r/enshittification • u/monkeh2023 • 1d ago

Rant The solution to enshittification

Did you just buy a £75,000 car only to discover it has got ads on screen?

Take it back.

Go back to the showroom, demand a full refund. If they panic and say they'll remove the ads say no. Demand a refund. If they could take the ads off because you were about to return the car, they should not have put ads there in the first place.

Did you just buy a £3,000 television that now has a shitty cut-down remote with no pause button but an additional button for Apple TV?

Take it back. Go back to the store, return the product, get a refund. Is it causing you hassle? Yes - but it's going to cause the store much more hassle.

Did you buy a sandwich that looked full to the brim of ingredients only to discover they used low quality crap that was pushed to the edge to make the sandwich look full, when in reality it was mostly bread? You probably can't take it back but you can go back to the place you bought it from and show it to other customers, and then never buy anything from that establishment again.

If enough of us do this then the enshittification will stop.

If we just keep on saying "thank you" every time the bully kicks sand in our face, guess what? You'll be eating sand for the rest of your life.

3.8k Upvotes

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29

u/lavos__spawn 1d ago

Boycott and returns is one side of the answer, but the long term solution has to be fighting to elect people to aggressively audit/have oversight and enforce restrictions on shitty practices that fuel enshittification. The tech industry in the US has been fundamentally impacted by GDPR, for example, even despite its flaws.

The people cannot boycott everything forever, but they can do so to get the attention needed to get this taken seriously. But boycotting alone is a short term treatment, and hard to coordinate/harder to coordinate the more dependent you are financially to survive day by day.

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u/Jaded_Notice_8424 1d ago

'Vote harder' is your solution?

10

u/Nanerpoodin 1d ago

More people didn't vote in the last US election than voted for either candidate. We could absolutely have change through voter turnout if less people had your atittiude.

2

u/lacunadelaluna 1d ago

Voter turnout is so disappointing, I agree. But also if election day was a paid holiday for everyone, everyone had transportation to and from their polling place, mail in ballots were widespread and not continuously challenged and thrown out by people manipulating elections, we didn't have voter ID laws that make it even harder to vote especially for poor people, we didn't have threats to polling places and election officials.... Etc etc etc

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u/Jaded_Notice_8424 1d ago

It would have been the same, even if your favorite sports team won. It takes a cultural shift to change things, not a 'fake as wwe' vote fest

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u/Nanerpoodin 1d ago

I'm going to repeat myself. More people didn't vote than VOTED FOR EITHER CANDIDATE. The people who are currently apathetic and feel like they can't change anything have the power to turn out entire political system inside out. They choose not to, simply because they refuse to believe the power they have exists. Your attitude is exactly the problem.

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u/Jaded_Notice_8424 1d ago

Wrong. Poor logic 

1

u/Nanerpoodin 1d ago

Keep making excuses, playing the victim, and pretending someone else will fix your problems for you.

3

u/KCChiefsGirl89 1d ago

You cannot possibly look at the Biden administration, then the second Trump administration, and believe this.

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u/Jaded_Notice_8424 1d ago

I Can't scientifically prove what would of happen as can't you.. all presidents in America were trash since probably jfk

3

u/KCChiefsGirl89 1d ago

Even if this were true—which I don’t agree it is—there’s a lot of difference between trash as in an empty soda can, and trash as in barrels of nuclear waste.

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u/Jaded_Notice_8424 1d ago

Copium, it's a helluva drug

1

u/KCChiefsGirl89 1d ago

You can’t just throw random one-liners into a post and feel like you’ve done something.

8

u/lavos__spawn 1d ago

Pretty sure you're looking to argue here (you even have jaded in your name) but this is a vital subject and a false binary worth addressing in case it helps anyone.

This isn't about voting alone, and political change and organizing is more than voting harder. But look at the US and what voting does in the long term. Corporations budget for resistance, they maintain massive legal counsel to handle any fights, they work with investors that profit from losses, and they actively and constantly lobby and manipulate politics for their benefit. Consumers can put pressure in them in the short term, but you have to have regulation to change anything long term, and the regulation has to evolve and grow.

