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UpInArms

(53,136 posts)
Sat Jul 19, 2025, 08:40 AM Saturday

The Enshittification of American Power

FOR DECADES, ALLIES of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US.

And right about now, they’re probably wishing they hadn’t.

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.

People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.

More worth reading and understanding at:

https://archive.ph/NVwaS

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The Enshittification of American Power (Original Post) UpInArms Saturday OP
This stuff is a lot easier to shift than that article implies WSHazel Saturday #1
Thank you UpInArms Saturday #2

WSHazel

(532 posts)
1. This stuff is a lot easier to shift than that article implies
Sat Jul 19, 2025, 10:07 AM
Saturday

Every business that goes into decline overestimates its customers' switching costs right before it starts its decline.

Customers of Facebook have virtually no switching costs. That company could become MySpace as easily as it made MySpace into MySpace. Microsoft has serious network effects, but Apple and Google's are much less. It is worth noting that IBM dominated technology for about 20 years in a way that none of Microsoft, Google and Apply have been able to do. Things change.

It is a lot easier to switch from the dollar than that article says. To be honest, the world doesn't really need a reserve currency anymore in the electronic age when financial transactions can occur in an instant. All Trump has done is pushed the world towards operationalizing this future reality.

There is a tendency among all people, including political and economic writers, to view the world through their own biases. That view will miss a lot of outcomes. It is naive to think that much of the rest of the world has not been preparing for an American dictatorship or decline given the two terrible Republican Presidents of this century. I think we will find that the rest of the world is more capable of moving away from the U.S. then writers like the one of that article think.

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