Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

That increased profitability can only come from enshittification. Every product manager on Google Search spends their workdays figuring out how to remove a Jenga block.

Source: Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Internally, every powerful person at Google is committed to ensuring that their rival-peers don’t stake out fresh territory as their own. The one thing every top exec can agree on is that the one guy who’s trying to expand the company into an adjacent line of business must not succeed.

What’s worse, these princelings compete with one another. Their individual progression through the upper echelons of Google’s aristocracy depends as much on others failing as it does on their success. The org chart only has so many VP, SVP and EVP boxes on it, and each layer is much smaller than the previous one. If you’re a VP, every one of your colleagues who makes it to SVP takes a spot that you can no longer get.

Those spots are wildly lucrative. Each tier of the hierarchy is worth an order of magnitude more than the tier beneath it. The stakes are so high that they are barely comprehensible.

That means that every one of these Jenga-block-pulling execs is playing blind: they don’t — and can’t — coordinate on the ways they’re planning to lower quality in order to improve profits.

I don’t know if I’ve read a clearer description of the things I’ve seen in 30 years of (mostly) Fortune 250 corporations. Over the course of my career, about a half dozen of my successful software projects — with many happy users — have been sabotaged because they made someone else look bad, or just had the unacceptable side-effect of making me look like I knew what I was doing. Seriously. I could write a book.

Hey, I got paid, and have had a comfy ride along the way. What could I expect as a developer toiling away in the bowels of some faceless blue chip corporation? The only thing the kind of companies I have worked for could offer would be a role with more responsibility but no more pay. Uh… pass.

What really frustrates me in all of this is the tireless effort and work to make sure that software never actually improves workflows or processes for the company, so that eternal middle managers can preserve their tiny little fiefdoms. Sure, we’ll make some software to do something, but by the time the managers “manage,” the people who don’t do the job write the specs, the outsourced programmers who don’t understand anything about the process write the application, the years go by, and the poor schmucks who have to use the thing sign off on the acceptance testing, just to move on, everyone is left with a piece of crap they can’t stand to use, and they wonder why anyone bothered. They’d have been better served just continuing to use horrific, shared Excel spreadsheets.

Google spends a whole-ass Twitter, every single year, just to make sure you never accidentally try another search engine.

I never want to hear another word about what else Elon Musk could have done to supposedly improve the world with the money he spent buying Twitter.

Likewise Google/Apple’s mobile duopoly is more cozy than competitive. Google pays Apple $15–20 billion, every single year, to be the default search in Safari and iOS. If Google and Apple were competing over mobile, you’d expect that one of them would drop the sky-high 30 percent rake they charge on in-app payments, but that would mess up their mutual good thing. Instead, these “competitors” charge exactly the same price for a service with minimal operating costs.

Since the 80’s, American corporations have learned to toe the precise line that will allow them to point fingers at their “competitors” in court to wriggle out of the en vogue legal definition of monopoly, but it’s all such a naked joke. The app stores are the same way. It is a certainty that very-high level execs at Apple and Google have concluded to keep their fees the same, so that the market for app development doesn’t actually work, and is anything but “free.”

I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End

I have a simple question for every ‘expert’ who thinks they understand the root causes of the shipping crisis:

Why is there only one crane for every 50–100 trucks at every port in America?

No ‘expert’ will answer this question.

I’m a Class A truck driver with experience in nearly every aspect of freight. My experience in the trucking industry of 20 years tells me that nothing is going to change in the shipping industry.

Source: I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End

This is the other half of the port problem itself.

Both of these stories talk all around the issue, but if you read between the lines, you can see the root problem, which I’ve been trying to explain for awhile now.

It is the business plan of every VC-funded startup today to buy their way into a market, use their funding to underprice everyone else out of it, come to monopolize it, and then extract all the profit from it going forward. (Or dualopolize, and collude with another heavy weight. Looking at you Verizon and AT&T.) Everyone else has learned the new playbook, and the US is experiencing runaway consolidation and monopolization in every market sector.

You can see the after-effects of this approach right now in New York. Uber has “won,” and the cab business is now in the toilet. The incumbent hegemony has been overthrown, and medallions (cab “licenses”) are now worth 1/5th what they were a couple years ago. Naturally, the state is proposing relief for cab companies, but it doesn’t give much relief to individual owners, and many of them are on hunger strike for more help.

We say that the United States has a capitalist economic system, but every business since the Reagan 80’s has concentrated its efforts to accrete as much power as possible, and use it to bully current competitors, and prevent new entrants into the market. This has resulted in our current situation where 2 or 3 companies control virtually everything about any particular market you can point to. The classic examples are food and entertainment/news. And when any large-enough business gets in trouble, the government is Johnny-on-the-spot to come rushing in with a bailout. So much for taking risks being the operative balance to getting to enjoy the profits.

The excess capacity of every link of every supply chain in the country has been liquidated for short-term profit over the past decade, and then COVID happened. And, very naturally, as predicted perfectly by the corporate model, the companies which have their respective leash on the various parts of this problem are yanking on them, to try to extract more profit from “the market.” Except that we, the average citizen, are “the market” here, and that’s why we’re seeing people start talking about inflation. It’s coming, and it’s inevitable, because the US has “free market capitalism” in name only now. Between the bailouts, and with as much involvement as Congress has “regulating” every market and industry now, it’s hard not to call our system a planned economy, which, of course, is the classic euphemism for Communism.