No. Not really. They’re different things. Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe how previously good tech companies break their own platforms to maximize short-term profits. The AI bubble is just a regular investment bubble where people are throwing too much money at a product that can’t deliver on its own hype.
A good example of enshittification is why Google search sucks now. A while back they noticed that the number of search queries was hitting a plateau. It hit a plateau because Google controlled over 90% of the search market, there are a finite number of humans on Earth, and there’s a limit to how many things a person needs to google in a day. But Google is a publicly traded corporation and line needs to go up. So what Google did was to make their search engine worse at searching so that people would have to perform multiple searches to find what they’re looking for. More searches = more ads delivered. More ads delivered = line go up. Their flagship product doesn’t do the only thing it’s supposed to do now, but the shareholders got a bigger return on their investment that quarter.
The AI bubble is the tech industry promising a fantastic blowjob machine, and selling investors on the vision of a future of unlimited bespoke orgasms where you’ll never have to foot the bill for taking a woman on a date, or pay a prostitute, ever again. Everybody started throwing money at that because, duh, it’s a magic blowjob machine. But now that people are using it they’re finding out that, yeah, sometimes it sucks your dick, but a lot of the time it just punches you in the balls, or it hallucinates that the definition of “blowjob” is anal penetration with a leaf blower. And sometimes it randomly turns into a nine-legged spidergoat that vomits acid on your crotch, and nobody really knows why. Also, it seems to be burning through a crazy amount of energy and water just to punch me in the balls. So now people are getting less and less enthusiastic about throwing money at it. And when the market can no longer buy into the hype because of all the testicle punching, the big investors will dump their holdings while they can still do so at a profit, and the bubble will pop.
HubertManne@piefed.social 5 hours ago
it started way before ai although a lot of it is algorithm related along with data collection. Is that what you mean?