Greenlash And The Enshittification Of America – CleanTechnica

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As America careens toward a tumultuous new era where political stunts override all sane government initiatives, the word “enshittification” created by Cory Doctorow in 2022 is becoming a more than apt description of the changes the country is facing. According to Wikipedia, enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers alike to maximize profits for shareholders. The term was chosen as the word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023 and by the Macquarie Dictionary in 2024.

In describing the phenomenon, Doctorow wrote, “Here is how platforms die: first they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a ‘two-sided market’, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holds each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”

In a 2024 op-ed in the Financial Times, Doctorow argued that “‘enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything,” with “enshittificatory” platforms leaving humanity in an “enshittocene.” By extension, one could argue that it has now come for the ideals upon which the United States was founded, for what is government but a platform for managing the affairs of a nation and mediating the competing interested of its citizens?

Enshittification Is The New Normal

Heather Cox Richardson has written extensively on this topic. In November 2024, she described the intellectual roots of the American Experiment and how those concepts have changed over time. “Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a ‘him’ in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences. The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or ‘liberty,’ including the right to consent to the government under which they lived.”

She wrote that FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower emphasized the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth. Those mid-twentieth century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights.

Movement Conservatives

Meanwhile, a small faction of so-called “Movement Conservatives” became determined to undermine the liberal consensus. Big business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans. In their view, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great. They argued that such a government was only a small step away from communism.

They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars to pay for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished in his place of business, in society, and in his home. The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers — usually white and male — to undeserving marginalized Americans.

For “Momentum Conservatives,” the demonization of non-whites, foreigners, and women has worked spectacularly well. According to Time Magazine, in 2020, a total of $50 trillion had been transferred upward from American workers to the wealthy. Since then, the trend has only accelerated. If people are feeling poorer today, it is because they are. And yet, American voters have now contributed to the enshittification of the nation by choosing a leader who will turbocharge the movement of wealth upward and leave them with less of a social safety net — including access to medical care — than they had before. The US government used to be a platform designed to meditate between various interest groups in society, but today, one of those groups — the super wealthy — has captured the platform and made it their own with unfortunate results for the rest of us.

The Greenlash Has Begun

Lloyd Alter this week reported on what Financial Times columnist Pilita Clark calls a “greenlash” that is occurring in many parts of the world and spurred by the extremist policies that put Donald Trump in the White House once again. The greenlash is the result of a monumental lie fobbed off on the public that claims net zero climate policies are a “costly elitist plot against working people.” It is part and parcel of the enshittification of America, as the attorneys general of Republican-led states file lawsuit after lawsuit against those who dare to make climate action or ESG considerations part of their business decisions. Those who advocate for taking steps to address the coming climate emergency are characterized as malevolent actors who are creating illegal organizations and racketeers, trying to deprive honest business leaders of their God-given right to increase their wealth further.

As a result of such pressures, financial institutions are fleeing organizations such as the Net Zero Banking Alliance created by Mark Carney and others after COP26 in Glasgow turned out to be such a stunning failure. According to the Globe and Mail, the departures from NZBA are the result of “opposition to environmental, social and governance measures” and this “is expected to grow with Donald Trump’s return to the White House.” It referred specifically to comments by House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan last June who said his committee had “evidence of a ‘climate cartel’ consisting of left wing activists and major financial institutions that collude to impose radical environmental, social, and governance goals on American companies.” It said it would investigate to see if current antitrust penalties were enough of a deterrent to such “collusion.”

Alter points out that the Harvard Business Review wrote recently, “In the past 18 months, many companies have initiated a sobering retreat from their prior commitments to sustainability, related to both the environment and people. Canada’s six largest oil sands companies wiped their websites clean of their decarbonization goals. The month before, as part of a company-wide expense reduction, Nike laid off dozens of sustainability managers.”

“Greenlash is happening all over the world,” Alter said. “Everything we have fought for and promoted for years, from heat pumps to bike lanes, is now ‘a costly elitist plot against working people.’ And I have to walk into class next week with a positive attitude and say to my students, ‘Here’s what we have to do to roll back climate change and live sustainable lives.’ I don’t know if I can pull it off.” Meanwhile, 3000 Oklahoma citizens descended on their state house last week to advocate for laws banning renewable energy.

The Hegemony Of The Wealthy

Enshittification is everywhere you look. The collapse of liberal society and the hegemony of wealthy overlords is nearly complete. Los Angeles is burning but people in Oklahoma want to ban any actions designed to address the results of an overheating planet. Better to bury their heads in the sand than identify the problem and craft reasonable measures to mitigate its worst effects. Alter takes solace in the words of Bill McKibben, who urges us to associate with other like minded individuals because there is strength in numbers. I prefer the advice of Elie Wiesel, the famed chronicler of the damage inflicted on Europe by the Nazis. “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but we must never fail to protest.”

On August 3, 1914, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” It seems that America is at a similar juncture now in January 2025. How is it possible that just when renewable energy and carbon reduction technologies are beginning to make measurable progress, the world has gone mad for more carbon emissions and pollution? The answer is — profits. Profits are more important that religion, patriotism, or a survivable planet. We will not be able to address the degradation of the environment in any meaningful way so long as profits remain the be all and end of all of human existence.

That may seem like an impossible task, but if we fail to take up the challenge, the human species will exist no more and there will be no one left to mourn our passing. The lamps will have all gone out and our tombstone will bear a short but poignant epitaph, “They preferred enshittification to living.”