One awful thing about enshittification is that companies, before or maybe never, I guess I have to think that the system is supposed to be that companies create a product, they sell to us, and they get the money. But we know everyone is doing it for the money, so the product becomes an afterthought, and getting money from you is the first thing that is in anyone’s mind.

So what happens when product is not the priority? They will try to do anything and everything to try to cycle the money out of you. They might try to make products bad, they might make advertisements that are more fishy, they might make data capturing way more pervasive so that they can have more information on you. The point has changed from exchange of goods and services to just cycling money from you, and that is going to change a lot. Or maybe it has changed the world as we know it.

Because before that might be a subconscious process of the whole world, but now I think people are acting on it consciously. It’s like everything is a fucking scam – nothing works, nothing lasts, nothing is of good quality. Everything is just to get money out of you and convincing money to be something that you’re supposed to do to everyone else. Like they will make you feel bad, they will make you feel incompetent, they will make you feel like an idiot, they will make you feel like you are not sufficient, just so that you would spend money on something, but the thing was never going to do anything. It’s all about just getting money out of you. So it has gone from commerce to manipulation. The exchange of goods is now not the point.

It might be because before you could just invent new products and categories and you would increase the size of the pie. But I think we are reaching a saturation point where everything is almost becoming the same. Everything is coming from the same fucking factory from China. And there is not much land to discover commercially. So now they are just trying to hype up the land and get the fucking money rolling. Land is just a metaphor here. But basically there are not much product categories or product left now. They just have to make do with the expectations of growth and not have much products to account for that expectation of growth. So they are now manipulating the customers because product is something beyond them now. So there are three moving parts, the product and the customer. The product part is over, company wants profit, it won’t change. So now what they are toying with is the consumer.

That’s why you see many note-taking AI startups that are not doing any productive thing but are just running off marketing. They are not needed yet. Based on how they make the person feel, they are able to cycle money out of them. Thus, they are not products of productivity but instruments of manipulation with the intent of getting money out of people. Everything now seems like it is made with the intention of cycling money out of you. And product now seems like something that is part of a puzzle, not the puzzle itself, like it used to be. The puzzle is to guzzle money out of people, and product is a tiny part of it. Marketing is the greater chunk.That’s why things that aid in manipulation are going so big – digital marketing firms like Meta, analytical firms, etc. It’s all about the humans now. How do we make them feel in such a way that they give us all the money and power?

We see people calling out USA that the whole country is run by lawyers and China is praised that they have so much development going on because it is run by engineers. The whole government structure and the people in them are different in USA and China. And I think we can see this in our real world also. Down the line somewhere marketing took over engineering and solving problems was taken by extracting money and that changed the world.

Before the discussion started with product that hey we have this thing to sell and now it is making profit we are earning revenue and then started the question of how do we maximize revenue but now the starting point is how do we grow as fast as possible how do we have as much revenue as possible so product is largely irrelevant in the discourse of fine current commerce. One can even say the new product is not the product itself but the manipulation and the feelings of the customer that the products are largely slide line so how are we making the customers feel and how that contributes to the money extraction operation.

A product is something that is retrofitted into the philosophy of money extraction instead of profit being something optimized on top of a product solving a problem. That is the vein of philosophy that is shaping our world today. This fundamentally changes how a customer is viewed in commerce. He goes from someone who has a problem that can be solved with a product to someone with a psychology that can be manipulated by showing some sequence of media to extract money from them and handing them some product that is retrofitted and not the primary source of this whole machinery.

And I think this trickle down from luxury and the upper-class. Before, the only people who could afford to buy something that didn’t have that much utility or productive capacity were the rich people who were splurging on luxuries. You can look at some silverware or extremely expensive jewelry or stuff like that. They didn’t do anything productive, but it showed that hey, people are willing to spend money if their emotions and psychology is manipulated a bit and thus, you can extract money from them. And that psychological thinking of not providing value but being able to extract money via toying with people’s emotions and their hunger for status or their volatilevolatile emotions is now trickled down to normal products. “Hey, this thing won’t do much, but it is making you feel this way, so hey you gotta give me money. I can extract money from you because you feel in a way. Being human is now targeted at the vulnerabilities and the humanness is now the core engine of commerce, and not the products and the problems they solve.”

It’s like this belief of extraction without providing utility was contained in a secure parameter of just luxury. But now the plague has exploded. It has now escaped and has infected the whole world. We now have a contagion, we now have a pandemic, we have infected commercial systems where product and utility is not the point but extraction is. Luxury and the human sins of pride, sloth etc killed the very system which was providing it the utility and productivity it needed and the progress that it all caused.What was contained inside a secure perimeter in luxury was actually very consensual. When you bought something luxurious, you knew that it didn’t have much utility. It is not productive if you try to use it; it will break. But when that philosophy escaped that perimeter and leaked into everyday items and other areas of commerce, what it has done is made it’s way into things that are non-consensual.

I don’t want a shitty washing machine that needs to be replaced every four or five years. I want something that would last at least a decade. But without my consent, I won’t ever be sold that. I will always be given something shitty.