There is still profit -- I bet those French towns full of race watchers sold a lot of food, beverages, and other amenities, which turned dollars into the local economy... Smaller scale capitalism, but without logos branded on everything. Fun to compare a French racer's uniform with a go-go USA stock car and it driver all branded with logos.
It's the decentralization. Everything is centralized in the US with every industry controlled by a handful of big companies. It's like the Soviet Union. Americans who visited Moscow in that era used to joke about Bakery 514 or Meat Store 70. Nowadays, they shop at Food Store 51470 and don't get the joke anymore.
My work of late has involved trying to resist capital markets deregulatory changes, in large part to build a comment record that will support litigation because they can't actually be stopped at the agency level, and this phenomenon is repeated over and over. Relaxing disclosure requirements will save companies $x per year, but there is absolutely no effort to quantify (or even discuss qualitative impacts in a rigorous way) the impact on shareholders and the capital markets of having less information about companies available or eliminating mechanisms by which shareholders can hold boards and managements accountable. It's maddening, but the cost-benefit mania introduced in the Reagan years (and reinforced by Clinton) gives regulators cover to point to the cost savings for companies and hand wave away other effects.
There's a very icky-sounding thing economists and planners do when they're evaluating projects, which is assign a literal dollar value to a human life, called the "Value of a Statistical Life (VSL)" and discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_a_statistical_life
It's useful when talking about things like air quality and transit improvements and cost-benefit analyses of things that involve societal goods and services. It's gross-sounding, and for good reason, but it at least tries to accomplish some of what HamNo argues is missing from projects that impact public welfare. Because of the ick, it's easy to dismiss VSL from economic analyses without too much pushback, but it absolutely could be used in projects like road widening (more cars = more pollution and more incidents and more death/illness) and the like. It's also race/income agnostic, because it's a hard number assigned to a statistical life, which would make things like the Louisiana data center WAY more expensive to Meta even though it's in a poor section of town.
I feel like this is why there’s so much push back on climate change goals. There’s a tragedy of the commons happening. Each gallon of gas burned is kinda pretty easy to track, I mean you can go to the gas station and track it on an individual basis, we get gas bills for the methane piped into our house etc. Industrial use too is similarly pretty easy to track even via satellite. That’s where the pushback starts tracking at all allows folks to assign that negative value to individuals/orgs, then charging that value for the contamination of the collective air becomes strait forward. To the essay’s point the valuing of any collective asset that is exploited without cost is where the enshitification breaks. Hence the pushback from the main users of our collectives.
Well I was todays years old when I found out that we even turned le Tour de France into a socialist event 😂 I feel like you should translate it to French ! So many of us would have never thought of seeing it like that. Thank you for such a gem !
This is why health care is a such a critical place for fights for the public good. Many more Americans have an instinctive understanding that they're reaching the limits of capitalism when it comes to visiting the doctor or being treated in a hospital than for most consumer goods. The enshittification of health care through both consumerization and financialization is driving the public's general fury over health care. It's also a rare industry where the public costs - lives lost, bankruptcies triggered, claims denied are a little more easily measured than for most real estate developments.
One of the many reasons I cover health care. Nice piece, thanks.
Fundamental values and definitions. Like, "poorer." In the aggregate. When they're lying on their death bed, I doubt they're saying, if only my portfolio had performed one tick better! My Wharton School SIL repeats to me that more people have been lifted out of poverty by capitalism! To which I reply: have ya seen China lately? Anyway. There is richness in life. And of course we need financial systems - even communities barter - of some sort to function. Still, the blood from sacrifices made on behalf of the almighty EBITDA would fill the Grand Canyon.
Here's an interesting example: if you're older than 45 or 50, you'll notice how advertising, in general, has become really awful in the last 20 years. The minute advertising went digital, the demand for "results-based" ads and testing A/B versions became the standard. That somehow you could quantify creativity, instead of telling good stories. That the desire for data-driven analysis of ad budgets and marketing basically made advertising disposable. With the exception of a few marquee events during the year, e.g. the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, etc advertising is entirely forgettable. I can barely remember any of the ads I saw on those televised events, and yet, I can still remember many, many brilliant ads that built brands in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Advertising used to be a highly creative business. And now the demand to monetize--or at least justify--every campaign through data analysis has sapped every bit of joy and creativity out of the industry. I'm glad I got out 17 years ago. The internet enshittified everything.
Similar movements in public education of all places. "Data-driven" decision making became the motto of the younger administrators I worked under. And yes, they "sapped every bit of joy and creativity out of the industry."
