arvind

@lina@mastodon.catgirl.cloud @atax1a@infosec.exchange To be fair: Doctorow’s book and articles and blog posts sketch a terrifying and accurate picture of how capitalism is using the internet for exploiting people “every instant” “everywhere”. The ability to insert computers and cameras and a bewildering array of sensors in factories, offices, departmental stores, farms, vehicles, public places, and homes; and in everyday things like refrigerators, cradles, televisions, tractors, etc.; has enabled giant monopoly corporations to relentlessly exploit people—as workers, as consumers, as petty producers. This documentation is the most valuable part of Doctorow’s work. To his credit, he also tries to analyze the political economy of the internet ecosystem, something that most celebrants and skeptics of the internet fail to do. However, as I pointed out earlier, Doctorow’s analysis has no awareness of how over 80% of the world population, residing in the global south, fits into this picture of “enshittification”. He argues that a “competitive market”, with sound regulatory guardrails, existed in the USA roughly until the 1970s, and was then dismantled; this eventually culminated in the enshittification of every aspect of life we see today. Doctorow’s proposed remedies boil down to bringing back this “competitive market” capitalism. Unfortunately for Doctorow, there is ample historical documentation showing that actually existing capitalism never resembled this mythical "competitive market" beast.

@lina@mastodon.catgirl.cloud @atax1a@infosec.exchange i think you may be mixing up epistemology and epidemiology. Cory Doctorow's book, Enshittification, is written like a medical treatise on the "enshittification" disease. It has four parts: natural history, pathology, epidemiology, and cure. In my earlier post, I simply reused "epidemiology" as Cory Doctorow's term in his book.

@lina@mastodon.catgirl.cloud It's funny to see the Doctorow fan club jumping at you as if you are single-handedly stopping all countries from implementing Powerful antitrust; right to repair; interoperable software; a new, open web; strong labor unions; digital privacy for everyone… (I am simply quoting one of the replies in this thread.) All of them are free to campaign for, and implement, those cures for "enshittification". I will add another criticism (especially as a denizen of the global south): imperialism does not enter Doctorow's framework of the internet at all. Imperialism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin, and have been since the very emergence of capitalism; as Samir Amin has shown. Dan Schiller meticulously shows in his book, "Crossed Wires", how the USA conceived and executed the internet as infrastructure to be owned by American private interests and to be controlled by the American military-industrial complex. From the American point of view, the internet was always meant to advance and entrench American imperialism. The (American) internet enabled corporations in the global north to disperse production across disparate locations in the global south; because of the internet, they could still control and coordinate all those production centres. Corporations could not only earn superprofits by paying global south workers a fraction of the wages they paid their global north counterparts for the same productivity, but they could also use the enormous reserve army of labour (billions of landless labourers and peasants pauperized by neoliberal policies) in the global south to exert a relentless downward pressure on wages throughout the world. This is the crux of the matter: this has enabled global monopoly finance to turbocharge the exploitation of global north workers—that’s the phenomenon Doctorow labels “enshittification”. (He doesn't really care about the global south workers.) But Doctorow shows no awareness or understanding of this phenomenon. So his so-called epidemiology of enshittification is completely off the mark. There is also a lot of stuff that is simply wrong. (For example, Baran and Sweezy had shown more than half-a-century ago that monopoly rents were always part of true-blue capitalism, one doesn't need Varoufakis's ahistorical theory of technofeudalism for explaining them, as Doctorow seems to believe.) Even the compromises capital made with the working classes for a few decades prior to the 1970s did not come about because there was some long-lost "good capitalism", as Doctorow seems to believe. In the first seventy or so years of the 20th century, imperialism had to contend with communist revolutions in Russia and China; and with national liberation struggles throughout its colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America leading to independence of many of these countries from colonial rule, and of implementation by native rulers of economic policies at least partially independent of capitalist hegemony. There were genuine possibilities of anti-capitalist revolutions springing up in the global north. This existential dilemma forced capitalism to compromise with labour in the metropolis—the social democratic welfare state in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, and Keynesianism in the Anglo-American sphere were the results of this compromise. (Like a lot of Western intellectuals, Doctorow is only aware of the global south as some place that is over there somewhere, so this entire history does not register.) By the 1970s, various factors led to the weakening of these challenges to capitalism, eventually leading to today's situation. Anyway… Since Doctorow's epidemiology is so off the mark, his cures are nothing but placebo. In fact, they depoliticize genuine anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles for a people's internet. @atax1a@infosec.exchange