I’ve been thinking about enshitification recently, and I’m also working on a startup with a friend that just received funding. I’ve been wondering how one might arrange a business such that it won’t gradually trend towards shittier products in search of higher profit margins.

Obviously, it would be nice to redesign all of society so that this isn’t a thing, but barring that, does anyone have any ideas for setting up a business in such a way that motivations are aligned with producing a good product?

Currently, we’re trying to retain as much control as possible, but at some point we may go public, and if we do, I’m not sure how to keep us aimed at accomplishing our goals. We’re building a platform that should solve or at least improve the replication crisis in scientific research, and we could lose control to investors that want board seats, or sell to someone like Google.

If we do either, I doubt the company will do what we want it to do in the long term.

Going public is the route that seems less likely to lead to this change in direction, but it seems like it could end in the same place over a long enough timeline.

  • Ace T'KenMEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    Gah! I missed this thread. Hope it’s not too late to contribute. I am the C.E.O. (and an Economist) of a medium-sized I.T. firm in Canada and designed the company to be as ethical as it could possibly be from the ground up.

    • All employees have equal votes after their initial 3 months is up in any part of the company that they are engaged in. I can (and have) been outvoted.
    • After employees are here long enough (a few years), they can purchase shares if they like.
    • I am the lowest paid full-time employee at the company by design. I do not take dividends.
    • We operate on a Matrix org chart meaning that the “boss” on every project changes based on who is best suited to lead it and who has experience in that area.
    • We have it in our charter that there are never any outside shareholders allowed. If you leave the company, your shares are purchased by the company for current market value. This includes myself. This is why employees owning shares is a good idea; it becomes a retirement plan. Unlike most corporations, we don’t want solely financially invested shareholders as they’re in business to extract value. They are parasites.
    • We have acquired other companies. We have never had to pay for one. Our procedures are so thorough and ticket counts so astronomically low compared with other I.T. companies (which are called MSPs) due to our subsystems and customizations that they literally give themselves to us.
    • We are as environmentally conscious as we can be. We redo and donate old systems to nonprofits and schools where we can. The only waste we put out is utterly dead hardware - no forced upgrade cycle. Electricity bills also drop dramatically at clients we take over due to more efficient machine use.
    • During COVID, we gave away over $500k in free support. I figured it was more important that our nonprofit clients stay open than we stay open.
    • We have a full FOSS stack that we can deploy if a company is open to it (and would like to save a bit of cash to boot).
    • In nearly ten years, we’ve never had an employee leave, and never had a client leave (well, we had one restaurant client close during COVID, but I don’t count that).
    • We have full benefits.
    • We have zero interest in “infinite growth” as it’s not a functional model. We have turned down clients because they don’t “get” us and would be a headache for our staff.
    • Our current goal is a 9-5 (not 8-5), four-day workweek for all staff.

    I understand that not every business owner is “good.” I believe that with proper regulation, however, we can make them at least behave way, way the fuck better than they do now. It’s what I call Social Capitalism and it’s exceedingly functional from my experience.

    I’ve built this model out in hopes it will catch on. I feel that if most companies operated under Social Capitalism that we’d be substantially better off. Certain aspects of it are so important and such a step up from the norm that I don’t understand how they weren’t obvious to other owners. But… greed I guess. Greed hurts every system it’s in.

    Also of interest, we don’t have an issue with The Peter Principle as you’re never forced to move out of a position of competence or interest. You’re not salary-limited simply because you don’t want to be a manager; in fact, there are no managers.

    • ProbablyBayseanEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Having retirement shares as the same shares as the company that one is working at seems to be a huge concentration of risk. If you go out of business, then people lose both current active income and future passive income. I hope that your staff diversify away that risk.

      • Ace T'KenMEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        It’s not a complete retirement package by any means but it is a way for them to get some of the value out that they put in. We definitely encourage them to diversify their portfolios.