We just need Rache Bartmoss to kill the old one...
The report linked is damn good
Yeah well america is one big business, they don't care for regular citizens, they wanna know how they can make profit of citizens. I bet that wont ever change
The United States was in early release. We're thrilled to announce we've officially launched and will be landing in a country almost certainly near you.
The problem here is - in my opinion - caused by:
The right always chasing "deregulation"? Well, here is the result. High profits, high prices, shitty products and services.
And the people suffer.
"the commons" has largely been privatized online. That is the result of what you have stated.
We should all be ashamed, and afraid.
Also the mental disease which is known as "wanting to be a billionaire". Everything in the world is structured around making that status the ultimate goal. It is like endorsing sociopathy.
With Elon Musk soon to be a trillionaire and maybe Zuckerberg and Bezos, too. Being a billionaire won't be the dream goal anymore.
i dream of being out of debt
And every time you try to undo at least some deregulation, you get likened to Stalin, no matter how bad that deregulation was.
As they say. The cloud is someone else's computer.
Emphasis on someone else
A few days ago I tried to find the best frame of the video to turn into a meme. This is what I came up with.
This is a handy meme to have these days. I hope to see it in circulation and to spread it myself! Thanks!
Not sure I agree with the statement that we wouldnt accept enshittification in our analog lives... ovens and refrigerators with screens and becoming unrepairable, cars are only sold with onboard computers and power windows with no other price point, materials for most household items becoming plastic / single use / or deliberately designed with a failure lifetime. I recently started buying clothing with no synthetics and they are unfathomably better performing in terms of breathing, odor, comfort and warmth. We've forgotten what physical products used to be like, in 20 years we will have similarly forgotten what un-enshittified internet / tech was like.
I think, and perhaps it's scarier than anyone wants to admit, we've already gotten accustomed to or given up fighting against enshittification of the analog world.
The common thread is capital and financialization, and there can be never be progress until the ideas in "how to win friends and influence people" are called out as demonic and unhuman.
The fact that half of eligble voters in the US willingly voted for the ultimate enshittifier not once, but twice, is a testament to this.
I've also started buying natural fibers only. Noticable improvements in quality of life
Funny, just today I found out my subscription to addy.io, the email alias company, was somehow deactivated, and I reactivated it today. Unfortunately, any emails or email metadata sent to deactivated aliases are not kept on their servers, which is fantastic for privacy, but then I start thinking, "what if these were important emails I couldn't get because my subscription was fucked with?", or "what happens if the email alias service goes down and I can't get any emails I was expecting?”. Now I'm at a crossroads as to whether or not I should continue primarily using my aliases for my emails, or just provide my true email for important services and leave potential spam/junk to the aliases.
Sidenote, the reason I wanted to use my aliases as my primary email contact was because of breaches I discovered via Have I Been Pwned. I think I did go a bit too far in the opposite direction, so now I need to find that middle ground. Definitely gonna make some changes over the next few days with my email addresses on my accounts.
or "what happens if the email alias service goes down and I can't get any emails I was expecting?”
mail servers are generally supposed to try for a few days when delivery fails
Exactly why I only use email aliases for newsletters and stuff
I have one primary email and one that goes to a «not important» folder that I check irregularly.
Seems a good middleground, don’t have to create a new alias for each service
Hmm maybe i'll do something similar. I was thinking recently of using a new alias when doing purchases online but haven't decided yet. Kinda don't want to over-complicate things you know?
Works for me. Mail there gets auto «read» too so I don’t have notifications or indicators of new mail :p
You can use a custom domain in many cases, which you control (not sure about addy.io though). Still has the dependency on the service, but you can at least quickly transfer if it goes to shit.
For me important stuff gets the real email address and the secondary/beyond gets the aliases
For me it’s a tale about loss of ownership in a dematerialised world. No one is going to cut a piece of my dining table because I own it and physically have it entirely at my side.
I’ll never own (my locally installed) Spotify nor the songs I listen to. Though for the later I have vinyl alternatives which no one is touching.
In his Enshittification book, Cory referred to this as "technofeudalism" —essentially the return to the feudal society where there are owner elites and peasant subjects. The owners control everything, and the peasant have to rent access under the terms and conditions set by the owners. In the technofeudalism model, everybody (the peasants) have to subscribe to access anything from the corporations (the owner elites), with the corporations retaining all the power.
If you want a specific variety of a plant that's patented by, say, Monsanto, you don't own the seeds you get but rather their permission to plant them.
If you re-plant seeds in your own field produced by the crops of the previous year on that same field they can sue you and they will win (see Bowman v. Monsanto Co.)
This is why I only seed torrents
The problem is capitalism. Specifically, the consolidation of power in a small number of decision makers.
Break up the big companies. Stop letting them do mergers and acquisitions. You don't even have to do something radical like dismantling capitalism entirely.
I wish I knew how!
Dismantle the establishment board by board
I guess we just keep voting Democrat until something happens...
As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue. It is a race to the bottom.
How do you fix that without massive upheaval for the people you are trying to help. I don't know.
