the Rot Economy — the growth-at-all-costs mindset that means that the only thing that matters is growth of revenue, which comes from showing as many ads to you as possible
The Slop Society
This is the cost of the Rot Economy — systems used by billions of people held up by flimsy cultures and brittle infrastructure maintained with the diligence of an absentee parent. This is the cost of arrogance, of rewarding managerial malpractice, of promoting speed over safety and profit over people.
CrowdStruck
What we’re seeing today isn’t just a major fuckup, but the first of what will be many systematic failures — some small, some potentially larger — that are the natural byproduct of the growth-at-all-costs ecosystem where any attempt to save money by outsourcing major systems is one that simply must be taken to please the shareholder.
CrowdStruck
A common refrain in every failure, from Marvel to Warner Brothers to Boeing, was this: “Leadership doesn’t know what they want,” and “leadership doesn’t trust the people who know what they’re doing to do their jobs.” It’s a deadly combination — people who try to use easy data to justify making decisions when they don’t know the first thing about a product, because they’re too busy numberfucking and datafucking to try to make number bigger, results in every one of these companies getting worse. It’s not that games are worse, it’s that leadership fucking sucks.
the biggest threat facing your team, whether you’re a game developer or a tech founder or a CEO, is not what you think | by Doc Burford | Medium
In this episode, Ed Zitron tracks the history of the growth-at-all-costs rot economy to a court case in 1916 that established the Shareholder Supremacy, and set the terms for General Electric’s Jack Welch to fundamentally break capitalism, an era where companies moved away from building lasting, sustainable companies that created things and instead began focusing on pleasing shareholders – and how it leads to today’s terrible tech companies and leaders.
The Shareholder Supremacy – Better Offline – Omny.fm
The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company — an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money —has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.
This is the Rot Economy, which is a useful description for how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful — and sometimes beloved — services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth. But it’s worth noting that this transformation isn’t constrained to the tech industry, nor was it a phenomena that occurred when the tech industry entered its current VC-fuelled, publicly-traded incarnation.
In The Shareholder Supremacy, I drew a line from an early 20th-century court ruling, to former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, to the current tech industry, but there’s one figure I didn’t pay as much attention to, and I regrettably now have to do so.
Famed Chicago School economist (and dweller of Hell) Milton Friedman once argued in his 1970 doctrine that those who didn’t focus on shareholder value were “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades,” and that any social responsibility — say, treating workers well, doing anything other than focus on shareholder value — is tantamount to an executive taxing his shareholders by “spending their money” on their own personal beliefs.
DEI and the Rot Economy
Of all the stupid and uninformed takes I’ve seen re: Crowdstrike, including a good helping of conspiracy theories, the absolute stupidest is blaming “DEI engineers.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if people who constantly blame DEI for anything that goes wrong are frequently the cause of things that go wrong.
Unironically narrow executive over-optimizing on short term gains and efficiency(which as you noted probably correlates with people who constantly blame DEI) is in fact frequently the cause of things that go wrong.
The AI Bubble and the Rot Economy
They’re no longer building products for people like you
and me. They’re building things, symbolic capital I call it, to show off to the market, and say, look we’ll grow forever, we’re so Innovative, and we’ll be Innovative forever. It’s very frustrating.
I call this the rot-com bubble, where for about 20 years they have found all of the hypergrowth markets.
…
These were all hypergrowth markets. These were ways of building billion, hundred billion, trillion dollar industries. We’re out. I think we’re actually tapped out of them.
What if this is all they’ve got?
The A.I. Bubble is Bursting with Ed Zitron – YouTube
The markets are disconnected from value.
The A.I. Bubble is Bursting with Ed Zitron – YouTube
Welchism
The prevailing power dynamic of our economic age, Welchism has at its heart the conviction that companies must prioritize profits for shareholders above all else, that executives are entitled to enormous wealth and minimal accountability, and that everyday employees deserve nothing more than their last paycheck. Welchism ascribes moral worth to material success, bestowing millionaire CEOs with the veneer of virtue, almost entirely irrespective of their actions. It thrives on downsizing, dealmaking, and financialization. And the Welchist worldview adopts a Darwinian attitude toward the labor market, a smug conviction that those who don’t make it are to blame for their own misfortune, that the poorest among us ultimately deserve their fate. The closest historical analog to Welchism is probably imperialism. The empires of yore had a comparable multinational reach to today’s biggest corporations, a similar willingness to confer absolute power upon their rulers, and the same tendency to exploit their subjects. Yet unlike imperialism, which has largely faded into history, Welchism still thrives today. Forty years after Welch took power, his warped worldview is still shaping our economy in ways large and small.
There is capitalism in America before Jack Welch, and after him. His career serves as a line of demarcation, a split between the past and the present. Look at the trend lines for any number of key economic indicators—wages, mergers and acquisitions, manufacturing jobs, union representation, executive compensation, corporate tax rates—and it’s clear that right around 1981, the year Welch took over, things started to go off the rails.
Further Reading
- Neoliberalism
- Conservatism
- Resentment
- Southern Strategy
- Lost Cause
- Segregationist Discourse
- Meritocracy Myth
- Moral Panic
- Lowering the Bar
- Minority Stress
- Racial Weathering
- Policing
- Toxic Masculinity
- Bodily Autonomy
- Biological Essentialism
- Stigma
- Shame
- Ableism
- Eugenics
- Administrative Burden
- R-Word
- Empire of Normality
- Autism Grievance Parent
- Power
- Privilege
- Precarity
- Oligarchy
- Sadopopulism
- Rot Economy
- Fantasy Economy
- Metric Fixation
- Objectivity
- Tech Ethics
- Ableism
- Neuronormativity
- Empire of Normality
- Pathology Paradigm
- Behaviorism
- Eugenics
- Deficit Ideology
- Sameness-Based Fairness
- ”Better get used to it.”
- Inspiration Exploitation
- School-Induced Anxiety
- Toxic Positivity
- Resilience
- Burnout
- The Road to Neuronormative Domination.
- Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
- We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
- 14 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
- Double Empathy Problem
- Double Empathy Extreme Problem
- Triple Empathy Problem
- Disability Double-bind
- Performative Neurodiversity (Neurodiversity Lite)
- Pathology Lite
- Empire of Normality
- Harm Reduction Theater
