Where The Rot Economy separates is that growth is, in and of itself, the force that drives companies to enshittify.
Not finished reading the article yet, but my reaction to reading this line is that Zitron is missing the mark in the same way he qualifies Doctorow’s Enshittification does.
I don’t think growth directly drives companies to enshittify. Rather, infinite (and especially constant-or-better) growth in a finite space is only possible when things degrade. Physical widgets do this pretty decently on their own, though we (humans) had to come up with planned obsolescence to keep degradation above a certain threshhold. Software, on the other hand, doesn’t naturally degrade over time. It only seems to do so because the different actors in its ecosystem, from the software “bricks” to the underlying hardware, are similarly incentivized to churn out new things that deprecate the old, indirectly degrading them.
We’ll see where Zitron goes from here to the end of the article.
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