Words have power. In 1991, I read "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling," the transcript of Bruce Sterling's keynote speech for that year's Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA, and within a year, I'd dropped out of university to become a programmer:
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Reuters' Jeff Horwitz analyzes leaked memos that reveal that: 10% of Meta revenue comes from scam ads, and; Meta knows it, and; decided not to stop about it, because; the fines for facilitating life-destroying fraud are less than the revenue from helping destroy users' lives:
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A tuxedoed figure dramatically shoveing greenish pigs into a tube, from whose other end vomits forth a torrent of packaged goods. He has the head of Mark Zuckerberg's 'metaverse' avatar. He stands upon an endless field of gold coins. The background is the intaglioed upper face of the engraving of Benjamin Franklin on a US$100 bill, roughed up to a dark and sinister hue.
The crux of the enshittification hypothesis is that companies deliberately degrade their products and services to benefit themselves at your expense because they can. An enshittogenic policy environment that rewards cheating, spying and monopolization will inevitably give rise to cheating, spying monopolists:
While I formulated the idea of enshittification to refer to digital platforms and their specific technical characteristics, economics and history, I am very excited to see other theorists extend the idea of enshittification beyond tech and into wider policy realms.
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A Gilded Age editorial cartoon depicting a muscular worker and a corpulent millionaire squaring off for a fight; the millionaire's head has been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of 'Enshittification,' its mouth covered in a grawlix-scrawled black bar.
That's where Pavlina Tcherneva comes in. Tcherneva is an economist whose work focuses on the power of a "job guarantee," which is exactly what it sounds like: a guarantee from the government to employ anyone who wants a job, by either finding or creating a job that a) suits that person's talents and abilities and b) does something useful and good.
TThe epigram for my forthcoming book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It is a quote from Ed Zitron: "I hate them for what they've done to the computer" (Ed even recorded a little cameo of this for the audiobook):
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"A 1930s editorial cartoon depicting a bloated baseball player labeled 'Monopoly Giants' sliding into home base but falling short. He is being tagged by a smaller, weaker player labeled 'consumer.' An umpire is striding into the frame, declaring the monopolist to be safe. The image has been altered: the slider has the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. The ump has the head of Robert Bork. The consumer has the head of a foolishly grinning child laborer, photographed at the turn of the 20th century.
About bottle caps and a general denial of reality.
I made this work in 2012. I filled a humming top with plastic objects found in the stomach of one albatross chick on Kure Atoll (Northwestern Hawaiian islands). 340 g. Cigarette lighters, plastic fragments, toys and mainly bottle caps.
There is a reason why the lids no longer come off the bottles!
[Swaantje Güntzel, stomach contents/340g, 2012, plastics, metal, 19,7 x 26,7 x 25,4 cm]
The image shows a toy spinning top for children with a blue base and red handle. Inside the spinning top are various plastic objects, such as lighters, bottle caps and toys. The objects were found in the stomach of an albatross chick on Kure Atoll.
The games industry's self-induced traumatic brain injury ( pluralistic.net )
https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/17Nov2025.jpg?w=840&ssl=1 ...
Facebook's fraud files ( pluralistic.net )
https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/08Nov2025.jpg?w=840&ssl=1 ...
The enshittification of labor ( pluralistic.net )
https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/07Nov2025.jpg?w=840&ssl=1 ...
Hate the player AND the game ( pluralistic.net )
https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/10Sep2025.jpg?w=840&ssl=1 ...