A Priceless Bag of Enshittification
Observation and Analysis
Background
The bag in the header picture made me laugh this morning.
It’s the bag that my very helpful daughter (thanks again Angel!), used to wrap my long service vape, which I accidentally left in a bed-sitter I rented for a night to go visit my daughter in Wales, 4 trains / most of a day’s travel away from where I live with no car in Bournemouth, after the vape had run out of juice (I’d forgotten to pack some). So it got left on a shelf in the bed-sit and forgotten when I hastily packed to leave the next day. My daughter then had to go and collect it from the bed-sit owners, then dispatch back to me in a jiffy-bag, wrapped in the above bag.
OK that’s the background out of the way, now to the bag;
The Bag
You can see (Zoom in if you need to), written on it are these legendary words:
“WARNING Plastic bags can be dangerous. To avoid danger of suffocation, Keep this bag away from babies and children.”
What makes those words hilarious, on that particular bag, is that the material of the bag is identical to that used in face masks.
Remember those disposable masks we had to wear every day?
Yup, its the same material.
I did check by stretching the bag over my face, it didn’t suffocate me or stifle my laughter. It was perfectly breathable, even multiple layers of it, just like the face mask.
Unfortunately it wasn’t big enough to put over my huge head, the header photo could have been so much better.
Just to confirm the warning is made in all seriousness, there are two holes, strategically punched through the two layers of the bag, to give four holes in the bag in total, presumably to provide breathing holes, just in case the warning was ignored or missed.
After all, if the warning was found to be invalid, by maybe some kid running around wearing the bag as a full head facemask, those holes are the get-out clause, those are the reason the kid didn’t suffocate, right?
Analysis
How does a nonsensical, relatively expensive-to-produce warning, and extra processing steps of bag integrity-destroying hole-punching, come to be done in the production of that bag?
The story has to be each employee in the company(s) contributing systemically to producing the bag, following the guidelines set out in company manufacturing operational and safety guidelines, to the letter, never questioning it, because questioning gets one fired, right?
The first employee looks at the bag, and the company op procedures most likely says “If the bag is made of plastic, put the bag through through safety procedures”.
So it goes through safety procedures.
The first step in the safety procedures probably say something like “If the bag is made of plastic, put the standard suffocation safey warning on the bag”, so the bag is stamped.
The second step of the safety procedures probably say something like “If the bag has suffocation warning safety stamp, and is not intended to be airtight or watertight, punch the bag with two holes, in the main cargo area of the bag”.
So the bag is hole-punched.
And that’s about it. Nobody will question the system or these extra processing steps that make a mockery of previous perceptions of the company which might also produce face masks from the same material.
After all, it’s all bums on seats, doing something that gets a little money to help pay bills, right?
It’s a priceless illustration of Enshittification, the system we live in as energy-slave-ants, that is killing itself while killing us, and the planet, whilst we work for it, hoovering up its energy for it, never questioning it.
I am inclined to frame the bag and put it somewhere it might survive as a memento of Enshittification.
One day it might be found, and the beings finding it might use it to deduce a little of what happened to humanity — Enshittification of all things.
Eventually it became existential, when all the untruths involved in it resulted finally in the planet burning, destroying everything, we destroyed ourselves along with all life.
Did you know that the energy in profit, applied to the thermal mass of the planet, in addition to energy lost to efficiency of extraction and processing, gives figures in the right ballpark of measured temperature rise?
So it’s profit at the root of our problem.
Hence why I keep banging on about solar indexed stimulus, and why its needed, to end profit.
Either we end it, or it will end us.
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Credits — “Enshittification”, Cory Doctorow
PS I anyone wants to buy the bag, its not really priceless. I’ll sell it for $1M to the right buyer.
