Everyone now sees the rot economy—and we’re beginning to understand what’s behind it

Again, things I’ve been pointing out for over a decade—heck, even over two decades, if you consider early concerns I had over Yahoo!—are now mainstream thought.

Ed Zitron’s latest newsletter begins:

A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world—watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every corner of our digital lives. My core frustration isn’t just how shitty things have gotten, but how said shittiness has become so profitable for so many companies.

Ed talks about the terrible software and websites that we now live with:

product decisions are now driven, in many cases, by companies trying to make you do something rather than do something for you

and:

We live in a constant state of digital micro-aggressions, and as I wrote last year, it’s everywhere

And like me, Ed has to defend himself by saying he doesn’t hate tech, but he knows that it could be, and could have been, so much better.

Like me, he remembers the days of actual progress brought about by technology, not tech that attempts to milk users at every turn.

Head over to his newsletter, Where’s Your Ed at. I’m relieved that there are others who see what I’ve been seeing for a long, long time. I wonder if those who criticized me for it, gaslighting me by saying that no one else experienced what I so frequently observed, now accept the truth, or do they still love Big Brother? Or have they simply conveniently forgotten their subservience?
 
What’s the bigger picture here? Read ‘The plot against America’ by Mike Brock in Notes from the Circus. It might not be that hard to draw parallels between certain things happening in the US and 1930s Germany, but the forces have been at play for a long time, and those forces differ. Then tell me that a lot of the people dismantling democratic systems aren’t wedded to some form of this techno-determinism. Brock labels it epistemic authoritarianism. And when I say that technology is here to serve us, it runs completely counter to the beliefs of this movement.