I grew up in a household led by a Milton Friedman acolyte. I tried very hard to find truth in it cuz Dad was never wrong. But, learning about externalities in college many decades ago (from Commies according to my Iowa Legislature) was when I really started to question it all. Enshittification has been my favorite word since I first heard it from Cory Doctorow. Thanks for writing about it!
When Americans look at a big fun public event in another country and wonder, sincerely, “Shouldn’t this be more enshittified?” it is not a sign of our superior economic insight. It is a sign that capitalism is making us fucking insane.
However, know that the stars of cycling can make a lot of money through ads and product endorsements. The stars do not rely on their salaries for their wealth.
Imagining looking at a sporting event through beautiful countryside and wondering if they weren't selling enough ads. Just ghoulish stuff. All those supposedly economically enlightened types that never flipped to the next page in their textbook to talk about non-rivalrous and/or non-excludable goods....
Ah, my mistake. Roche is a wonderful human being, and should be lauded with flowers and plaudits, alongside his fellow mental giants, Bret Stephens and Thomas L. Friedman, who should ride on chariots while we peasants throw flowers before them.
I'm French and American but live in the better country. France is NOT socialist in the classical meaning of the term. Mostly because of the fact that as a Member State of European Union, which is a bloc based on a neoliberal economic model, we must harmonize our laws with EU directives. This has meant privatizing vast areas of the economy that should be public. That said, we have strict regulations over advertising and sponsorship that can't be touched by the EU and that is probably what set Roche aback. We had one Socialist government (Mitterand's 1st term) and the international markets pushed it from democracy in the workplace within a year. Nationalizations were reversed. This pattern has continued for 40 years. You must overthrow the speculative markets before you can take power for the Working Class.
“Shouldn’t this be more enshittified?” it is not a sign of our superior economic insight. It is a sign that capitalism is making us fucking insane.
Amen to that.
Yes! Preach it Hamilton!
There is still profit -- I bet those French towns full of race watchers sold a lot of food, beverages, and other amenities, which turned dollars into the local economy... Smaller scale capitalism, but without logos branded on everything. Fun to compare a French racer's uniform with a go-go USA stock car and it driver all branded with logos.
It's the decentralization. Everything is centralized in the US with every industry controlled by a handful of big companies. It's like the Soviet Union. Americans who visited Moscow in that era used to joke about Bakery 514 or Meat Store 70. Nowadays, they shop at Food Store 51470 and don't get the joke anymore.
French towns actually pay the race organizers to have the Tour de France start or end in their town for the reasons you cite.
My work of late has involved trying to resist capital markets deregulatory changes, in large part to build a comment record that will support litigation because they can't actually be stopped at the agency level, and this phenomenon is repeated over and over. Relaxing disclosure requirements will save companies $x per year, but there is absolutely no effort to quantify (or even discuss qualitative impacts in a rigorous way) the impact on shareholders and the capital markets of having less information about companies available or eliminating mechanisms by which shareholders can hold boards and managements accountable. It's maddening, but the cost-benefit mania introduced in the Reagan years (and reinforced by Clinton) gives regulators cover to point to the cost savings for companies and hand wave away other effects.
"But most people, I think, experience it as a sort of ambient deterioration in the smoothness of life"
fucking brilliant description....Its SUCH a subtle thing I'd never seen words explicitly put to it
this describes it PERFECTLY...It really IS this ambient shift away from smoothness
There's a very icky-sounding thing economists and planners do when they're evaluating projects, which is assign a literal dollar value to a human life, called the "Value of a Statistical Life (VSL)" and discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_a_statistical_life
It's useful when talking about things like air quality and transit improvements and cost-benefit analyses of things that involve societal goods and services. It's gross-sounding, and for good reason, but it at least tries to accomplish some of what HamNo argues is missing from projects that impact public welfare. Because of the ick, it's easy to dismiss VSL from economic analyses without too much pushback, but it absolutely could be used in projects like road widening (more cars = more pollution and more incidents and more death/illness) and the like. It's also race/income agnostic, because it's a hard number assigned to a statistical life, which would make things like the Louisiana data center WAY more expensive to Meta even though it's in a poor section of town.
See also the social cost of carbon, the external $$ cost of emitting a ton of CO2 in global economic and health effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_carbon
I feel like this is why there’s so much push back on climate change goals. There’s a tragedy of the commons happening. Each gallon of gas burned is kinda pretty easy to track, I mean you can go to the gas station and track it on an individual basis, we get gas bills for the methane piped into our house etc. Industrial use too is similarly pretty easy to track even via satellite. That’s where the pushback starts tracking at all allows folks to assign that negative value to individuals/orgs, then charging that value for the contamination of the collective air becomes strait forward. To the essay’s point the valuing of any collective asset that is exploited without cost is where the enshitification breaks. Hence the pushback from the main users of our collectives.
