> This is akin to arguing "nothing ever changes or improves in Liberal democracies", when policy history doesn't reflect that.

Ever-growing wealth disparities, eroded rights, mass enshitification in a race to the bottom, and widespread hatred of ones neighbor over fake outrage culture war propaganda disseminated from corporate media are not a trends of improvement. They are trends of decline, unless you're of the class who has their doomsday bunker on standby.

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lanfeust6 a day ago | parent [-]

> Ever-growing wealth disparities

Higher concentration of wealth is not new, it's happened many times and dissipated many times. Real-wages are still growing, which is what we care about qua improvements in our well being (and what attracts immigrants). The key risk though is regulatory capture from consolidation of tech companies (much of this "wealth" in question is stock valuation, which tends to get reinvested in companies), but anti-trust is still a thing, and has been wielded relatively recently.

> enshitification

This is about consumer products, not government policy. Buy an alternative, you have those choices.

> widespread hatred of ones neighbor over fake outrage culture war propaganda disseminated from corporate media

Based on polling, the most salient issues seem to reflect economic anxieties. Even stances on immigration are really about that.

When the established parties and institutions fail, people lash out and elect populists. The populist fervor will wane once housing affordability is appropriately tackled for instance.

> not a trends of improvement

Yeah, not everything improved in the short-run, that isn't remarkable. Many things did. Look at real-wages, look at the extreme poverty rate globally as defined by the UN. I could go on.

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psadauskas a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Higher concentration of wealth is not new, it's happened many times and dissipated many times.

That's a very clinical way to put it. Usually when its "dissipated", its through war or economic depression or both, and a great many people who never had any wealth suffer needlessly, while the wealthy rarely do.

It would be nice if we could like, _not_ do that, and try something different for once, instead of throwing up our hands and saying "well that's just how its always been!"

	▲	lanfeust6 a day ago \| parent [-]
		You're forgetting anti-trust. Standard Oil controlled 90% of the oil production in the U.S. until it was splintered into numerous companies. We're not really at the point where this needs to be done for tech. Also, dynastic wealth itself doesn't sustain itself well, and dwindles in a generation. See: the aforementioned Rockefeller, whose grandchildren are nowhere near as rich. Notwithstanding that many of the wealthy (in particular, Bill Gates) are donating the majority of their wealth when they die.

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swed420 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This is about consumer products, not government policy.

You speak as if these things are unrelated.

> Buy an alternative, you have those choices.

Increasingly, we don't:

"Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised"

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h... (https://archive.is/wSmtd)

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lanfeust6 a day ago | parent [-]

> You speak as if these things are unrelated.

State the connection, because it seems like your next argument is going to be "the government didn't stop them", as though that's their job.

> Increasingly, we don't:

Think of a single enshittified product that matters to you for which there is no alternative but to use it.

This also all pales in contrast to the conveniences and improvements afforded over time. You can now access and stream basically any music you want for free, for example. Television sets are now commodities, which tend to be cheaper adjusted for inflation. Etc etc. So the rhetoric about enshittification doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

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swed420 a day ago | parent [-]

> State the connection, because it seems like your next argument is going to be "the government didn't stop them", as though that's their job.

It's not their job to break up monopolies and ever-shifting financial abstractions a few steps ahead of the law that enable monopolistic behavior?

> Think of a single enshittified product that matters to you for which there is no alternative but to use it.

* Mobile devices and their respective walled gardens if you expect to do something as simple as access your own bank account or reliably receive text messages

* Social media which only really works when lots of people are on any given platform

* Food that is safe, nutritious, and sustainable

> Television sets are now commodities, which tend to be cheaper adjusted for inflation.

Oh neat, they didn't enshitify the legacy propaganda client devices yet. How nice of them, and quite the measure of progress.

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lanfeust6 21 hours ago | parent [-]

> It's not their job to break up monopolies and ever-shifting financial abstractions a few steps ahead of the law that enable monopolistic behavior?

It's not their job to prevent companies from selling products that are a bit shittier in some fashion. Buy from a competitor.

I know you must not be confusing enshittification and monopoly, so why the attempted switch? At any rate, we're not dealing with monopolies, but competition can be reinforced through policy and anti-trust is still being wielded, more recently against Google.

> Mobile devices and their respective walled gardens if you expect to do something as simple as access your own bank account or reliably receive text messages

This is a EU phenomenon, and it's a product of EU-wide payment-security regulation, in particular PSD2's Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) rules. Banks found apps cheaper than SMS and card readers, and registered phones offer a layer of fraud protection. There are other incentives.

You're lumping this as "enshittified" but given what this does, average people would not agree. People who dislike this move are more privacy obsessed, or techies who dislike the app ecosystem. Ultimately if consumers en-masse cared enough about this to push a grassroots effort through, it would change, but they do not.

> Social media which only really works when lots of people are on any given platform

vbulletin forums and online communities have been around long before the popular iterants today. HN itself is an online community. It can work whether there are more or fewer.

People tend to tolerate more for high-traffic sites, but not infinitely so. Digg died many years ago, and now reddit's numbers are plummeting. FB's traffic is just old people.

> Food that is safe, nutritious, and sustainable

Lmao we've never had it better for food, in terms of choice and access. Pesticides are also safer than ever.

Notwithstanding staples and cheap healthy foods like legumes, there are novel products on the shelves all the time, including "sustainable" offerings. For instance consumers have enthusiastically adopted "milk alternatives" despite not reporting themselves to be vegetarian.

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swed420 11 hours ago | parent [-]

> I know you must not be confusing enshittification and monopoly, so why the attempted switch?

If you can't see how these are related, then we're done here.

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lanfeust6 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I guess I can't because in the first place every "enshittified" example you could muster was not contingent on monopoly, at all. You misunderstand what monopoly is, and are working your way backwards from it as the conclusion.

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swed420 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You're ignoring the context of my previous comments and taking a strict definition of monopoly to ignore the arguments put forth. Bad Faith 101.

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lanfeust6 4 hours ago | parent [-]

No, I'm taking the only definition of monopoly, and you're creating new "contexts" whenever it suits you. I addressed your arguments and you have no rebuttal, so this is what you resort to, taking your ball and going home.

	▲	swed420 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I addressed your arguments You did not. But you have lots of boot to clean out of your mouth, so I won't bother you any longer.

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watwut a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Based on polling, the most salient issues seem to reflect economic anxieties. Even stances on immigration are really about that.

Meh, the economic anxiety voters are systematically voting for economically worst performing parties. They may say "it is economy" in polls, but it is hardly believable.

The difference between men and women in voting patterns is not about economy.

	▲	lanfeust6 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Average voters don't understand much about the economy, but that doesn't mean they aren't reacting to externalities like housing costs, prices, or other worse outcomes.