I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems
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I agree. The DSA is trying to fill that gap. We've even started trying to fill the media gap in the SF Bay Area with our own worker-focused online newspaper, called the Bay Area Current - just launched in April. https://bayareacurrent.com/
Everyone is welcome.
You, me and everyone we know have all been subjected to a 40-year blitz of anti-solidaristic propaganda, aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals.
Hard agree!
Also - re solitary actor propaganda and propaganda in general - Naming is Framing.
The way most non-Republicans use the name ‘Democrat’ refers to conservative, established politicians and insiders rather than activists and upstarts and reformers.
Which is the exact opposite of the way Republicans use the word ‘Republican’. For them, establishment Republicans aren’t ‘Republicans’ they are RINOs.
AOC is almost never described as a Democrat. Why is that and what framing does it engender?
To me, it frames the party as never including progressives, activists, reformers, etc.
Who benefits from that framing?
Republicans and Democratic conservatives, established politicians and insiders.
Great, important thread. this individual-action idea bubble needs to be popped. Well done.
Oh sure, you can tinker in the margins, and you should! Get a repairable laptop, like the Framework, which is the greatest computer I've ever owned, and run Linux on it (I use Ubuntu, which is easy to install). You'll spend two weeks looking around the UI for the thing you need to click on and then you'll stop noticing it altogether, forever:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame
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Access the internet via RSS, and avoid all the algorithmic twiddling and surveillance that subjects you and yours to the depredations of the worst people on earth and their feral algorithms:
https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/
Give preference to high-security, private, open messaging tools like Signal. Open an account on a federated social media service, like Mastodon, and make it a first-class home for your online social life:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
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Do all this! Do more! You'll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better. But you're not going to fight enshittification this way. Enshittification is not the result of people making bad choices: it's the result of bad policies that produce bad systems.
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Enshittification makes for a neat descriptive account, talking about how platforms go bad:
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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But the most important part of enshittification is its causal hypothesis: the answer it proposes to why this degradation is happening everywhere, right now:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite
Here's why you're getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don't have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don't compete.
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I've created four "paradoxes" to describe how market capitalism undermines itself:
1. Property rights limit competition
2. Property rights enforcement invites exploitation
3. Markets reward secrecy but need transparency to function well
4. Market success undermines market competition
It means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they've amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about "fighting for the user." Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.
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A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
