This is what happens when you dont control the machine you purchase. Stallman have warned much of this, but it is often on deaf ears, because consumers' behaviour don't change.
It’s more that our major markets are totally dominated by the standard pattern and there are no meaningful alternatives outside of bike and mass transit, which are not meaningful alternatives to vehicle ownership.
This is the most important point IMHO. There is no rational argument that someone is voluntarily signing up to some consumer-hostile behaviour by choosing to make a purchase if (a) every supplier in the market is playing the same game and (b) it is difficult to function as a normal member of society without buying that type of product from someone. Smartphones are a textbook example of this. For many people so are cars and TVs. General purpose computing is in danger of going the same way. Don't get me started on so-called smart homes.
Call it a failure of the free market and competition to provide effective alternatives. Call it a lack of oversight and regulation from governments that increasingly back businesses and economic figures over protecting their own people. It doesn't really matter. Until there is clear law that says selling products to people that will actively act against the interests of the purchaser must at least be prominently disclosed before purchase and probably in the more serious cases simply be banned by law the enshittification will continue because it makes the decision-makers a lot of money.
If anything our regulatory system has been hijacked by capital sponsors to reinforce the fundamental monopolies that operate our economy, and the secondary consequence is that if we do not continue to do it at this point, our economy will implode. So the government is not only captured but also has only one meaningful choice: to further reinforce the monopolistic control of the western economies in the hopes of continued “economic growth.”
Obviously this should be seen as a disaster scenario (and highly likely outcome) for a capitalist society.
I agree that there is a lot of regulatory capture within Western governments and this is bad. I respectfully disagree that we can't fix it.
In particular I reject the notion that any organisation or system is too big to fail. If any commercial organisation or cartel is reaching a position or scale where its failure would represent a significant threat to the economic stability or indeed the democratic government of its host nation(s) then it is imperative that it should be quickly - and if necessary brutally - brought to a position where either it no longer poses such a threat or it is effectively destroyed and space is created for alternatives (possibly derived from the original) that will better serve the society they are part of.
