When television first started, there were 3 channels and a handful of commercials. After a few decades of more channels and more ads appearing, cable showed up. Now you could pay a subscription to get premium content without ads!
But after a decade, not only were they putting ads on cable you paid a premium to watch, they were speeding up both the shows and the ads to fit more into breaks that kept getting longer.
Younger people are just starting to see the cycle is underway again with streaming services, but over the last 10ish years, I've noticed all the various cliques going "why is {our interest} going to shit" as if it were an isolated incident and not happening everywhere.
The first act of capitalism when it was created was the slave trade. Corporations have always been vehicles the ultra rich use to extract wealth.
Revenue is how much money a company brings in selling things. Profit is how much of that remains after paying for materials, leases, power, reinvesting into the business, and paying wages. Basically, CEOs are paid 300x more than employees to defer maintenance and suppress wages.
Economics 101- charge as much as you can, pay as little as possible. Any corporation that makes billions in profit only does so by gouging customers and stiffing workers.
Real wages are stagnant, pensions aren't a thing, and they're trying to get rid of social security. There's a reason we're told to use things like HSA, 529s, and 401ks: it enriches the already rich.
There is something called a fiduciary duty to shareholders which basically means publicly traded corporations must act in the best interest of investors. It SOUNDS like a good idea, but it's not really well defined.
The reality of the situation is BlackRock basically owns the stock market and the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve is owned and controlled by a group of banks- not the US government. Those banks are publicly traded corporations that own chunks of everything and each other. It's a giant rich guy circle jerk that basically means the recent uniform RTO mandates were probably from Larry Fink himself due to how central commercial real estate is to collateral for things like naked shorting.
Inflation isn't things costing more; it's the dollar being worth less as more money exists. The reason the rich buy art, watches, and shit is because they benefit from inflation. If you hold on to $5,000 for a decade you have $5,000 that buys less after a decade of inflation. If you buy a painting, jewelry, or whatever, it appreciates overtime being worth more than $5k.
Federal minimum wage was 7.25 in 2008. Not much, but you could buy 1-3 shares of AMD or 18" of Subway. Today, M2 (a measure of money in the economy) is three times what it was in 2008 and minimum wage is still $7.25 and might get you 6" of sandwich. AMD, on the other hand, currently sits around $120 a share.
Someone that works to eat will always be falling behind while someone that's not struggling can just load up on wealth that keeps growing. A majority of the country doesn't have money on hand to deal with a $500 emergency while more than half the wealth of the country is owned by a handful of people that make lifetimes of wealth through passive investments alone.
Unfortunately, it's all very complicated and basically everyone is stupid most of the time with only brief windows of subject specific competence. Reason and rationality is a best case outcome but people act like it's the default.
Welcome to the meat grinder. None of us matter.
I don't have much to say about the points you're making here. I have a feeling after we sit down and discuss this over coffee/a beer we will find out that we're pretty much on the same page.
The only thing I want to point out though it that the term "enshitification" was coined for online platforms. It describes a business catering full hog to the needs of the users to create a following, then sell access to that following to other businesses, until both followers and b2b customers are locked in and get milked for every cent possible. From the user POV that's when the service enshitifies ~~DVD~~ and the b2b customers are between a rock and a hard place. Your cable example follows a similar mechanic but since it is not online it is technically not enshitification as dumped into the world as a term by Corey Doctorow.
That's just minor pedantry that you're naturally free to ignore as well. As I said before, I don't see us disagreeing on the overall point you're making. Very eloquently, I might add.
Edited typo
The enshittification cycle Doctorow discusses is specific to online companies and services, but does have a certain general form that is applicable more broadly. But it isnt just "service degrades over time due to the tendency of profit to diminish."
It's about platforms, aka markets, aka middlemen. An online service doesn't just exist to serve customers. Initially, the platform holder caters heavily to customers and to suppliers. Netflix offers a seemingly unlimited buffet of video for a low monthly fee, but also they seek out content creators to license their works and hire them to make new exclusive works. Epic Games store, same deal: free games for customers, huge exclusivity deals for publishers.
Enshittification happens when you get big enough to play the sides off each other. Publishers are captive to your platform for access to the audience, the audience is captive for access to your exclusive content. Older companies sold directly to stores or consumers, making it easier to just put the squeeze workers or customers.
By controlling the platform/market, you can extract wealth from every aspect of it: degrade customer experience, lock in and underpay producers and employees, and if you get big enough you can even start bossing around the government. Look at how much Amazon makes by forcing shippers and postal providers to cater to them.
That dynamic is somewhat novel. Markets are traditionally regulated, controlled, (and profited by) the government. David Graeber talks about the origins of markets under monarchs in order to centralize sales of goods to supply armies more readily. The modern capitalist understands that if you own the market, then you've won.
Unfortunately, what many don't realize is a win for capitalism is a loss for basically everyone else.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169
Tldr- the endlessly parroted "capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty" notion stems from a study that basically equated subsistence farming to poverty because despite meeting all their needs and desires it made zero money per day.
Basically, the entire notion that capitalism is swell is a lot like saying Africans were better off as slaves because they were previously unemployed and then given jobs. Which is basically the first argument capitalists tried to make while "extracting value" with the slave trade.