The world has moved on (Pluralistic, lapsarianism)

The world has moved on

Douglas Adams wrote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."

I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the Great Enshittening, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" -J. Hodgman)? I am, after all, old.

I've written before how conservatives' yearning for "simpler times" is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason times seemed simpler during your childhood is that you were a child, and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you could enjoy your childhood.

That's where the "National Customer Rage Survey" comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents' attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it's fair to say, customers are pissed. We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off.

So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.

The latest Customer Rage Survey inspired The Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. I spoke with Timmons this week. She's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now – and many of them cite my work on enshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn't a market problem, it's a political problem, and shopping isn't politics.

Later, Timmons forwarded one of those emails to me. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase: "The world has moved on."

[Dark Tower spoilers follow.]

In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land.

It wasn't always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. And then the world moved on. For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics has collapsed.

The Dark Tower series is a long Bildungsroman. Those character studies and the lore they surface create an overwhelming, many-layered sense of loss and worse, of despair. For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people's lives is the best day of the rest of their lives.

Over and over again, we are made to ask ourselves, why has the world moved on? Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to "the beams," vast ley-lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. "All things serve the beams," we're told. By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force, and so the world has moved on.

Because, as I've written many times, there were always enshittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt. But those enshittifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers' urge. They were held in check by competition, and regulation, and workers' sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced.

And the foundation – the Dark Tower upon which all the beams converged – was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade."

The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after all forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the "unitary executive" and Project 2025. These beam-breakers wanted kings, and they got them.

I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind. Robin asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies "conservative"? His answer: the foundation that all these views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural.

Hence Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism, "exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. "Taxes are for the little people."

The attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in their place. It's a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy, and every hereditary aristocracy requires hereditary serfs (that would be us).

The ideology of economism – which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society – cashes out to "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." That's why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, and the environmental protection agencies. As Trump told us on the debate stage in 2016, that kind of cheating "makes me smart."

That's why Elon Musk (almost) got to force every pension saver in America to bail out his money-incinerating AI business and his failed social media takeover. Musk's mistake was trying to get a bunch of billionaires to hold the bag, too. The one form of systemic violence our society will not tolerate is trillionaire-on-billionaire violence.

The world has moved on. 50 years of neoliberal rule has weakened and snapped the beams – the rule of law, consumer and labor rights, civil rights – that radiated from our Dark Tower: antitrust law. They wanted "bossism." Or, as rendered in the original Afrikaans, "baasskap," which means "the social, political and economic domination of South Africa by its minority white population." Not for nothing, baasskap is the foundation of Muskism.

In "The Utopia of Rules," the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection, no one had enough money to get by. Thanks to elite impunity, we were ruled by monsters who committed crimes in the open. Thanks to unchecked greed, we paid everything for healthcare, only to be denied treatment. Thanks to the dismantling of the welfare state, more and more of us had to wait in long lines to fill out absurdly long forms in triplicate.

Graeber pointed out that the rise of the web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. The form-giver can perform very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us.

AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now require ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka-as-a-service.

What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue or get shunted to a customer service bot.

This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number. This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers. This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge – the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working.

The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.

So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Shopping is not politics.

What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, talk to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org; in the UK, United Tech and Allied Workers. Get involved in party politics. Get involved in local politics.

Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Cory Doctorow, pluralistic.net.