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DOCTOROW_EVIL

                                                      Janurary 04, 2026
                                                      February 03, 2026
                                                      February 14, 2026

                                  ENSHITTIFICATION

Doctorow's model is that
corporate evil will always     Law, or similar constraint: Doctorow's
expand to fill the allowed     pantheon is law, competition, unions
envelop of law.                plus internal pressure from employees.

It's a good model-- it covers a       So Doctorow does have a role for what
lot of what we've been seeing.        I'd call "social pressure", but he
                                      confines it to that realm of
                                      employees-- a key example for him was
                                      when google employees objected (with
                                      limited success) to making their
                                      services worse for uses--
But I question the
inevitability of                         Google has intentionally made search
this: I think that                       worse, because if you need to do
"social pressure" is                     several searches and they get more
another constraint.                      ad impressions.

Social pressure is real.
It's not all just laws,
it's a sense of what's        (Modern jargon: "norms".  This
acceptable by your peers      is then a "norms erosion" theory.)
and by society at large.

My take is that what's going on
is a general deterioration of
ethics and morals, a decline of
expectations.  So when a company    Doctorow, I think, would insist that
starts getting evil is just seems   this is an illusion: when you think
normal and unremarkable.            you've identified a case where a
                                    company behaves ethically when *not*
The deterioration is at all         under duress, if you look closer you'll
levels-- the reason you             find it's operating under constraints
can't get an effective              you haven't noticed.
boycott going is that people
feel beaten down: yeah                  I have a feelint that Japanese consumer
everything sucks, but                   products are better than American and
everything always sucks,                that this is mainly due to a difference
everywhere, so what's the               in culture.  According to Doctorow, I
point?                                  must be wrong: there must be stronger
                                        consumer protection laws in Japan, that
   One reason we *don't*                I'm not aware of.
   have the laws to contrain
   the corporations is                                ANIMISTS
   a widespread feeling         
   it's *okay* for them to  
   be all powerful--                      
                            
      Which came first,     
      the decline in                    
      anti-trust or the     
      decline in ethics?    
             


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