The mercenization of Christmas

Something has long felt off in the heart of the Eixample's golden square, where it's impossible to shake the feeling of artificiality. We've been pointing out the problems with the tourism model for so many years now, the exados And the de-Catalanization, which seemed like simply repeating the same old thing would eventually lead to something happening. But, naturally, what's happening is that nothing is happening, and what's already wrong can always reach even higher levels of misery. But the irony is that we no longer lament the destruction caused by unfettered capitalism, but rather that this destruction isn't even the famous... creative destruction. Strolling through the center of Barcelona in the midst of the Christmas rush, we experience a shift in nostalgia: from yearning for the anti-capitalist virtues of traditional Christmas, we have moved to a world where we simply yearn for a Christmas in which capitalism works.

In recent months, a concept with considerable explanatory power has emerged: merdification (in English, enshittificationAt the risk of readily applauding words that don't add much, I'd say this idea captures something important that has changed in the real world. Popularized by journalist, activist, and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, merdification describes the process of progressive degradation of digital services that we've experienced in recent years, especially platforms. Doctorow explains it in three phases: "First, they're good to their users, then they abuse their users to improve things for their enterprise customers, and finally, they abuse these enterprise customers to reclaim all the value for themselves. In the end, they become a pile of crap." With the narrative of merdification, Doctorow helps us understand why Google's search engine is worse now than it was five years ago, why social networks no longer make us feel part of a community, and why the products Amazon recommends are no longer as good or as cheap.

The beauty of merging is that, unlike conventional markets, where a decline in the quality of a product or service is accompanied by a break in loyalty and a shift towards competition, digital platforms present a collective action problem that is impossible to solve individually. Twitter, Gmail, and Amazon could be legally obligated to guarantee what is known as interoperabilityThe obligation to be designed in such a way that if you decide to switch to an alternative service within the same family, whether as a customer or a seller, you don't lose your data, contacts, reputation, clients, and so on. If leaving Twitter means losing all my followers, or if Amazon punishes me by making me disappear if I try to sell on another online platform, then freedom of choice is a mere fantasy. Doctorow explains how the reason for all this is no mystery: these companies have simply been allowed to achieve a monopolistic position, and instead of denouncing it, politicians and propagandists claim that these monopolies are good and natural. The result is the vague feeling that we continue using a service because we like it or because we lack the willpower to leave, when the reality is that we have been hijacked by collective dynamics.

And so we arrive at Christmas on the city's streets, which has been undeniably mercenized. Because Amazon is not just an online store, but a commercial infrastructure that reshapes the entire system: it acts as an intermediary between producers, sellers, and consumers; it sets conditions, prices, delivery times, and visibility, and ultimately generates systemic dependency. And once it had us hooked with a seemingly beneficial and decent service, we gradually stopped buying from local competitors, who have closed their doors one after another. And the businesses that have taken their place are not the winners of a fair competition, as they would have us believe, but rather those that are part of cartels that organize themselves to offer increasingly inferior products at increasingly higher prices.

Now that the days of shopping in the city centers are approaching, I invite you to compare the current experience with the time when the free market still functioned as Adam Smith said it should. Thanks to the idea of mercenary behavior, we can at least understand that the feeling of being subtly ripped off doesn't stem from any paranoid delusion or romantic idealization of the past, but is the result of the abdication of competition policies combined with the mix of spectacle and opacity that camouflages the absurd practices of digital platforms, which it doesn't allow. Things have gotten so bad that if Christmas is to save anything, it should start by saving capitalism from itself.