I find the Rot Economy hypothesis entirely compelling, but also, *incomplete*. Ed's explaining why we should hate the players *and* why we should hate the game, but the enshittification thesis goes even further and explains why we need to hate the *umpires* - the policymakers, enforcers, economists and legal theorists who created the enshittogenic environment in which the Rot Economy took hold.

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Some early reviews of *Enshittification* have expressed dissatisfaction with book's "solutions" section, complaining that all the solutions are *policy* oriented, and there's nothing suggested for us to do in our capacity as individual consumers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

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Those criticisms are correct: there *is* nothing we can do as individual consumers. Agonizing about your consumption choices will not fight enshittification any more than conscientiously sorting your recycling will end the climate emergency. Enshittification isn't caused by "lazy consumers" who choose "convenience" or are "too cheap to pay for online services":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/#or-give-me-death

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The wellspring of enshittification isn't poor consumption choices, it's poor *policy* choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn't their personal moral failings, it's the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

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And here's the kicker: we know where those policy choices came from! The people who made these policy choices did so in living memory. They were warned at the time about the foreseeable consequences of their choices. They made those choices anyway. They faced *zero* consequences for doing so, even after every one of the prophesied horrors came to pass.

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Not only were they spared consequences for their actions, but they *prospered* as a result - they are revered as statesmen, lawyers, scholars and titans of economics.

As Trashfuture showrunner Riley Quinn often says, the curse of being a leftist is that you have object permanence - you actually remember the stuff that happened and how it happened. You don't live in an eternal now that has no causal relationship to the past.

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It's not enough to hate the player, nor the game - we've got to remember the crooked umps who rigged the match. We have to say their names, because that's how we root out their terrible ideas and ensure that our policy interventions make real change. If Elon Musk OD'ed on ketamine tomorrow, there'd be ten Big Balls who'd tear each others' throats out in the ensuing succession fight, and the next guy would be just as stupid, racist, and authoritarian.

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Musk, Cook, Zuck, Pichai, Nadella, Larry Ellison - they're just filling the monster-shaped holes that policy-makers installed in our society.

Start with Robert Bork, the jurist who championed the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust, which promotes monopolies as efficient and counsels policymakers not to punish companies that take over markets, because the only way to *really* dominate a market is to be so good that everyone chooses your products and services.

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Wouldn't it be perverse to use public funds to shut down the public's favorite companies? Bork was a virulent racist, a Nixonite criminal, and he was dead wrong about the law *and* the economics of monopoly:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Bork's legacy of pro-monopoly advocacy is, unsurprisingly, *monopolies*. Monopolies that make everything pricier and worse: from athletic shoes to microchips, glass bottles to pharmaceuticals, pro wrestling to eyeglasses:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

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These monopolies did not arise because of the iron laws of economics. They are not the product of the great forces of history. They are the direct and undeniable consequence of Robert Bork convincing the world's governments to embrace his bullshit, pro-monopoly policies.

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Satan took Bork to hell in 2012, but you know who's still with us? Bruce Lehman. Bruce Lehman was Bill Clinton's copyright czar, the man who, in his own words, "did an end-run around Congress" by getting an UN treaty passed that obliged its signatories to ban reverse engineering:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16145640-ctrl-ctrl-ctrl

Lehman's used the treaty to get Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and section 1201 of the DMCA made it a felony to break DRM.

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Bruce Lehman is why farmers can't fix their own tractors, hospitals can't fix their own ventilators, and your mechanic can't fix your car. It's why, when the manufacturer of your artificial eyes bricks a computer that is permanently wired to your nervous system, no one else can revive it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/12/unsafe-at-any-speed/

Bruce Lehman is why you can use the apps of your choosing on your phone or games console. He's why we can't preserve beloved old video games.

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