General Discussion

Let me start by saying that I do not attribute blame for enshittification to your poor consumer choices. Despite the endless insistences of the right, your consumption choices aren't the arbiters of policy.

The reason billionaires urge you to vote with your wallets is that their wallets are so much thicker than yours. This is the only numeric advantage the wealthy and powerful enjoy. They are in every other regards an irrelevant, infinitesimal minority. In a vote of ballots, rather than wallets, they will lose every time, which is why they are so committed to this wallet-voting nonsense. The wallet-vote is the only vote they can hope to win.

The idea that consumers are the final arbiters of society is a laughable, bitter counsel of despair. You will not shop your way free of a monopoly, any more than you will recycle your way out of wildfires. Shop as hard as you like, you will not – cannot – end enshittification.

Enshittification is not the result of your failure to grasp that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." You're the product if you pay. You're the product if you don't pay. The determinant of your demotion to "the product" is whether the company can get away with treating you as the product.