Governments are actually less nefarious by this metric because they don't have a perverse incentive to make things worse. If a government wants more money out of you, it just raises taxes. If a corporation wants more money out of you, it needs to induce demand, which at the limit means actively working to make the product worse. Our modern world is proof that relying on competition isn't enough to save us from the enshittification.
> Governments [...] don't have a perverse incentive to make things worse.
I hate to break this to you, but in the USA, this has happened multiple times: for instance, allowing Govt to shutdown due to spending limits, to push some extra pain + score political points, and then paint oneself as a savior when the shutdown is eventually lifted.
You could argue that they're not making things worse for the folks that actually matter (and you'd be right), but there is immense hardship and pain inflicted on ordinary people routinely (esp. of late), so I didn't want to leave your comment unchallenged.
The political gamesmanship in the US is beyond shameful, but that's different in an important way. When the government passively denies you a service by shutting down, that's negligence. When the government actively makes a service worse, that's cruelty for the sake of cruelty, and rightfully gets called out. But when a company actively makes a service worse to induce demand, that's a fat bonus for a PM, where instead we should be calling it out for the cruelty that it is.
Or to put it another way, for a government, cruelty is done for its own sake. In a corporation, cruelty is economically incentivized.
I can also see a "unifying mental model" -- whatever increases the "health" is pursued.
A corporation needs to "feed" on money, so its actions reflect this (e.g. PMs worsening services intentionally, in order to be able to charge more and thereby boost revenue).
A party in power needs to "feed" on support from its "base", so its actions reflect this (you said it best: "for the sake of cruelty")
Enshitification is not something that happens to customers. Free software is not free to the advertisers, and as such, the companies will go to great lengths to meet their needs. And this makes sense. Why would a company do anything for you if you aren't paying?
If people preferred a good paid solution over a shitty free one then Kagi would be a trillion dollar company and nobody would ever have heard of Google. But that's not what people want. They want shitty but free. This is the market working as it should. Enshitification is not something done to us. It's something we do to ourselves.
