Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap…

Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap customers and then progressively empty their bank accounts. Reading that process socially and even more important *materially* gives it very different meanings. /1

Using traditional economic framings, enshittification is a flavour of monopolisation. The various tricks and devices to prevent competition. Because we’ve lived and breathed economic framings for social life since the 1970s, all sides of most debates agree to the framings. /2

Competition is said to be an unalloyed good, monopolisation an intrinsic bad. It surprises me that basic framing doesn’t strike us as weird. Most of my time here is devoted to reverse engineering these economic framings. To showing how bizarre they are. /3

To recap many threads, societies are 100% social. They’re not run by political systems, not by any -isms. They’re all functionally equivalent, in the basic underlying social mechanisms they use. More specifically, societies run on status. /4

We call the various ways different cultures and countries work with status by different political and economic names, which disguises that we’re all doing the same thing. Building status hierarchies. Humans’ deepest desire is to have status, because status = identity. /5

The work of Rene Girard talks about this, Gabriel Tarde’s earlier work on imitation as the root social act also (we imitate/emulate higher-status people, and that’s what creates the status hierarchies). Status is also neither good nor bad. But it can be gamed. /6

Status reflects that some things are better or worse than other things. A good plumber is hopefully one who does plumbing better, and therefore has a higher status. Our democracies are failing because we levelled all status hierarchies into a single master hierarchy. /7

A hierarchy of popularity. Elections destroyed democracy, bizarrely we define the latter now by the former. Democracy preceded elections by many centuries. Once you make popularity the key to ultimate power, all other status differentiation is toast. /8

Anything can be made popular. We learn the basics of this at school, popularity is the currency of all schooling, socially. It’s just marketing. Our governance became completely decoupled from objective, material reality. /9

Take Peter Dutton’s nuclear fantasy, announced in more detail yesterday for Australia. It’s seriously a criminal joke, as public policy. He knows it. He doesn’t care. He’s using it to fire up the team sports, imitative rivalry as Girard called it. To win votes. /10

To build and strengthen his own status hierarchy, in opposition to many generations of complex multi-layered hierarchies of expertise-driven status - our public life. Like any ‘influencer’ today, how you get the followers behind you becomes irrelevant. /11

Just lie, make up abject fantasies, provided it generates a team (status hierarchy) that in turn opposes existing teams and takes over their social position. Social media vastly accelerates this bullshitification process. An economy of likes. Popularity is the currency. /12

How does this relate to enshittification? Enshittification is the building of status hierarchies, using one set of specific modern network techniques. It’s the same social mechanism humans have used since there’s been humans. And here’s where economic framings don’t help. /13

Because that’s not in itself a bad thing. Status is unavoidable, it’s our root social act. It’s our identity. And we want hierarchies of that status, to reflect the basic quality of what’s on offer. Competition? That’s so obviously an invitation to do more team sports. /14

To set up more rival teams, to challenge existing teams, for status. What Will Storr calls ‘status games’, as the stuff of all human life. It’s not a solution for the destruction of democracies. It’s the opposite. It prevents stabilisation of any status hierarchy. /15

Sociality is intrinsic violence. Team sports, the (endless) battle for status and identity. All that stabilises societies is a structuring central status hierarchy at the heart of a society, to provide a level of control of the team sports. /16

This, I’m certain, is the historic reason religions and monarchies exist. They’re both mechanisms for the regulation of status. Take Victorian England, which I Tweet about a lot. Heavily dominated by both Church and Queen. /17

And yet obsessed with engineering the social good. It managed to harness status games towards collective well-being. It turned status games into ‘success’ games, as Storr calls them. As opposed to status games of virtue or domination. /18

Social media is saturated with status-virtue games. History is overwhelmingly about dominance games. But the Republic of Letters found a way to harness status games for material well-being of societies. Of course nothing is perfect. The raw material of status is desire. /19

There are no utopias. Desires always shift. But you need to stabilise status games, team sports, to provide fractalised control of the various status hierarchies in play. Enshittification is a crude attempt to do this. It won’t succeed, as Cory says, the platforms will die. /20

But we don’t need to replace them with lots of competition. We need new status hierarchies, playing status-success games again. Where status is coupled to material well-being. Like the Romans and Victorians. Even Asia today, in many ways. /21

Rather than the empty election-driven popularity contests, status-virtue games, that we currently call democracy. Monopolies are just successful, stabilised hierarchies. Not in themselves bad. But they can be gamed, as these platforms are doing. /22

A monarchy is a monopoly. As is a church. Or a State. Humans will always create them because they always create status hierarchies. And they should. There is no ‘the people’, some flattened cultural fantasy of no differentiation between levels in all walks of life. /23

The real task is to ensure that status games are success games. Not virtue or dominance games. And again, humans have pulled that off before. Usually by making engineering the core of their societies. /24

Without that, only catastrophes bring meaningful change. That’s all that can disrupt status hierarchies. There’s data to prove it. /end