Farming used to be just hard work. Now with things like Monsanto trademarking crops so farmers need to buy new seed every year or john deere making it illegal to repair their tractors so you need to go directly through them, farmers are feeling the greedy pinch of enshittification. Suddenly hard work alone is not enough to just survive as a farmer. Now take a blowhard like Trump telling them how much “illegals” and other “others” are the cause of their sad existence and they just hop right on that train.
I mean, some of the most radicalization happened because of how farmers were getting fucked by banks, and by various combines, and so a lot of them started doing stuff like collective action.
I think the book What’s the Matter With Kansas? even goes over some of this history. But I think as most family farms went bust, most of America went urban between 1910-1920, that kind of collective action was almost predetermined to get squashed. And the people holding out buy into a whole lotta Hollywood-style myth-making about rural life (ironically). Couple that with a lot of propaganda and racism and it spells the current situation.
Ironically, on the enshittification front, it was progressives that I first noticed pushing the “right to repair” stuff, by the way. Same with the stuff about patenting genetics of seeds…
Ironically, on the enshittification front, it was progressives that I first noticed ….
Yes, back to the face-eating leopard party. A huge logic gap as one of the many reasons we can no longer understand each other.
Unsatisfied with the guys not doing enough to make your life better? Burn it all down assuming you can walk through the flames unharmed.
Don’t like being in a bad spot? Destroy all attempts to help you, with the expectation it will hurt those people more and you’ll be ok because you are one of the “good ones”.
Farming used to be just hard work. Now with things like Monsanto trademarking crops so farmers need to buy new seed every year or john deere making it illegal to repair their tractors so you need to go directly through them, farmers are feeling the greedy pinch of enshittification. Suddenly hard work alone is not enough to just survive as a farmer. Now take a blowhard like Trump telling them how much “illegals” and other “others” are the cause of their sad existence and they just hop right on that train.
I mean, some of the most radicalization happened because of how farmers were getting fucked by banks, and by various combines, and so a lot of them started doing stuff like collective action.
I think the book What’s the Matter With Kansas? even goes over some of this history. But I think as most family farms went bust, most of America went urban between 1910-1920, that kind of collective action was almost predetermined to get squashed. And the people holding out buy into a whole lotta Hollywood-style myth-making about rural life (ironically). Couple that with a lot of propaganda and racism and it spells the current situation.
Ironically, on the enshittification front, it was progressives that I first noticed pushing the “right to repair” stuff, by the way. Same with the stuff about patenting genetics of seeds…
Yes, back to the face-eating leopard party. A huge logic gap as one of the many reasons we can no longer understand each other.