[xbpx]

You ever drive down a main drag of any town or city pretty much anywhere that has a fairly unregulated capitalist system? Advertising everywhere. Signage. People dressed as hotdogs paid a few bucks an hour to wave a sign shaped like a ketchup bottle.

The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different.

Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and maximizing the bottom line". Capitalism is creative destruction driven by distributed profit seeking along the edges of relatively immobile statist and corporate oligopolistic structures.

This always involves cycles of enshitification that end in bottom feeding until extinguished by new techno-social revolutions.

GenXers were talking about the enshitification of main street with the spread of big box stores and malls in the 80s and 90s. Same system, same process, new generation.

[082349872349872]

> The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different.

It's obvious now that bringing the world to the net would make the net a lot more like the world, but you see, those of us who came up in the pre-Canter & Siegel days had actually hoped that it would make the world more like the (in the before times) net.

[xbpx]

I know, my statement there is harsh. The early tech culture emerged from 60s counter cultural forces that had, to their credit, really impacted the world. So it probably wasn't as naive as it seems now.

[tempsy]

Except this was all triggered with the end of ZIRP...this all happened relatively recently.

High interest rates forced corporations to actually get serious about profitability. Layoffs, price hikes, charging more for less is all related to that.

[xbpx]

For sure. But there will always be good times and bad. Main streets in towns were likewise vital communities until interest rate hikes and massive deregulation in the 80s.

If you want to keep quaint Norwegian looking towns pristine even through harder times you need fairly heavy regulation.

[pixl97]

Is 34+ years recently?