Brutkey

Cory Doctorow
@pluralistic@mamot.fr

Long thread/7

The answer is power: firms that enshittify must first overpower the forces that keep their enshittificatory impulses in check, like competition and regulation (these are two sides of the same coin: getting rid of competition paves the way for regulatory capture).

7/

Cory Doctorow
@pluralistic@mamot.fr

Over decades, Air Canada has merged with the majority of its competitors and has become so structurally important to Canada - a big, geographically dispersed country with many fly-in settlements - that regulators can't really threaten it with meaningful penalties, not without threatening Canada itself. They're too big to fail, thus too big too jail, thus too big to care.

8/

Cory Doctorow
@pluralistic@mamot.fr

That's how Air Canada was able to turn its customer service into such a joke that it just didn't matter, and so it didn't matter if it replaced those purely ornamental customer service reps with chatbots.

The rise and rise of overseas call-center outsourcing paved the way for AI replacement in the same way that Walmart paved the way for Amazon. Once Walmart destroyed your town center and vaporized all the businesses that served your community, why *wouldn't* you shop on Amazon?

9/