Enshittification isn't caused by venture capital

pluralistic.net

13 points·headalgorithm··3 comments

Enshittification is caused by greed and opportunity. Anything that can be exploited for profit will be exploited --- eventually.

Venture capital is just an enhanced and amplified version of it.

Yeah while I was reading the post I couldn't sense the point of writing it. The title could have been "Enshittification isn't only caused by venture capital". But that doesn't make sense because you can't have VC in a vacuum. Seems like pot/kettle pointing.

> All flavors of capitalism harm working people and seek to shift wealth and power from the public and democratic institutions to private interests. But that doesn't change the fact that there are, indeed, different flavors of capitalism [...]

Cory Doctorow's clarification of enshittification as a result of collapsing constraints is worth considering. I'd never before thought of it as an application of the Theory of Constraints.

Also, the "Capitalism v. Capitalism" mentioned--tech monopolies vs. businesses trapped on their platforms--is well-put. It's always been a part of his talks on enshittification, but few seem to hear that part.

I'm way too unfamiliar with Bluesky/Atproto to comment, but I liked the motive he described: "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification..."

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