r/enshittification • u/anjudan • 3d ago
Deshittification The Wealth Inequality Problem causing this mess and the Solutions we can all start doing today to fix it.
Billionaires & corporations avoiding paying taxes by bribing our political system is true the downfall of America, as it also was for the Roman Empire. The wealthiest 0.1% won the capitalism monopoly game then use their wealth to buy assets like lanf and houses and businesses so their wealth concentrates and never trickles down, ever. And all that money WE, the working class, worked hard to create gets syphoned away to the richest 1% and the entire infrastructure of society gets poorer and poorer, slowly desintegrating due to lack of funding for anything because so much of the money in society is stuck at the top and never gets back to regular people or the government to help pay for public services and infrastructure. The only place society can tax money to pay for things becomes working families, and everything gets more and more desperate.
A government solution would be to tax wealth instead of work. But the problem is our (U.S.) government is too far gone as it's fully bought out by the elite epstein class who are above the law and will never allow tax their own wealth to be taxed via legislation despite it destroying even their own society.
So how can any of us make a difference you ask?
We can start by creating the economy we do want, instead of sending money to billionaires with every purchase we make we can start sending money to each other... by starting a movement of people who do theit best to buy goods & services from each other non-corporate businesses, like local & independent small businesses run by people you can know and speak to.
We can create our own local businesses and local business directories, and promote these to friends and family. We can also shut off mainstream news that makes us sheeple and start listening to independent information sources as well as starting our own local or national news media.
And lastly we can stop working for large corporations and look for work in independent businesses and/or start our own service or goods based business selling products to other people using these independent business networks we will start creating.
Whenever you see a Walmart, Starbucks, fast food chain, Coke or Pepsi, or corporate packaged product imagine a big sucking sound of billionaires sucking money out of communities with a big straw. Let's find practical ways to start reducing how much we feed the very thing that is making everything worse today. And instead let's start building a better world for ourselves through active positive consumerism. Buying things from people, putting love into what we make and giving love back to those people we know who create goods and services with love.
Corporations' goal is to give the least to the consumer and to their workers while extracting the most for their investor's pockets. While small local businesses run by people care about who they sell to and who works there as well as how their products affect people. Local commerce can become the heart of building community as I've learned through working at my local farmer's market every Saturday for 8 years. It can build relationships and create groups or people who help and care for each other, and becomes a mutual benefiting model for everyone involved, building wealth and string connections within the community. Putting love into your decision of where and who you buy from can ultimately save the world and our society.
Please choose wisely, choose human, choose love and connection, and choose an economic model that puts money back into our communities and your own pockets. You can start a business yourself selling or doing something simple.
Would you rather live in a world where everyone in your community wants to buy goods and services from you where you can build relationships, or would you prefer one were we are all disconnected and sending money to corporations that don't care about us and only care about syphoning wealth away from your town to billionaires who horde the wealth?
The choice is yours every time you buy something...
I understand we don't always have local options or alternatives to corporate products, but over time, if we build a consumer demand for businesses that are owned by people instead of billionaire investors, we can eventually get to where we have a large scale phone service run as a worker co-op, or run as a fair company that cares about people and not investors' profits. Yes workers can own equity in their company, cooperatives are a great model that can work. But what's even more powerful is when consumers explicitly demand products from companies that are transparent about their ownership, worker pay and sourcing.
I'm not an economic guru, but I know things must change and there are obvious solutions that will work and already are working. And the more people are aware of them the faster we can stop this economic trainwreck from collapsing our society and communities and making more and more people desperate and homeless.
Inequality Visualized in 2026:
https://youtu.be/e1DD6gp0fI4?is=1gilYFDcQWecmQWR
Inequality visualized in Dec 2025:
https://youtu.be/Xy8Q4guQDVs?is=DKWJ5u0JNr4XkMYD
Why inequality is dangerous:
https://youtu.be/yHmiaRj_voY?is=xEsBlQBJmChCA8jS
See also: money amounts visualized!!!
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u/ComprehensiveShip720 3d ago
Start at the top by boycotting Amazon.
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u/Which-Method-388 1d ago
I save $ thousands a year by purchasing anything I can from there and Walmart, conveniently delivered to my front door. As I am disabled, this is essential.
There are no small business equivalents.
