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burnitalldowndarling · 6 days ago

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You can’t fight enshittification

Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.

I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life.

Oh sure, you can tinker in the margins, and you should! Get a repairable laptop, like the Framework, which is the greatest computer I've ever owned, and run Linux on it (I use Ubuntu, which is easy to install). You'll spend two weeks looking around the UI for the thing you need to click on and then you'll stop noticing it altogether, forever:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

Access the internet via RSS, and avoid all the algorithmic twiddling and surveillance that subjects you and yours to the depredations of the worst people on earth and their feral algorithms:

https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/

Give preference to high-security, private, open messaging tools like Signal. Open an account on a federated social media service, like Mastodon, and make it a first-class home for your online social life:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

Do all this! Do more! You'll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better. But you're not going to fight enshittification this way. Enshittification is not the result of people making bad choices: it's the result of bad policies that produce bad systems.

Enshittification makes for a neat descriptive account, talking about how platforms go bad:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

But the most important part of enshittification is its causal hypothesis: the answer it proposes to why this degradation is happening everywhere, right now:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

Here's why you're getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don't have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don't compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they've amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about "fighting for the user." Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.

You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you're going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta.

Likewise, you can use privacy-preserving adblockers in your browser, but the instant you've got to do business with a monopoly that requires you to use their app, you will be totally helpless before them, because anti-circumvention law felonizes modifying an app so it preserves your privacy. An app is just a webpage skinned with the right kind of IP law to make it a jailable offense to install an ad-blocker:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

When all your friends are going to a festival, are you really going to opt out because the event requires you to use the Ticketmaster app (because Ticketmaster has a monopoly over event ticketing)? If so, you're not gonna have a lot of friends, which is a pretty shitty way to live.

If you turn your personal campaign to live an enshittification-free life into a set of rigid practices that isolate you from your community, you will be miserable – and you will undermine your ability to address the systemic roots of enshittification.

That's because systemic problems have systemic solutions. They are addressed through mass movements, impact litigation, political action, street uprisings, mutual aid, and other forms of solidarity and community.

The monsters who benefit from the status quo don't want you to know this. They want to brainwash you with Margaret Thatcher's mantra, "There is no such thing as society." They want you to think that you are a pathetic, atomized individual. They want you to die in a heatwave while gasping out your profound regret for not recycling more diligently and taking more care with your "carbon footprint." They want you to drive around for hours looking for an independent cardboard seller to make your protest sign with, convinced that it's more important to avoid shopping on Amazon than it is to actually show up at the protest outside the Amazon warehouse. They want you to curse yourself for failing to cycle and take the bus in your city where there are no bike lanes and the buses run every 45 minutes and stop at 8PM. If you wanted a livable city, you should have made better consumption choices! Perhaps you could dig your own subway, ever think of that, hmmm?

You, me and everyone we know have all been subjected to a 40-year blitz of anti-solidaristic propaganda, aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals. Don't like your health care? Shop around! Don't like your boss? Quit your job! Under no circumstances should you advocate for either a union or socialized health-care. You're an individual, there is no such thing as society.

"There's no such thing as society" is what you say if you benefit from society (which absolutely exists) and don't want it to change.

To make changes, you have to exist in society. Yes, the Democratic Party is a weak and pathetic failed gerontocracy, but the Democratic Socialists, the Sunrise Movement, and other political groups that are independent of the Dems but still drag them into doing something good, sometimes, all deserve your support.

Yes, the union movement squandered the Biden years, refusing to spend its record-setting cash reserves on organizing, despite the millions of workers begging to join unions. But workplace democracy remains the only way that we ever have – or ever will – defeat capital, so join a union, form a union, support a union:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out

Yes, plastic recycling is a scam cooked up by the petrochemical industry and all the plastic you stick in your blue bin either goes to an incinerator or a landfill, but if you don't support (and join up with) real environmental activists, you're going to roast alive:

https://heated.world/cp/169762317

Yes, Israel is committing a genocide and Brown, Columbia, and other elite universities are capitulating to Trump, whose evangelical base believes that war in Israel will hasten the Second Coming, when all Jews will be cast into eternal damnation. But that doesn't relieve you of your responsibility to act to defend our Palestinian brothers and sisters from the death rained down on them with the weapons our governments send to Israel. That goes double for us Jews, in whose name the slaughter is being committed:

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2025/07/31/miriam-margolyes-hitler-comments/

My book on Enshittification is coming out in a couple of months, and the early reviews are already coming in, and they are gratifyingly glowing. But there's a trend in these reviews, a caveat that reviewer after reviewer has raised: my book is "short on individual solutions."

You're goddamned right it is. Because this isn't an individual problem, it's a systemic one.

Sure, live the best life you can, making the best choices you can. But don't kid yourself that this is fighting enshittification.

The reason corporations spy on you isn't because you're too cheap to pay for media, so they must resort to surveillance advertising. Whether or not you pay a tech company, they will absolutely spy on you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The reason they can spy on you is that the US hasn't had a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you took home. This is the last technological threat to our privacy that Congress has addressed. The reason you are spied upon is because there are no systemic consequences for this surveillance:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

The reason gig work companies misclassify their workers as contractors in order to abuse them, steal their wages, and deny them workplace protections is because they can – not because workers are insufficiently choosy about their employment arrangements.

To fight systemic problems you need to be part of a systemic solution.

For 23 and a half years, I've worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most enshittification-fighting organization in the world:

https://eff.org

EFF is a member-supported nonprofit. We rely on donors like you, and we squeeze our budget hard. For as long as I've been with EFF, I've heard smears about how we're secretly shills for Big Tech and dependent on them for our funding (hilariously I once heard that EFF's reps to a meeting were transported to it in a stretch limo paid for by Intel – except I was the rep at that meeting, and I took the bus). Here's all of our financial disclosures, see for yourself:

https://www.eff.org/about/annual-reports-and-financials

Donating to EFF is one way to fund the systemic rejection of enshittification. But if you want to join the fight – if you want to be part of a community that fights back – then you need to know about the Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA):

https://efa.eff.org/allies

EFA is a network of independent community groups that EFF helps coordinate and advise. When one group is in trouble, we connect it with other groups that have overcome the same troubles. When one group scores a victory, held other groups replicate its successes in their towns. Our organizers also help people in communities that don't have EFA affiliates start groups and join the network.

I get it: this is harder work than changing your consumption habits. But it's infinitely more rewarding. You're more than a consumer. You can aspire to more dignity than is afforded to an ambulatory wallet:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/16/through-the-meat-grinder/#hells-kitchen

No one is coming to save us except us. There is such a thing as society, and you're a part of it, and so am I, and so are the rest of us:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/they-are-going-to-take-everything

You can't fight enshittification. But together, we can.

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

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