What does the money need?

In the midst of a Mastodon thread about the pressure to generalize driving out accessibility: 

We have to ask how did system administrators (sysadmins) rebrand themselves to reliability engineers and keep a distinct discipline but frontend developers now have to put up with being absorbed into a generalist role where now we can't practice these essential parts of our craft to build quality products... I think the pressure to have generalist workers is not one that is based on making better products but  one that benefits corporate interests, you don't need to hire as many people.

I know and love a few SREs and/or whatever else we're calling the roles caught up in the mantra to "reduce external dependencies."

Whatever you call them, they're just as caught up in the drive for cost reduction. They're just situated in a more efficient management structure than when they were on the other side of the org chart, and they shift some of the OpEx into the larger, more tolerated R&D budgets. 

But everything and everyone is caught up in the drive for "efficiency." 

For as much as it's already a cliché,  I like the shorthand of "enshittifcation" because it's an analysis that doesn't hinge on some theory of oppression (sexist, ableist, racist) to explain why all this is happening. 

Sexism, ableism, and racism help characterize or add flavor to the austerity measures when they come, and I  suspect that the die-off of DEI roles is partially because they moved very quickly from "manages the diversity training budget and ERG Slacks" to "has a few thoughts about the equity soundness of your layoff list." 

But it would be more helpful to think of the neoliberal thought process as profoundly indifferent to any of it. It asks itself "what does the money need?" Everything else is coincidental. 

It's why your Trump-voting CFO is able to get up when it's his turn to run all hands and remind everyone it's Black History Month, or take his turn signing the executive memo about how shocked and saddened everyone is by something that probably did not shock or sadden him. 

Capital is indifferent to humans. It doesn't need any special animus, or disregard for some particular protected category, to be that way. That's just how it is.