It's relentless. Every fucking thing is made wrong. Design, which is the practice of making things easy to use or understand, not look pretty, is dead.

He got the idea from the Chinese. All you need is complete control by the government to force it upon everybody. So fascism, which is exactly what they are working towards.

That's not just America

i think you could make a case for Edward Bernays too

Thank the people who vote for a piece of shit multiple times just to ‘own the libs’

Late stage capitalism

Also early stage capitalism as it happens. The middle period can go alright if they're absolutely terrified of being guillotined.

Added to the stops. This is going to be a busy fieldtrip through time.

looks up LifeLock

LifeLock is identity theft prevention software, initially sold by the LifeLock company, and now sold by Gen. The software was marketed as NortonLifeLock after 2017 and is also bundled with several Norton 360 products.

Makes sense :P

I mean obviously, but they only exist because of the absolute machine of propaganda carefully designed to create exactly that deranged mindset. Chicken and egg thing.

Late stage capitalism

Reagan fucked everything up, of course, but we cannot forget about Bill Clinton overseeing the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass–Steagall_legislation

no obvious benefit

Traveling is probably the best thing you can do to not be a complete shithead about 90% of things in life.

that's the way the cookie crumbles, eh

YouTube asked me to upgrade to premium... to download my own fucking video!

Clinton had a GOP Congress.

If you want a lesson, it's vote in every election and always mark your ballot to hurt the GOP worse.

Clinton had veto power.

I didn't. I said it as a warning to the countries that are following the path, and some are. If yours is in good shape, then great, keep it that way.

Also, I don't associate countries and the ones in control with the people who live there. It's not some team sport where all represent, most citizens of a place don't have all that much control over what their country does. Most of us are born into a place and system that we have to live in and can't change. That's not throwing in the towel, that's just knowing you can change some things directly around you, but you can't change everything, so you have to adjust the best you can.

Idk I can see things going a lot further

Everything is a scam, and NOTHING works anymore. Customer Service is often "I'm Lily, your AI customer service chatbot. I'm still learning, so please be patient with me. What can I help you with today?"

Bitch, I got a problem with your product/service, and I need help. I don't want to be your volunteer learning experience, I want you to solve my problem, not teach you how to be human.

Just stop buying things. Prepay for phone service every month. Don't sign contracts. Minimize any potential interaction with corps.

Design is absolutely thriving. Things are made, with great care and precision, to more easily manipulate and mislead buyers and to more easily misinform the population. Most importantly, things are made to more easily extract wealth from everyone else.

What you are assuming, incorrectly, is that the general population is the customer. The general population is, in fact, just another resource for the wealthy and powerful (the real customers).

It's a move from profit seeking to rent seeking by the capitalists. Some have called it feudalism.

Like 10 minutes ago I was trying to figure out the cost of adding a hotspot to my mobile plan, but I couldn’t find a strsightfiward answer. They ended up sending me to their chatbot who took me round in circles before eventually giving in. Why did that have to be so frustrating? Why did it need ai?

(My kid has poor WiFi in his dorm and his college doesn’t seem to be able to help)

Outside of farming your own food on owned land, (never mind property taxes) how exactly could someone live without buying shit? "Stop buying things" is not a option for most people in most places of the world.

Dont get me wrong, it sucks and im down for the revolute but right now, no.

Demonizing the Chinese is silly. Their move for so much control is, in large part, a response to constant sabotage my capitalist interests.

I'm not saying terrible things haven't been done or won't be done by them. I'm just stating the fact that you can't be polite or play nice in a room full of violent fascists looking to make you fail. This is what China learned by watching the cold war with the USSR.

Rather than "stop buying things", maybe "stop subscribing to things"? There's almost nothing that requires a subscription that is actually necessary or particularly beneficial to a comfortable life.

Buying food, for instance, is probably a practical choice for most people. Subscribing to yet another service streaming mindrot isn't.

My business works almost entirely organically. We charge a fair rate. Not the cheapest, not the most expensive. We never broke our ethical code. You'd be surprised how many people scoff at me.

