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He died shortly thereafter. The question he was being asked, right at that moment, was about the number of mass shootings in America.

-David Dayen
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-10-political-violence-reality-distortion-field-charlie-kirk/

There have been 47 episodes of mass violence on school campuses this year. The 47th took place at a Denver-area high school, 26 years after the Denver-area high school in Columbine, where three people were shot on Wednesday, two of them students. The 46th school shooting of the year had just one victim. Charlie Kirk, the conservative campus activist and podcaster, was shot in the neck during a question and answer session at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

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"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure." - Mark Twain

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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For Ed, these bosses (especially tech bosses) are the sociopaths who destroyed "the computer" (a stand-in for tech more generally). I don't disagree at all. The there is a direct, undeniable line from the ideas and conduct of tech bosses and the tech hellscape we live in today. A good read on this subject is Anil Dash's scorching post from yesterday, "How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs":

https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

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The Rot Economy describes the ideology of bosses, starting with monsters like GE's Jack Welch, who financialized companies, optimizing them for making short term cash gains for investors, at the expense of their workers, their customers, their products and services, and, ultimately, their long-term health.

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Ed's a smart and passionate guy, and this was definitely the quote to sum up the rage I felt as I wrote the book. Ed's got a whole theory of who "they" are and "what they did to the computer," which he calls "the Rot Economy":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/

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TThe epigram for my forthcoming book, *Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It* is a quote from Ed Zitron: "I hate them for what they've done to the computer" (Ed even recorded a little cameo of this for the audiobook):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

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#Enshittification