Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

Yep, as another Xennial, I can relate to a lot of this. Enshittification has been going on for a long time. Although consumerism, materialism and enshittification certainly skyrocketed from the 1980s onwards. Loneliness, isolation, depression, lack of community... all makes more money for the wealthy and corporations - happy people don't need to buy useless crap to fill the void. Which is in part why we saw the largest wealth transfer in human history during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

I would disagree that it's anything to do with left vs right politics though. I'm old enough to remember when being left meant being ant-consumerism and fuck the man (those hippy origins). Nowadays people in politics and the wealthy don't care about left, right, centrist. They ALL do whatever wins them votes and makes them the most amount of money. Otherwise we wouldn't have greenwashing, pinkwashing, rainbow-washing, etc., nor left politicians protecting corporate interests. There's more money for politicians and The Man by pushing the whole left or right ideologies division. This can be seen by social media platforms encouraging outrage and conflict but it happens online and offline.

I'm not really angry (I definitely tend more towards the peace loving hippy spectrum of Xennials) but I definitely feel frustrated and saddened that people don't realise how much power they have to end this bullshit. All of these problems only work if the populous is compliant with it and complicit in it. If we as a collective stopped buying, if we choose to opt-out, it would be relegated to history. (Granted I understand it's not that easy but even small steps such as being a conscientious consumer and just consuming less is a big step in the right direction as is looking for community engagement instead of thinking that social media fills that void).