Here is a post about the “enshitification” of modern life I found on Gab that is worth sharing.

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Blair Cottrell

@RealBlairCottrell

4h · AU · Last week I spoke with a mate of mine who does computer software engineering.

He’s been doing that for a while so out of curiosity I asked him, “What’s the best computer I could buy these days?”

“Windows?” He asked.

“Yeah.”

He told me they’re basically all the same thing.

“You could spend $500 or $5000, you’re only paying more for better components. The system is essentially the same.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Obviously a $5k PC would run better than a $500 laptop.”

“It would run better.” He agreed. “But the base operating system is the same. It’s the same machine, just with different components.”

He went on:

“They’ve been the same machines for around 25 years. There’s been no major breakthrough since then, everything just got shrunk down and components became more efficient, but in essence all computers functionally operate the same way they did when we were 10 or 15 years old.”

“We don’t create anything anymore. We just remake trendy, cost-effective emulations of what was new 25 years ago.”

While driving home I kept replaying in my mind what he’d said to me, because I sensed there was something profound in it.

After a couple days I realised what he’d said pertained to literally everything.

I thought about what life was like 20-25 years ago. I recalled films like the Lord of The Rings trilogy and the Star Wars prequels, then compared the brilliant originality of ‘back then’ to the crude emulations of the same recycled stories sold by Hollywood today.

“Cost-effective” but insipid and lifeless copies.

I looked at my phone and realised it’s essentially the same phone I’ve had for about 20 years now. The cameras are better but every ‘new phone model’ is the same one as before with minor component updates.

The food was another example. 25 years ago what we ate wasn’t predominantly vegetable oil and carcinogenic additives. Now everything will make you sick, because it’s all a “cost-effective” mass produced copy of the real food we used to eat.

But the big realisation came when I paid attention to the people themselves.

If you stop and look around at ordinary consumers in any major shopping centre or supermarket, you can’t deny they’re typically very fat, disabled or retarded, if not then they’re Indian, Black or Chinese.

25 years ago this wasn’t the norm. People were relatively healthy and White. Immigrants and visibly handicapped people were something well & truly out of the ordinary.

The quality of the Western peasantry had suffered the same fate as our film, literature and technology. They were seized upon by merchants who halted their development in order to refine them into a crude but more profitable emulation of their original form.

They had been made “cost-effective”.

If you’ve read this far that old Christian proverb ought to come into focus: the love of money being the root of all evil.