In the last 5 to 10 years everything seems to suck: product’s and services quality plummeted, everything from homes to cars to food became really expensive, technology stopped to help us to be something designed to f@ck with us and our money, nobody seems to be able to hold a job anymore, everyone is broke. Life seems worse in general.
Why? Did COVID made this happen? How?
I think the enshitification of the Internet was sort of just what happens to everything once it gets monetized. It was already happening before COVID.
On the other hand - when I was growing up, my city was rough. So much violent crime, bands would not come here, it was notorious. Now? No. Violet crime has decreased sharply, my kids grew up in a different world than I did.
Jobs haven’t become less secure, or at least not in my experience, that change happened in the 1980s, and it’s been about the same since.
Everyone is broke because of Ronald Reagan, for lack of a better way to explain it. Deregulation. Workers have gotten ever more productive without getting their cut of that increase in productivity and this is the endgame of that trend.
The rise in interest rates meant easy money dried up for corporations. They all had to “monitize” at the same time. That’s why enshitification happened everywhere at the same time. Things are easing. Enshitification will slow down.