Once, there was a company called CleanCorp. It promised a better future by making everything tidy: your home, your phone, and your life. It was very good at tidying. It was far less good at asking what anyone actually wanted tidied.
CleanCorp knew best for its customers: its shareholders, demanding never-ending quarterly gains at any cost. Its products arrived tidy, sure – but with features no one asked for, rules nobody agreed to, and a roadmap that included all the things people did ask for, coming perennially “someday”.
Eventually, people realized CleanCorp couldn’t remain clean forever. In the name of “tidiness”, its products were sealed shut and meant to be thrown away when the new model came out. Its puritanical safety policy banned anything remotely taboo, out of fear of disrupting its image. And its employees were busy from 9 to 5, drafting profit-maximization proposals rather than anything they enjoyed, driving prices high, value low, and customers crazy, until the company crashed in its own dust.
Why was such a “clean” company so prone to enshittification?
is to give the people what they want. That’s it.
So, why is it so hard, then? Many companies feel they must maximize profit, because their investors expect it. But unless you’ve taken venture money, no rule says you have to.
Instead, at ClaerCorp, money is a proxy for value, rather than value itself. In most places the two line up well enough. But in a few fields, they drift far apart, like academic research, emotions and ethics, and public works projects, where monetary payoffs come slowly or are hard to measure.
Of course, value is subjective. But not having to chase every dollar means ClaerCorp can make things it’s curious about, or things that make people feel something. And it can use its profits not just as dividends, but as fuel for wilder experiments and crazier skunkworks projects.
ClaerCorp won’t be around forever. But we focus on making our products the best they can be, at the lowest price we can reasonably afford, because growth is contagious. When people can do more with less, they have time to dream. Time to build what they want. And time to grow – and some of that growth finds its way back to us, in ways we can’t imagine yet.
We can’t prove the world works like this – yet. But we can say that if we ever stray from it, we’re just another CleanCorp. And we know how that story goes: in due time, there will be a new ClaerCorp waiting to take our place.