And now AI is inserting itself in the insertion!

Just ask AI to make your Door Dash order for your Pizza delivery driver.

Corporations don’t invent new products or improve existing ones anymore. The R&D needed costs too much along with creating the tooling to manufacture and distribute products. Usually quite the opposite, they look how to cheapen products’ construction and durability while charging more to increase the profit margin.

It’s far easier to make a product a subscription, or desirable features a subscription, sell commonly needed add-ons separately at ridiculously inflated costs (like printer ink or power tool batteries) or as you said, insert middle-men to extract fees for the convenience of their existing between the customer and the desired product.

And now we have ten years of fucked up young adults who think this is how it’s always been.

"Enshittification" better be the word of the year.

Agree on the chatbot thing but to be honest, it was like that way before LLMs.

There was a full decade where they would just keyword match you to different chat flowcharts.

Complete with Trump-as-Biff-as-Trump.

Thank Reagan.

When he deregulated the banks he gave a blank check to a bunch of third raters who'd gone to small time banks because they knew they couldn't cut it anywhere else.

If I ever invent a time machine, I'm making a few pit stops on my way back in time to cap Hitler, and Milton Friedman and his friends are on the list. He's the misanthrope who popularized the idea that the only duty of a company's leadership is to deliver profit, and any other pursuit is a disservice to the shareholders. This is known as the Friedman Doctrine.

This CGP Gray video from a decade ago makes the point that when the bulk of a countries wealth comes from a very small area of production/industry - tyranny will soon follow.

When all the wealth comes from a few tech-billionaires (rather than the productive labour of the diverse masses) - the representative/leader/dictator ONLY has to please the small minority who has all the money.

...and your personal data would be wholly under your control.

But then, how can the IC spy on you without a warrant.

Let's not pretend the rest of the world is so much better. I'll concede the US is winning the race to the bottom. This is the winning Trump was talking about.