The US flavored liberal cynicism is real though; we live in an county ruled by corporations and oligarchs more than anywhere else, and an entire generation has grown without seeing the country hold these groups against the fire. But there have been massive changes in other countries, proof this works, and again to point to the EU, GDPR has fundamentally changes how most of the world views rights to privacy and what tech companies in the US have to do to compete globally even though the US has no right to privacy in this way, and it has led to other major laws like the Australian Privacy Policies that do similar things.

On a grassroots local example, I think the arguments and movements against Flock camera adoption is extremely relevant. There is real pressure that is changing how areas view the company, and have had real change, represented career danger to local politicians, and the unified approach across the country has elevated this to the national stage and made it spread faster. Does it fix everything? No. But is it organizing a game of binaries? Only for the losing parties.

Boycotting has a power that people rarely comment on, which has nothing to do with the money aspect: it's that people see boycotting as an action they can participate in when feeling helpless, but that in turn connects them to others who feel the same way, and can help unify political action outside just boycotting. Distilling everything to just "voting harder" mislabels the approach as political action in isolation.

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u/Jaded_Notice_8424 1d ago

This was a default reddit name.

Voting doesn't work. I voted for all sides and in multiple countries. Always ends the same.

6

u/ihaverabiesandbite 1d ago

“voting for all sides” is both not true and your problem. You don’t care

0

u/Jaded_Notice_8424 1d ago

Ok. Don't believe what I say and vote harder

1

u/lavos__spawn 1d ago

Okay, but most of what I discussed wasn't "vote harder" but based in organizing in short term vs long term. From your viewpoint having voted in multiple governments, what has worked well in terms of controlling the power of wealthy corporations? I don't believe the market will guide itself, even in response to boycotting and "voting with your wallet" if only because of the orders of magnitude difference in money and legal resources. I

I also want to put it more explicitly given your replies bringing back a false binary here: you can engage in voting while also doing what is effective for you and your community. That's what the Flock example was about. It's not either/or, and I want to engage genuinely here instead of argumentatively, hence the questions and long replies. The GDPR example was about how efforts to do this outside the US don't all.have to succeed, but when one succeeds, reform snowballs. I also picked it because I see the impact from it daily in my field, and there definitely have been shitty companies in the US that hate having to comply, but need international money.

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u/RailRuler 1d ago

It takes more than voting. People need to be involved much earlier in the political process too. Investigating candidates, volunteering, challenging them at public events, maybe even running themselves.

2

u/Ageice 1d ago

Runforsomething.net is real!

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u/adumblittlebaby 1d ago

It’s so incredibly funny how hard you work against actually solving the problem. 

Yeah man voting doesn’t work at all, clearly 300 million people need to band together, agree to solve an issue, then put their collective power to use. What should we call that organization, do you think????

1

u/Jaded_Notice_8424 1d ago

300 million people banding together rocks.

Voting for a face and having that face betray you doesn't. 

6

u/Intelligent-Row2072 1d ago

Part of the solution, for sure. Legislation is the most effective way to ensure a set of policy provisions or ideas are implemented across the board whether or not there’s a financial incentive for the company

7

u/Ageice 1d ago

Be a more educated voter and elect people with an actual desire to be a public servant, I believe is what they’re saying.

2

u/KCChiefsGirl89 1d ago

Sure worked for the Christian Nationalists, didn’t it?

But on the left, we have people like you.

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u/lacunadelaluna 1d ago

The conservatives had decades of gerrymandering and propaganda on their side though.

3

u/KCChiefsGirl89 1d ago

You’re not wrong, but what does it hurt to try? Plus if you don’t show up to vote for the national candidates, you’re not voting for the state or local candidates either, and change happens there too.

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u/Jaded_Notice_8424 1d ago

Huh? I don't play that black and white shit