I can see 35% of the workforce at a company with a mature product like Twitch doing nothing, or working on random extra features that no longer make sense when interest rates go up. Idk if you'd call it fundamentally wrong, it made sense at a different time.
Its modern jargon that refers to multinational, corporate focused, globalized markets. Its gone through a few definitions over the last century, but most recently its been used by the anti-work movement to deride a culture that has all but abandoned individual people in favor of the ultra wealthy. A culture where greed and money are the only virtues and all choices are driven by the bottom line.
You'd have to be brainwashed to think the world would be better without the industrial revolution. That's Unabomber territory. Ignorance alone wouldn't suffice... would it?
Would the world be better if there were incentives to promote skilled crafts instead of racing to the bottom to produce cheap shit at scale?
I'm not saying to go back to the stone ages, but ultimately there have been movements to buy local and preserve traditional ways of crafting that are push back against industrialization.
While yes, so called "anti-work"[0] movement (or if you're from the early 2000s, the occupy wall street movement would be of similar philosphical values, for example) uses this term rather often, it derives from the work of the Ernest Mandel[1][2] based on his work in which he used the term to describe the latter stages of capitalism post WWII as he saw it, and how it inevitably would end up in deep inequality and power concentration, to paraphrase the thesis.
As far as "its always been that way" goes, I can't speak for all of the past, but there are clear models in the present that show it doesn't have to be that way. Norway & Sweden come to mind, for example.
[0]: Orewellian term at its best. The movement isn't actually anti work, much like luddites weren't anti technology. This label is attached by and large to people who are centered around ideas related to equitable wealth distribution in society & more worker rights, namely. They don't actually profess to be against work, as far as the movement goes. Individuals may vary. Never the less, its clear doublespeak.
The anti work subreddit was founded by people who were truly anti work. It was then co-opted by people in low and middle wage jobs venting about poor working conditions exacerbated by the pandemic. Its a great example of how moderates sanewash extremist ideas to something a bit more palatable, similar to defund the police. While most people probably want a demilitarization of police forces, some people truly want a policefree state.
Originally, it's the idea that capitalism will have a terminal crisis (i.e. die off) and we are in this final crisis because it will hit a state where productivity cannot be increased and so profit will be too difficult to increase.
In practice, technology and some major events have prevented this from happening. The modern left-wing view is that we have run out of new frontiers to exploit, so the capital class will (has) return to reducing labor costs with more extreme measures among other tactics.
With recent events like a major labor shortage (or future one due to declining population) in the developed world, climate change, a stagnation in productivity per person, gig economy emergence, and widespread privatization being viewed as very destructive; this idea has gotten more popular. Part of this is driven by some companies, especially in tech, having manic levels of optimism about frivolous things.
Personally, it kind of sounds like Malthus. But it is hard to deny that we are in a slump of sorts and that startups that sound like scams appeared to be more common for a while.
You'll get a lot of answers, but I think The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall[1] is key.
Capitalism means competition. Competitors mean reduced profits. As we get into the later stages of the game, that pesky competition aspect comes into play and firms do whatever they can to worm their way out of its consequences.
As profits inevitably fall, firms flail around doing whatever they can to maintain them and cause all sorts of misery for employees, customers, and the world at large. Increasingly brutal exploitation of workers, rotting product quality, all sorts of shenanigans with regulatory capture and rent-seeking as firms try to avoid competition and the need to sell a quality product at a competitive price.
Basically, it's the theory that capitalist economies demand continually increasing growth, even increasing rates of growth, in order to remain stable enough to stay hegemonic. The industrial revolution, through most of the 20th century, exhibited this growth, driving capitalism to be the dominant (eventually only) economic system on earth.
Unfortunately, growth is hard, and it slows down. Over time, providing meaningful improvements to the lives of the participants in the economic system fails to keep up with the demands of growth, and you start to see the system going full ouroboros, consuming all the positive impact its created in the lives of its participants in a downward spiral of exploitation and value extraction until there's nothing left. The period of time after the inversion from "making people's lives better" to "making people's lives worse" is "late-stage capitalism", equivocating it to cancer or other terminal diseases.
Personally, I'm more of a "threshold events" theorist, and that enshittification is just reversion to the mean, but that's the pitch.