Well I was todays years old when I found out that we even turned le Tour de France into a socialist event 😂 I feel like you should translate it to French ! So many of us would have never thought of seeing it like that. Thank you for such a gem !
You are the official How Things Work French ambassador/ translator.
I meannnnn… does this come with a living wage and a union ?
Absolutely not, this is America.
This is why health care is a such a critical place for fights for the public good. Many more Americans have an instinctive understanding that they're reaching the limits of capitalism when it comes to visiting the doctor or being treated in a hospital than for most consumer goods. The enshittification of health care through both consumerization and financialization is driving the public's general fury over health care. It's also a rare industry where the public costs - lives lost, bankruptcies triggered, claims denied are a little more easily measured than for most real estate developments.
One of the many reasons I cover health care. Nice piece, thanks.
Fundamental values and definitions. Like, "poorer." In the aggregate. When they're lying on their death bed, I doubt they're saying, if only my portfolio had performed one tick better! My Wharton School SIL repeats to me that more people have been lifted out of poverty by capitalism! To which I reply: have ya seen China lately? Anyway. There is richness in life. And of course we need financial systems - even communities barter - of some sort to function. Still, the blood from sacrifices made on behalf of the almighty EBITDA would fill the Grand Canyon.
There's a saying among economists that communism doesn't work in theory but somehow it works in practice.
Here's an interesting example: if you're older than 45 or 50, you'll notice how advertising, in general, has become really awful in the last 20 years. The minute advertising went digital, the demand for "results-based" ads and testing A/B versions became the standard. That somehow you could quantify creativity, instead of telling good stories. That the desire for data-driven analysis of ad budgets and marketing basically made advertising disposable. With the exception of a few marquee events during the year, e.g. the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, etc advertising is entirely forgettable. I can barely remember any of the ads I saw on those televised events, and yet, I can still remember many, many brilliant ads that built brands in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Advertising used to be a highly creative business. And now the demand to monetize--or at least justify--every campaign through data analysis has sapped every bit of joy and creativity out of the industry. I'm glad I got out 17 years ago. The internet enshittified everything.
Similar movements in public education of all places. "Data-driven" decision making became the motto of the younger administrators I worked under. And yes, they "sapped every bit of joy and creativity out of the industry."
They want humans to be more like robots, nullifying culture and creativity as a part of human expression.
I grew up in a household led by a Milton Friedman acolyte. I tried very hard to find truth in it cuz Dad was never wrong. But, learning about externalities in college many decades ago (from Commies according to my Iowa Legislature) was when I really started to question it all. Enshittification has been my favorite word since I first heard it from Cory Doctorow. Thanks for writing about it!
I totally agree with your last sentence:
When Americans look at a big fun public event in another country and wonder, sincerely, “Shouldn’t this be more enshittified?” it is not a sign of our superior economic insight. It is a sign that capitalism is making us fucking insane.
However, know that the stars of cycling can make a lot of money through ads and product endorsements. The stars do not rely on their salaries for their wealth.
Imagining looking at a sporting event through beautiful countryside and wondering if they weren't selling enough ads. Just ghoulish stuff. All those supposedly economically enlightened types that never flipped to the next page in their textbook to talk about non-rivalrous and/or non-excludable goods....
I'll be cancelling my subscription to someone who kowtows to his betters.
You are a suckup, and you know it, and have just proven it for all to see, little man.
Ah, my mistake. Roche is a wonderful human being, and should be lauded with flowers and plaudits, alongside his fellow mental giants, Bret Stephens and Thomas L. Friedman, who should ride on chariots while we peasants throw flowers before them.
I'm French and American but live in the better country. France is NOT socialist in the classical meaning of the term. Mostly because of the fact that as a Member State of European Union, which is a bloc based on a neoliberal economic model, we must harmonize our laws with EU directives. This has meant privatizing vast areas of the economy that should be public. That said, we have strict regulations over advertising and sponsorship that can't be touched by the EU and that is probably what set Roche aback. We had one Socialist government (Mitterand's 1st term) and the international markets pushed it from democracy in the workplace within a year. Nationalizations were reversed. This pattern has continued for 40 years. You must overthrow the speculative markets before you can take power for the Working Class.