As much as everything is a scam, a vast majority of the customers are asking to be scammed. Should I sell the cheapest shit, cash out, and walk away while the work performed for the customer breaks down within a few months?

People don't get it. Still. It's mostly the consumer's fault for not choosing businesses with ethics. People chose quantity. That's not a decent business person's fault. Now, we're here and very few businesses with ethics exist.

Whose fault do you seriously think that is? The person with the money who always had a choice where they could purchase a product or is it the competing businesses who offer a product? It only becomes the businesses fault when there's no choice left.

There were choices. Choices were made. Now everyone is bitching about how there's no good businesses left. So start giving your money to decent people.

It's just like voting. You vote for the scummiest people. Wtf do you expect? A paradise? You're not getting a paradise and you're not getting a good product. You.

But how did we get here? We're not suddenly going to start making the right choices. Our choices led us here and they are what keeps us here.

The stock market is both. No .....?

The only 'subscriptions' necessary are water, power and heating.

I, for one, support our Chinese Overlords. 谢谢你

(I'm fine with USA no longer being Amazon World Police ^(tm)^)

Depends on who you are.
Broke-ass everyday American? Gambling.
Rich-ass spoiled-brat insider-knowledge-having-dick multi-millionaire? Fraud.

Reminds me of that one time I had to have blood drawn and my phlebotomist was a phlebotomist in training. I've never seen my blood splurt like that

Except it was passed overwhelmingly. Veto would've delayed the inevitable and been amazingly politically stupid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm–Leach–Bliley_Act

Capitalism since...ever. Regulation is the only balance and that no longer exists.

Late End stage capitalism

and congress had numbers, overwhelming numbers. it was a bi-partisan bill that passed 362-57 & 90-8. it was gonna happen with or without his signature.

"Stop buying things" is really just saying "buy fewer things."

1. Do you need it?
2. Do you have something already that works in it's place?
3. Can you buy it used?
4. Can it be repaired?

If the answer to those is "no", then go ahead and buy what you need. Exhaust the no-buying options first. Good advice even outside the enshittification conversation.

No. What I'm assuming correctly is that design schools teach you how to work for the population. I never fucking learned how to make something work like shit, so the user has to use it for longer. I learned how to anticipate needs and communicate to the user. THAT is what design is. I have no fucking clue what that other practice is called, but it's not what my design school taught me. Design is fucking dead.

The MBAs are making use of the math associated with risk management. An MBA with a flat tire teleworks for the day or takes a second car to work while a mobile mechanic service fixes the tire. A shift worker misses the shift and potentially loses the job for not finding someone to cover the shift.

MBAs who need a wrench can buy whichever wrench they want because they can afford it: a low end wrench if they need it to work once, a mid tier wrench if they're looking for a mix of quality and cost, or a high end wrench if they like to buy it for life. A shift worker buys what they can afford and has to pray it doesn't break because prayer is the only insurance they can afford.

A shift worker can't afford a better wrench because a team of economists, psychologists, and political scientists have calculated exactly how low they can pay a person and keep the economy from grinding to a halt. An MBA eats lunch for $15 every day because nobody charges them $150.

There's a cute little novel about that: "Automatic Noodle." Except in that one, a bunch of sentient robots can do Biang Biang better than an algorithm.

Congratulations on being able to run an completely ethical business - it can't be easy. I say that non-sarcastically.

I think one of the many issue which has lead to the state we are in now is that it's often impossible to tell the true quality or value of a product before buying it. So simply buying something more expensive is no guarantee of a better product, because the optimal strategy for an unethical business is to sell the cheapest possible product at the highest possible volume x price.

This CGP Gray video from a decade ago makes the point that when the bulk of a countries wealth comes from a very small area of production/industry - tyranny will soon follow.

When all the wealth comes from a few tech-billionaires (rather than the productive labour of the diverse masses) - the representative/leader/dictator ONLY has to please the small minority who has all the money.

Oh I guess in that case they just shouldn't bother vetoing? Yeah no fuck that.

Cool. Then make them do it.

I mean stop buying extra shit.