You don’t even need bribery. You can just throw money at something and make things happen.
If you think something is true, you can pay the world to prioritize things as if it were true.
If you think vaccines cause autism and you are rich, you can create massive “education” campaigns and the like to convince people its true. You can buy ads telling people its true. You can amass an enormous following of people who believe you and change policy without bribery.
Just reiterating what others have said but… if you have an IP you like and want more of it in the future (regardless of medium!) then its success in any other medium will likely impact whether or not you get more.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where:
Money matters more to most IP holders than the IP itself
New IP is seen as risky
Those in charge don’t have to take responsibility for their failures
If there is a commercial failure of an IP, there is a good chance that its failure will be seen as the IP generally failing or falling out of poluarity instead of the failure to best utilize the IP that likely occurred. As a result, priorities will often shift away from the IP to something else in all mediums (ex. ASOIAF/GOT). Unless the IP is absolutely gangbusters in all other mediums, it will suffer. Similarly, success will likely lead to more utilization of the IP in any medium.
It’s unlikely that the IP owner will sell or license the IP in the near future because at one point it was popular and new IP is hard to make. It would be better to hoard IP and maybe try again in a decade when they need a trick up their sleeve. Plus, another failure might damage the IP even more.
Admittedly, I’m not attached to any brands or IP in particular and so I’m not invested really. I just makes me a little sad when some IP I thought well of has this happen… or when the person who benefits from the IP turns out to be a person I’d rather not give money to. Occasionally I’ll ponder what might have been if things had gone differently and feel a little bad.
the same process
It doesn’t necessarily involve the middle man, who is ultimately the bigger fish that enshittifiers are looking to land. I think that’s relevant. Enshittification’s process involves capturing both a “retail” user base and a business user base and then squeezing both.
Edit. Enshittification is layered and more specific to industries and markets that are not inherently profitable. It starts with seed money being burned for that initial user base and fucks over everyone up and down the chain because the business is not really profitable otherwise. Skimp/shrinkflation is more about squeezing more profit than you are already making.
I’ve see it used a lot recently to describe the general degradation of quality in service of increasing profits. I think technically, it is not enshittification. Below is my general definition of the process enshittification describes. Repost from another comment.
A word that includes the word “shit” in it has a very nice ring to it when describing things getting generally shittier in favor of profit. I suppose language can evolve rapidly and things mean what people believe them to mean.
Edit: As per Wikipedia’s Shrinkflation Entry:
Skimpflation involves a reformulation or other reduction in quality.
I see skimpflation as a form of shrinkflation. The idea is still that the price stays the same but to try and hide the cost increase from the customer they give you less. I guess fewer strawberries per “smoothie” is even more subtle than fewer ounces of the original “smoothie” formula per bottle.
To be a pedantic asshole, technically enshittification is meant to refer to online services that follow an inevitable process of…
Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.
Most big game corps just shutter studios, usually letting them know via the grapevine after a board meeting or twitter post…
Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices
Assuming you are in the USA, it’s fundamentally because our politics is fueled by private money. The “haves” spend lots of money to make rules that protect and enrich themselves at the expense of the “have nots”. The rich get richer, and the rest of us get a larger share of the burden.
The rich then spend more of their money convincing everyone else that some minority group of their fellow “have nots” are to blame and let us fight amongst ourselves. They starve us but leave us with just enough left to lose so that the price of doing something about it is too high (quitting, losing health insurance, getting arrested at a protest, etc) for most of us to bear.
how can we change this?
Get money out of politics. Get the public to stop blaming their fellow have nots and demand change from the haves.
How does one person even start to address these issues?
Have empathy for and help your neighbors if you can, especially when they take the risks required to push for actual change. Talk to people. Organize. Support/start unions or a mutual aid organization. Go to local government meetings and make your voice heard. Run for local office.
Its easy for a small group of wealthy organizations to tilt specific elections or politics in their favor. It’s much harder them to do that in 1,000+ small communities across the nation.
Fundraisers and charities, when you have a lot money, are rarely acts of charity. They tend to be PR campaigns and power plays.
Honestly, even when the acts have good intentions, they are often quite damaging. The involvement of the wealthy in charity is very similar to their involvement in politics. Their wealth buys influence and gives them a disproportionate say that allows them to ignore and overrule the will of the people and sometimes even reality.
For example, look into the impact of Bill Gates’s “acts of charity” in the education space. He poured money into charter programs that negatively impacted public education. Later studies showed that his programs were not particularly effective.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that a very rich person is convinced by some charlatan that they found the a means to produce free energy. The wealthy person throws tons of money at the idea. How many talented people will be taken from other legit programs because the paycheck at Bullshit Energy Nonprofit is better? These rich people are successful and think they know bestr. Their money ensures they get treated like experts because money makes things happen whether or not those things are helpful.
