What combats enshittification is the commons itself. That is: if you can download a car, car manufacturers can't be rentiers. The commons isn't the same as "open", because it's about the norms, not the artifacts.<p>And sufficiently complex rentier schemes eventually collapse to the commons, because they resemble Ponzis: they get into the business of enslaving their neighbors because that keeps the scheme going. That's why historical empires have a definite lifespan to them.<p>What we've been going through with rapid progress in computing and networking is a series of these schemes, which have been the basis of "tech" as a distinct industry - IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. At this point everyone is in on the game and looking for ways to make "smart" devices.<p>But what ordinary people are doing in response is a kind of turtling of their behavior: doing fewer things that are more aligned with the commons that remains. The pandemic lockdown experience saw a wave of this, with a lot of preference shifts that reverberated through the supply chain.<p>And so I see a vibrant "future of tech" existing in terms of defining robust commons spaces with norms that resist an entity coming in and saying "let me <i>help</i> you with that". It's just the nature of things that rentiers can always deploy an army of mercenaries to claim the space first, and then the commons gradually catches up by being more survivable in turmoil.