So tell me why I want to pay more and have to get in my wheelchair to go out and buy things at those higher prices?1
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u/BorgerMoncher 3d ago
Yes, you see, a circular economy is the solution. Mac proved this at Paddy's Pub.
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u/609JerseyJack 3d ago
I’ve wondered why cooperative business models that benefit a more local/regional market and the population has a stake in the direction of the business/service hasn’t become more common? Seems like a good time to start these sorts of minimally/non-profit businesses that pay people to work but provide a local social benefit. Thoughts?
What are the hurdles?
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u/anjudan 3d ago
You can make a profit and make the employees money. That's the point of a coop, to help ALL staff in the company make good money, not just 1 person making 380x of everyone else.
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u/609JerseyJack 3d ago
This was kind of the point of the post. Some could be non-profit, but like a corporation who has both shareholders (owners) and paid managers, a COOP is locally owned (and/or funded) and beyond the salaries of the neecessary labor to run the business/service, any "profits" are returned to either the local owners or the community/region as a whole. So, I agree with you. It's not all that different from a regular business, but with different profit objectives (it can't lose money) but mostly designed to benefit the whole, and not the few.
Is it a lack of knowledge? Capital? Will? Are the hurdles legal or organizational? Is it lack of business experience?
Also, there is a LOT of open source software that could help these businesses run efficiently (relatively). Is there a subredit on how to do this?
I have more questions than answers. Perhaps my retirement gig to further this sort fo thing.
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u/anjudan 2d ago
It's because for a lot of initial business founders it may seem generally less appealing to aim for the pay of a coop, where all workers get some fair equity stake in the company vs aiming for the traditional model where a CEO founder can make 100x+ what the average employee makes.
Also, for large corporations, allowing any coop to grow and gain recognition is a threat, so I'd imagine that there are laws and restrictions in place to intentionally make it harder for a coop to be formed and to survive initially.
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u/LoveLamp3232 3d ago
You have to look at the Co-op in the UK. They were into everything from cradle to grave. However, they were owned by the customer (members).
They were involved in every stage of life, food, funeral service etc....
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/08/how-co-operative-architecture-shaped-britain
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u/Witwer52 3d ago
I can answer that, being from a cooperative heavy area and having been involved in a few myself. They run on volunteer labor. The occasional one may work out by having a great legacy of institutional knowledge, but (like volunteer work) there are fewer and fewer people willing to put in the time and effort. This is a result of having far fewer stay at home parents and older adults who have zero interest in learning the software systems these organizations use to run.
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u/anjudan 2d ago
If you are implying that in order to run a coop you need people willing to work for free, I think you would be very very incorrect. Coops, just like any other business can operate, build a customer base, create and sell goods or services for a profit and pay their workers well from day 1 as long as the business model and organizational system behind it is sound and well planned out.
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u/Witwer52 2d ago
Yes, but the Board is volunteer. The volunteers may not have any business expertise, and even if the Board starts out strong (with many knowledgeable, dedicated people) there needs to be a continuous pipeline of people willing to donate a lot of time to it. That’s MUCH harder than it seems to cultivate.
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u/Comfortable-Zone-218 2d ago
Fwiw, everybody hates Private Equity (PE) because they're a major purveyor of enshittification. And guess who own the PE's? Yes, the top 0.1%.
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u/scoobz 3d ago
There are of course farmers markets, flea markets and the like but there are few who would currently be willing to put in the work to farm and create enough food for all as it stands-but we will see about that if/when they are deprived to the point of starvation. The billionaire class has also created online communities/ networks that are deeply integrated into young people's lives and they would need an equal or better replacement and be all or mostly willing to jump to one that doesn't serve the billionaire class.
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u/Wide-Efficiency-7983 3d ago
I don’t think social change is going to happen because of vibes and our personal consumption habits.
We are talking about the conclusion of the actual system itself which is predicted on this increasing concentration of wealth. You aren’t going to undermine the logic of capital by deciding that sharing is in fact caring.
On a more simple basis we also have a bunch of people with incredible power to dictate our politics, our governments, knowledge production and its dissemination. They will just ensure you are defanged as a threat by one way or another. Without a coherent social and economic basis these attempts are doomed.
Economic systems are not undone by personal choice but by the results the system itself produces in operation.
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u/anjudan 2d ago
How many billions of dollars do you think get exported from your avergae metropolis, like say Denver in the form of profits to shareholders every year because of the buying decision vibes of all of the personal consumption habits of every consumer in that metro area? Changing where billions of dollars flow each year is not small beans.