I think perfect competition is impossible. The incentive is not to compete fairly, it’s to maximize profits and the most effective ways to maximize profits are anticompetitive, exploitative, or both. Anyone arguing for a society built around such a system is either naive or trying to buy more time with false hopes.
Virtually every condition in the ideal scenario is a barrier for profit, and I don’t think any civilization has managed even a single one of those conditions. There will always be actors looking to take advantage of any loopholes or create unregulated markets.
It’s just not a system that is sustainable. The incentives are simply wrong and the society built around those incentives can’t maintain a system of perfect conditions even if one were to exist.
Demonstrating the inherent contradiction of capitalism in practice.
Capitalism is allegedly the only fair way to price things, via the “Price Mechanism”. However, capitalists have simultaneously been creaming their pants at the idea of charging specific people or people in specific situations more, because they can get more profit, in service of Profit Maximization.
I’m sure I’ll get a lecture on how they are not at all mutually exclusive but I don’t care, honestly. It’s either going to price gouge when the customer is perceived to be in more need (low battery pricing for taxi apps) or have a price based on the customer’s ability to pay… at which point why not socialism?
Essentially, the capitalist will support what is best for themselves and make up reasons why it theoretically might benefit consumers (but not really).
[How] do you think Trump, with the powers newly granted to the office he’s again running for, will act in his second term?
There could have been better worlds
So… because Trump didn’t get unhinged to the point where he started a nuclear war, you aren’t worried.
How did you feel about refusing to concede in the 2020 election and creating uncertainty and doubt about the electoral process among a not insignificant minority of voters?
How about inciting an angry mob to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th?
How did you feel about hoarding and hiding classified documents so that he could show them off to impress his friends and guests? Maybe even sell them if times are tough?
How about strong-arming the Republican party and installing his family to run it?
How do you feel about how his SCOTUS has changed the fundamentals of the US government?
The Chevron deference?
Bribery?
Presidential “immunity” for official acts?
How do you feel about the loss of the right to have an abortion?
Do you think Trump, with the powers newly granted to the office he’s again running for, will act in his second term? Where is your line?
I see. So what has happened over the last 8 years as a direct result of his election isn’t concerning to you?
now that Trump has been president once, I know what it’s like when that happens and don’t worry that much about it anymore).
That sounds disturbingly like you aren’t all that concerned about what a second Trump presidency would be like. It sounds like you think the first one wasn’t as bad as people thought it would be and the second one will similarly be better than people think. Am I misreading your words?
You can abuse your position as a holdout and potentially fuck everything up in either chamber. Bills require passage in both chambers… but I’m sure you knew that.
I just hope there are enough gains in the house to make his ass irrelevant.
I am just destroyed by this. I genuinely had a little faith in humanity that people wouldn’t fall for this bullshit but I guess I sorely was mistaken.
Laitmer is a conservative, racist piece of shit who is going to take over Manchin’s job of fucking things up for progressives. Fucking hell this sucks.
To top it off, Israel just successfully dropped a political nuke on a critic and will likely have everyone running scared in the future.
I agree they’ve been trying to mitigate this but as I understand it things are quite precarious regardless. It’s not always possible to mitigate a disaster you see coming even if you try your best to prepare for it.
There has been more talk of it since then - that article just was the only concrete & most reputable source I could think of at the time and I didn’t want to turn a post into a research project.
Anyway, while there is more awareness of the issue it is, more or less, the same shady greed-driven risky behavior and nonsense that happened with home mortgages except its commercial mortgages and they’ve seen it coming.
It actually kind of is The Bigger Short
Some folks have been calling this for a while. The Bigger Short
Do you know what a changing climate does to the needs of the people?
I mean, obviously, natural disasters like severe weather impact the needs of the people. Look at the last two hurricanes in the US south or the wildfires out west. Death, injuries, lives disrupted, houses and businesses destroy or damaged, links in supply chains shattered.
Imagine what happens to populated areas that, hypothetically, get hit repeatedly by this for a few years. Many in Florida can’t find home insurance already. Eventually they’ll have to leave and go… where? If this happens repeatedly in poorer neighboring countries? What if sea levels actually rise and wipe out coastal cities? Massive migration, climate refugees, regional instability. It gets too hot for a good crop yield or rainfall patterns change and we get less fresh water? Food and water scarcity, death and starvation… the needs of people can’t be met.
Thr planet? It’ll likely be fine in a few million years. We won’t be.