omniharmonicEnshittification
Enshittification is Cory Doctorow’s name for the terminal stage of a platform or enterprise that, having captured its market, no longer needs to provide real value at all and instead monetizes the degradation of its own product. Platforms are good to their users, then abuse users to favor business customers, then abuse business customers to claw back value for themselves — and then die.
In the analysis of bioregional economics, enshittification is not an aberration but a derivative byproduct of the two machines of extraction — debt-based money and the profit-consolidating corporation — running together, alongside brittleness, consolidation through vertical integration, and a state so captured by the interests it was meant to regulate that its capacity to price externalities has been stripped away. It is a symptom of an endgame that is intensely consolidating and structurally incapable of self-correction. The structural alternative is ownership by the people who use and produce the value — see platform cooperatives.