Making ‘Careless People’ Care ⇥ pluralistic.net
The important thing about Facebook’s carelessness is that it wasn’t the result of the many grave personality defects in Facebook’s top executives – it was the result of policy choices. Government decisions not to enforce antitrust law, to allow privacy law to wither on the vine, to expand IP law to give Facebook a weapon to shut down interoperable rivals – these all created the enshittogenic environment that allowed the careless people who run Facebook to stop caring.
The corollary: if we change the policy environment, we can make these careless people – and their successors, who run other businesses we rely upon – care. They may never care about us, but we can make them care about what we might do to them if they give in to their carelessness.
This is a prudent conclusion to draw from “Careless People”. It is tempting to wonder if things would be much different with others in charge, but what Meta represents today is not an individualized problem.