Enshittification comes for everything, but what’s the endgame?
Chocolate—Hershey’s, at least—is getting worse. Not that the quality of Hershey’s products really matters to me, as I don’t generally eat a lot of chocolate, and when I do it’s not Hershey’s.
What does matter to me is that due to climate change, cacao is becoming harder to grow and thus more expensive. If they got rid of their child-labor/slavery problems, those prices would go up even more. It’s easy to see how that would lead a large company courting the widest possible customer base to gradually substitute in less satisfactory but cheaper ingredients to hold the line on price—necessary since that wide customer base is the middle class that’s been relentlessly ratfucked since Reagan..
While I might not care about chocolate so much, I care a lot about coffee, which is in a similar position with respect to climate change. I would hate to be throwing away my espresso machine in 20 years because I simply can’t afford real coffee.
But the thing that really freaks me out is the company that is trying to create cocoa substitutes because the industry suspects that actual cocoa may become so scarce that the real thing will, presumably, only be available to the wealthy. If one were to assume that these businesses represent dispassionate, amoral actors—though not necessarily smart ones—what they’re telling us is that they think it’s inevitable that we’re fucked.