"Vigilance Mr. Worf. That is the price we have to continually pay."

- Captain Picard explaining to Lt. Worf how to prevent things from getting shitty.

Continued vigilance is the price of lasting...

Sounds a lot like democracy.

Or just not operating under a capitalist model.

Which has many other benefits as well. Who wants perpetual class war.

Deenshittification: a term used by Fate fans to describe any adaptation before Zero

It can do more than that. Unions aren't solely about pay increases, they can enact all kinds of change in the unionized company. If the members of the union don't like that Google is now shifting gears to making killbot drones (this is not something I just made up), a union could demand they stop doing that, and if the demand is loud enough, the company has to listen or go out of business.

The employees invest their time and time is money. The customers invest their money and their trust. The general public invests their tax dollars to create the infrastructure needed for the company to even exist in the first place.

And don’t tell me the employees get compensated for their time, because they create more value than they receive, hence, profits.

The shareholders, literally only invest money. They give the least and get the most.

That is indeed was how capitalism worked before Jack Welch changed business culture to be all about shareholder value. Before him companies focused on employees. They bragged about how many employees they had. They bragged about not laying off any employees in the Great Depression.

And the biggest economic problem we have is too much investment. Companies are now competing to get investment dollars instead of competing to make good products to make revenue. Too many resources are devoted to marketing and hoarding data because being a data-driven company will attract more investment from billionaires that are hoarding wealth. Productivity numbers have been rising as it always has since the industrial revolution. But productivity is being devoted towards activities which only serve to attract investment but doesn't provide any real world value. Because of this, quality life has been decreasing even while productivity is increasing.

The rich have too much money and it's hurting capitalism.

Without customers, also no business.

Without employees, also no business.

You can technically have a business without the safety of the general public, but which society wants that?

So why do the shareholders get extra privilege?

Somewhat, my comment got truncated by real life interruption, sorry. But I think we need things that are more community driven than they are profit driven. Things like the Fediverse where the goal isn't doing all these things to make bank but doing all these things because it's something people want and how people want to engage with each other.

Doctorow wants regulations to help stave off "loss leading" style behavior and then hopes unions will also somehow help. I'm thinking ultimately that any platform run as a capitalist enterprise is eventually going to enshitify.

Agreed, companies will try to game any such regulations (just like tax laws, labor laws and such, those just had a lot of time to mature). The "free-time-for-gardening" program, too, would make city dwellers without access to community gardens balk and maybe fake gardens with rubber plants would become a thing to claim that gardening time without gardening :)

Regarding UBI, the counter argument is that if companies like Walmart paid scraps for hard work, it would allow people to simply leave. Same for cleaning sewers or emptying trash bins. It could be an instrument that adjusts economic rewards away from "how much revenue does the worker generate" towards "how bearable is the work."

Should we really be exploring experimental economic policies when we can’t even implement the economic policies that have been proven to work?

How about we focus on tax the rich, raise minimum wage. Once those are implemented then we can brainstorm other ideas.

I believe we should do both. This "waiting for the right moment" or "focus on one thing only" can be a fallacy, imho, that leads to well polished counters from reactionaries and less motivation in supporters.

• I think having more space hippie ideas will inspire many more people than boring minimum wage or tax increase fights, so it may well recruit more people and thus bring more pressure towards better labor.
• I also think it would help overwhelm counter-messaging. Imagine think tanks would have to counter a hundred wild ideas rather and being able to fine tune messaging against the small number of what we have now.
• Symbiosis: if everyone has two or three inspiring wild ideas floating in their heads, it shifts views in general. And beliefs that support a sexy solar punk utopia will also be applicable to boring labor reform ideas.
• With the whole climate situation and resource scarcity (like oil and rare earths), de-growth is coming eventually. For the current system, that would likely mean an endless great depression. Brainstorming crazy ideas for a less consumerist type of economy may well be a boon.

No, I agree with the definition. What I'm saying is that quality of streaming services is not degrading. The price is going up but that's not the same thing.

And I already said that you have many alternatives: there's multiple competing services (who's competing with YT?), you still can buy disks, you can watch TV, you can go to the cinema, damn, you can even read a book. No one is locked into one source of entertainment.