Memes

I'm probably going to publish a book on this topic at some point. Furniture as a craft stopped in 1940.

After 1940, anything new that came out came from industry, not from craft. You can still find actual craftsmen making furniture, hell the Stickley factory is still open. You can buy mission style furniture made of quarter sawn white oak to this day. And it's exactly like what you could buy 100 years ago, for about 100 times the price.

Meanwhile, there never has been a craftsmanship around modern furniture needs. Computer furniture has entirely been the realm of flat packed particle board, double wide mobile homes the nation over are having their built-in entertainment centers ripped out because a 75 inch flat panel doesn't fit anywhere in it. You can buy a dining room cabinet, or a bedroom armoire, but I haven't seen craft furniture made for home theater or video game enthusiasts.

Not that anyone young enough to like video games will ever be given the chance to have enough money to buy real furniture.

We really do need to start those lynch riots.

For me it’s more that I have to move all the time to keep the rent down and moving solid wood furniture is a nightmare.

Furniture used to be a thing you saved for and bought once, for life.

And if you were poor you got used furniture. Still much more expensive than Ikea furniture, but your "new" furniture would have scratches and dings from the previous owner. If you were really poor you got used furniture that had been damaged in a fire.

Now, you can get something that's built from cheap parts and doesn't last that long, but you can get it brand new.

There was only a few choices in the refrigerator space. People talked, compared notes, knew what brand ranked where in quality.

These days people talk even more, compare even more notes, there's pages and pages of information about the quality of things available on the Internet. The problem is that it's much less authentic.

In Ye Olde days, the people you talked to about a new fridge would be friends, cow-orkers, acquaintances from church, the guy in your bowling league, etc. These people didn't have any reason to lie to you, so you'd mostly get honest feedback. These days there's way more "information" available online about everything you might want to buy, including thousands of amateur reviews, and dozens of professional reviews. The problem is that the reviews are all from strangers, many of whom are probably shills for the company trying to sell something. The professional review sites frequently care much more about getting traffic than they do about factually reviewing things.

And then there's Google. In the ancient past it used to use a system called Page Rank (named after Larry Page, not webpages) that was, for a time, a foolproof way to get high quality results. But, for a long time Google fought a war against Search Engine Optimization operators who wanted their sites to rank highly despite being of dubious quality. Eventually Google realized that rather than fighting SEO, they could actually make more money by letting the SEO spammers win, because the SEO spammers just wanted to show ads, and Google had a monopoly on website ads, and a monopoly on search, so what were its users going to do -- switch to an alternative?

There's a very good summary of the enshittification of product reviews here:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

People used to have money to buy nice things and now we don't. That's the reason.