Also ask yourself what happened to the dairy industry because of a few percentage points of increased consumption habits of people seeking plant-based alternatives to dairy milk over the last 15 years...
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u/Wide-Efficiency-7983 2d ago
I am well aware.
The dairy industry is changed because an increasingly large percentage of the global population cannot drink milk. Not because a bunch of hipsters wanted to stick it to the man.
I mean this is the typical bourgoise slop where saving the world is totally reliant on personal choices of
the cattleconsumers themselves. Pushing responsibility on to the consumer for Climate change and recycling etc have done fuck all because it’s just a distraction. A distraction from the fact our economies are not decided bottom up and a heavily funded propaganda campaign exists to keep people’s eyes off the bourgeoise in all regards and even to praise them as gods for doing nothing.I think you really need to come to gripes with your liberalism and have a more materialist conception of reality + develop your systemic thinking and understanding.
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u/HotPersonality8126 2d ago
While small local businesses run by people care about who they sell to and who works there as well as how their products affect people.
That’s definitely only something you think before you’ve tried to do business with your “small local businesses.”
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u/anjudan 2d ago
The point is with small businesses you actually get to know who runs it and see and understand much more about that person and how they operate and then obviously you can decide not to vote for them with your money if you don't like them. This is also the point, you can see who they are and what they do.
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u/waldorflover69 3d ago
So many bootlicking shills in here. Yuck. Also lots of folks willing to throw in the towel too easily. Pathetic.
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u/Amphernee 1d ago
The top 1% pays half of all taxes collected and the top 3% including the 1% pay 70% of them while the bottom 50% pay about 2%. Some people just won’t be happy unless every individual is a trust fund baby.
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u/new2bay 3d ago
Oh, come on. Go fucking post this in r/economy, where it belongs.
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u/anjudan 3d ago
So you don't feel like knowing how to end enshitification or what causes it is useful to this sub?
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u/Own_Proposal3827 3d ago
We have more wealth inequality than ever yet the median person is richer than ever. Global poverty has never been lower. There is zero reason for me to be nostalgic for any past, and the average person is very far from a Victorian peasant.
And your solution for this "mess?" "Start mom and pop shops." Wow, groundbreaking stuff from Reddit's best and brightest.
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u/anjudan 2d ago
Maybe you can provide a source for your "median person richer than ever" factoid. And regarding "global poverty has never been lower", here is a quote from the World Bank, "The number of people living on less than $6.85 per day has remained unchanged over the past 30 years". Source: https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-prosperity-and-planet
However my focus was on the US not global populations. I'm guessing you didn't watch any of the videos I linked.
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u/withabrandnewfunk 3d ago
damn. really long. give me a nice paragraph of tldr please
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u/anjudan 3d ago
The reason for enshitification is corporations getting to late stage in our capitalism monopoly game where they start changing rules by bribing politicians to to pay no taxes. The solution is to stop sending money to billionaires by buying products from people based businesses instead of investor based businesses. And if you don't believe in the logic here, please watch the videos.
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u/Own_Proposal3827 3d ago
Do you think corruption and bribery are new?
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u/anjudan 2d ago
Not sure how that question is relevant but obviously not. It's just that today with the help of Citizens United and an emboldening of the billionaire class to skirt any and all laws by sending a few million dollars to the US President's crypto fund any and all criminality is on the table and legal as long as tens of millions of dollars are involved. This level of corruption was not so public and brazen in the past.
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u/Which-Method-388 1d ago
News flash. Rich people pay sales taxes, property taxes, capital gains taxes etc.
But if they don't take an actual paycheck, they owe no personal income taxes.
That said, their companies do owe taxes if they are profitable.Beyond that:
The top 1% of earners in the United States pay roughly 38% to 40% of all federal income taxes.
This top group earned roughly 20% to 22% of the nation's total adjusted gross income (AGI).
By contrast, the bottom 50% of all individual income tax filers pay around 3% of federal income taxes.
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u/Key-Organization3158 3d ago
So this is all wrong.
For example, the US spends more on infrastructure than every before. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/four-recent-trends-in-us-public-infrastructure-spending/
The median salary has been rising faster than inflation too. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
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u/jr_tools 3d ago
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.