There’s a Walmart near me that I just never bother going to because like 80% of the non-grocery items are locked behind plexiglass. There are 4 self-checkouts and 2 employees assigned to just stand there watching people to make sure they don’t shoplift. They’ve made shopping so hostile that it barely makes sense for it to be a department store at all. Might as well just go back to the old model of telling the employee what you want and then they go get it for you.

The AI bubble will “burst” as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.

The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it’s not doing that fast enough and it’s beginning to look like it never will. We’ve been hearing that the AI bubble will “burst any day now” for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can’t be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we’ll see that suddenly the “invisible hand of the free market” will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that’s why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.

I’ve been wondering about something like this for years. Websites have been aggressively enshittifying for a long time now. Everything defends against accessing their content via any unapproved means. Getting a full resolution image from anywhere via image search becomes more difficult every day. If a search engine lands you on a site, the site deliberately withholds the content that brought you there and dangles the carrot to keep you using the site for as long as possible, always making sure you fall just short of what you’re after so you keep looking. Most links that you share directly from your URL bar are littered with telemetry data so that unless you first sanitize the link, sharing it on social media means that now the site is able to link your session to the account that shared the link and map your social connections on platforms they don’t even own.

I have a foreboding of a future internet where everything, even the structure of URLs themselves is obscured behind a layer that is opaque to the end user. People will be completely locked in to only using the site in an approved manner from an active account in “good standing” with the platform. You can use the site as normal as long as you’re logged in, but the URL itself would only ever be something like website.com/sU6ecjejfE32Jy7w94. You could share that link as normal and people could click it and be directed to the thing you want to share, but they can’t view the content without logging in, and even if they don’t log in, the mere fact that they clicked it still links the two of you together in the user map. Nothing ever escapes the sandbox and nobody is able to share content from the site unless they accessed it from approved means, and they can only share it to others who are also using approved means. The more websites adopt this model, the more user-mapping takes place until eventually anonymity on the internet is completely dead. Every single site knows exactly who everyone is and every social connection that they have. Everyone who refuses to submit to this new paradigm is blocked from accessing the site at all, yet they are still mapped all the same. Making a new website that’s this restrictive would probably mean that it never gets off the ground, but making that change on a platform where users are already dependent and tolerating increasing levels of enshittification just might work. If one major platform pulls it off, others will follow.