More Enshittification

 One of the country's worst robocallers has died. Awww.  Anyway.

The thing about technology is that it's obviously quite wonderful in the right hands, but the the right hands are usually crowded out by the wrong ones. When the Internet came of age, the assumption was that it would "democratize knowledge" as everyone would have access to what had previously been locked up in library stacks and archives. Suddenly you could access the Library of Congress from Omaha.

Except instead the Internet became about sharing pictures of your dinner, trolling people and porn.

Robocalls are a great example of someone finding a new technology and using it to make people progressively miserable. It's not War, Famine, Pestilence or Plague, but it just makes life a little bit worse. Enshittification. What's more, the outright scamming that went on with robocalls was made possible by lax regulation.

The Biden Administration and Democrats in general worked for the last four years to lessen that process. Buttigieg and the Transportation Department attacked all sorts of immiserating things that airlines do, like hidden fees and cancelling flights. Airline travel is, in fact, the beau idyll of enshittification, as airline travel is amazing and wretched at the same time. 

The point, broadly, is that Democrats are a party of governance working - to the best of their knowledge and ability - to make things marginally better. Republicans are the party working to dismantle that. "Government is not the solution to your problems, government IS the problem" has been their operational mantra since Reagan rolled into the White House. While it is true that excess government regulation can be burdensome, the net effect can be positive.

Right now, I'm trying to negotiate a Treasury Department website to register a family LLC. I'm getting an error message that I've already registered it. The problem is, I need a BOIR number (don't ask). The bigger problem is that there is no human being who I can talk to to resolve this issue. 

In short, depriving the government of funds and outsourcing tasks to contractors contributes to massive hassle like this that contributes to people hating the government which helps elect Republicans.

What is clear is that the coming four years will see a massive increase in this sort of crap, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario could include the following:

- Another pandemic during a period when public health has been politicized by internet trolls.
- A crypto or other type of bubble during a period when financial oversight has been stripped away to placate the techbros.
- AI "disrupting" professions and industries that hollow out jobs.

The common theme is that we have an increasingly right wing tech sector - especially the vulture capitalists that sit atop that ecosystem - and they could have an outsized influence on this new administration. This is a group of dorky techno-libertarians who are the living manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect and Elon Musk is their living god. 

One of the interesting dynamics we are seeing is the normalization of Trump, in that many people have figured out how to play this moron through endless flattery. He is also 80% blustering bullshit, so who knows what he will really, actually do? Maybe he deports millions of people, but more likely he deports tens of thousands and declares that he has solved immigration. Trump doesn't really "do" policy.

But these broligarchs do, or at least they flatter themselves in thinking that they do.

Trump is an impulsive, incompetent moron who is easily swayed by those whispering paeans to his greatness is his ear. The cast of characters who will staff his administration absolutely include terrifying figures like Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, but there is also a going to be a lot of wealthy people making things worse for the majority of Americans because it makes things better for them.

If Democrats were serious about creating their own brand of populism, that is the opportunity to do so. 

Focus on the broligarchs.