Public companies considered harmful

Public companies are incentivised to focus on short-term “shareholder value”, which means that as time goes on, they will most likely enshittify their products and services.

Since the design of public companies leads them to enshittification, a good way to combat it is to avoid being a public company (and avoid giving money to public companies, but I’m writing mostly from the perspective of running a company).

This doesn’t mean that forever-private companies will completely avoid enshittification, just that this particular chain of incentives doesn’t exist with them by design. Of course, other mechanisms might incentivise enshittification, but those also apply to public companies.

I started this post thinking I’d write a lot about this, but I think I kinda like the current vibe of “fill in the blanks yourself”. I might write additional posts in the future that unwrap some of the implied reasoning above (e.g. what the fuck is the design of a company? What other mechanisms might incentivise enshittification?).