I was thinking about this post for a long time now, and the last post from Ed Zitron titled The era of the business idiot motivated me to write it down. Actually I was surprised how much I agree with him on this topic, because we talk a lot about the enshitification of the internet, products, films, music and basically everything surrounding us. And I was thinking, why? Is this capitalism? Or maybe people are different now? One thing that came to my mind was actually mix of many theories, and I called it Cargo cult society.
I'm a software engineer, and I've been in this industry for over 10 years now, I think any engineer that didn't start their career from "vibe coding" (I really hate you and love you Andrej Karpathy) knows Uncle Bob, in one of his books he described many of software engineering antipatterns, one of them was Cargo cult, and he also borrowed the term from a story about an isolated tribe that, fascinated by how many goods were exchanged at the airport, decided to build buildings of reeds and wood that resembled air terminals and air traffic control towers, because they thought that by doing so they would attract some kind of deity who would provide them with the same prosperity. Of course, the tribe didn't understand the intricacies of international trade, let alone the basics of aerodynamics or airplane construction, so by simple observation they thought it would be enough to replicate the look to get the same as the rest.
And to be honest, I think this explains a lot of our current problems - people are lazy, we knew it for a long time, but only nowadays we see the real consequences. Many of them saw for example a well prospering leader in some company, and they probably thought - he makes a lot of money, leads an interesting life, has a company/manages people and has built himself some kind of career. But through lack of imagination/willingness/skill (not sure which one, maybe any of these, or combination), they started to imitate what was the result and not the goal in itself. Imagine a specialist who really knows his stuff, builds a good product and starts a company. He's bound to be busy, he'll be at a lot of meetings, mentor people, visit factories, travel, etc. I have the impression that people have begun to think that it is enough to emulate this to be a good manager, they don't care about what is underneath, for example, how many years this person spent learning, how much energy and effort it cost him to become a specialist in his field which resulted in where he is now. People started to follow very shallowly the results themselves, they started to pretend that they were busy, that they cared about their teams, that they were interested in what their company was doing just to make an impression, instead of actually taking an interest in the field and exploring its intricacies.
What is perhaps even more sad, and shows the pettiness of the entire system, other people, CEOs, investors, began to believe in such a state of affairs, that it is enough to present themselves well and the rest will somehow resolve itself. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way; people who started behaving in this way understood that through simple imitation they could climb upwards indefinitely, earning more and more while doing less and less. Unfortunately, this state of affairs has led us to where we are now - devaluation of education, underappreciation of specialization, pettiness, shallowness, the pursuit of ever larger sums of money without delivering value - because if it is enough to keep up appearances, then results do not matter.
And I think the icing on the cake here is today's situation with AI, where people are constantly being scared by the idea of being replaced by artificial intelligence. I really don't understand how stupid one must be to lay off people because of AI, or to justify it in this way. Anyone who works for a company that justifies layoffs in this way should consider changing jobs. Dear friends, we have forgotten the purpose of economics and the "free market." It was created in the hope that companies would compete with each other to provide people with the best possible services, but unfortunately, we have forgotten again and focused on the results, started pleasing shareholders and CEOs at all costs, instead of focusing on delivering valuable products. Today's market is rotten at its core. Some time ago, I was thinking about an analogy I could use for the current state of the market, and it is a garden. I am a gardener and I understand very well that plants need to be taken care of, fertilized, and provided with the right living conditions. But a garden is not just about planting plants in the right places, giving them fertilizer, and watching them grow beautifully. If the garden is not tended to, it will quickly become overgrown with weeds that will smother our beautiful flowers and lead to their death. If this is not done for a really long time, trees will grow, which will again smother everything and a forest will emerge. In my opinion, the market should be a garden, and the government should be the gardener. And I mean a government that takes care of the interests of citizens, not the interests of corporations. Unfortunately, a garden is not only a beautiful place, it also teaches ruthlessness. You cannot be merciful to weeds or parasites that will destroy your plants. If I were to make direct comparisons here, the trees would be the expanding corporations that will kill everything beneath them, and the weeds would be the companies and people who base their businesses on very basic and primitive instincts, such as Mark Zuckerberg, who is a person without any moral backbone and who will do anything to increase profits, regardless of what emotions he will have to exploit or to whom he will have to sell reach.
This is how democracy dies in the age of the internet, destroyed by people without a sense of morality, shallow imitators whose only goal is profit at any cost. Emmanuel Kant and Erich Fromm are turning in their graves seeing the direction our civilization is heading.
I would like to remind you here that freedom, democracy, and morality are not given to us forever. We must take care of them and fight for them, because for evil to triumph, it is enough for good people to do nothing.
Ah, I would also like to point out and clearly emphasize here that I am not a socialist at all, as many people will probably accuse me of being after reading this article. I am a person who advocates for common sense and a combination of both systems. The free market is a wonderful invention, but it cannot be left unsupervised. Even Adam Smith (the father of capitalism) was not so naive as to believe that the free market would live its own life. Because what is good for General Motors is not necessarily good for the United States.
If I were to inspire you and recommend something, I really like the book "Small Is Beautiful" by E. F. Schumacher, an economist who proposed an alternative path for us and predicted the effects of continuous growth and the blind pursuit of money. I recommend it to anyone who thinks that even fragments of this article make sense.
Unfortunately, I don't have any simple solution to this problem at the end. I think the solution lies in the hands of each of us, we should above all look deeper and think. Einstein once said that everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. But to understand this and be able to apply it in practice, we need a lot of patience and work, unfortunately today's society is focused on quick results, preferably without effort and without sense. I wish everyone to have enough determination and strength to overcome this state of affairs, because it will often require you to make sacrifices in the form of giving up quick and easy results.