Companies used to have a smaller reach, meaning less total and potential customers. So they had to balance what what was good for the shareholders qith what was good for the customers or risk losing both. But products are often global now, especially digital ones. There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose. And investors don't care as much about the long term since they can trade stocks so quickly.
Maybe the solution is required holding periods for stocks or something. Higher short term capital gains taxes, and better incentives for long term gains.
As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue.
I'd say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people's pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they'd have made long term.
It isn't merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they're gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.
It isn't enough for Zuckerberg's company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into... the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they're doing, to make human labor irrelevant!
Because they've bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.
There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose.
So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.
It's increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.
So I will disagree on one point. If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders. Shareholders only make money if the stock price goes up, which requires people to buy it at the higher price. And if the company isn't growing double digits, buyers will go elsewhere. So the drive to produce shareholder value forces companies to chase the double digit growth or die. And shareholders want quick gains, so they can move on to the next company with double digit growth.
It's not the ceos who are the reason for all this. It's that all this causes boards to chose ceos that operate this way. People see that, and then aspire to do the same so they can be rich. This is why ceos spend so much time essentially marketing thier companies ideas. Thats how you get the stock price to go up. Buyers buy on the perception that a company is doing great things, or will. Reality doesn't often factor in like people think it does.
As for AI. They don't care about replacing humans. All they care about is a sales pitch that makes the stock price go up. If telling people that there software will replace humans does that, then that is what they will say. They don't let reality get in the way.
If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders.
Artificial scarcity is its own driver of revenue. At that point, you're not competing for space on the screen, you're competing for number of people who see your content. "Do you want 5000 views or 50,000? Do you want them to see this once? Ten times in a month? Daily? That'll cost you extra."
The value of an ad has diminishing returns. One billboard on the side of the road attracts your eye. Ten in a big messy cluster get ignored.
Facebook could have leveraged this to command higher rates for their ad content, rather than trying to engage on sheer volume. Now the website is down the same rabbit hole as Yahoo.
It’s not the ceos who are the reason for all this. It’s that all this causes boards to chose ceos that operate this way.
The Founders trade out shares to partners who then occupy the board. Normally, one of the Founders is the original CEO, because they have a controlling stack in the firm. New board members are introduced by the founders and often have a personal relationship with them. And with stock swaps, the CEO of one company can sit on the board of another. Michael Dell sits on Broadcomm's board for this very reason.
Tesla's board is a classic example of this incestuous back-scratching. Robyn Denholm moved from CFO of Juniper Networks - a major supplier for Tesla - to the audit committee chair of Tesla (and yehaw, what a job that must have been, given their shady business practices). She also is an operating partner at Blackbird Ventures, a venture capital firm which is a major investor in xAI, another of Musk's pet startups.
Once you climb to the top of these hierarchies (or you start getting into seriously investing in any of them) you start noticing these circular networks of leadership and trade. The Oracle / OpenAI / Nvidia circuit is another great example.
As for AI. They don’t care about replacing humans.
The very real and explicit and demonstrated belief among these tech billionaires is that they can automate away the need for humans - both as labor and as clients. They're building (or, at least, trying to build) a financial closed loop.
If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders. Shareholders only make money if the stock price goes up, which requires people to buy it at the higher price.
Government should be the balancing act in response to this. Regulations enforced by Governments.
That is a nice thought. But the government has never been "for" the people. And you can't reasonably expect people who are chosen by a popularity contest to be able to devise a way to provide that balance. It's not a required skill to get elected. And you can't expect the voters to know what real skills a polotician has. The spin and propaganda are just to effective at manipulating voter impressions. So it can't be the government...
Governments should be more or less thinktanks for the Nations issues. They're not expected to know all the answers, but collectively, they're in a position where they have access to the people who do. Ideally, they work together to solve a Nations issues.
What is the alternative if not government?
the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere
That's not exactly what it is, though. Enshittification is the deliberate degradation of a product for the purpose of extracting maximum revenue, where the product is progressively degraded up to the point where the consumer ditches it, but not exactly to it.
Without the tie to maximum revenue and measurement of consumer ability to cope, it's hard to understand why enshittification is so brutally frustrating.
Cory Doctorow describes the stages of enshittification as follows:
It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
And for good measure he reminds us of the why and how things used to be better:
The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.
https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc
You know, I agree with him that the pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership, but I don't think he got the reason for the change right. I think what we call Late Stage Capitalism comes from a single source: corporations don't give a rat's ass any longer if they exist in ten years. They are willing to toss reputation and long-term prospects out the window because the only metric that matters is quarterly numbers.
It's a thing I noticed on the Internet. I wondered why so many sites become big and then shoot themselves in the foot. We are on Lemmy (well, I am on Piefed) now, many of us from enshittified Reddit. But Reddit was the savior from an enshittified Digg, which was the savior from an enshittified Slashdot, etc. It figures that each iteration knew they were going to die making the choice they made, but also knew the quarter would be spectacular.
That worries me, because it's much easier to destroy something than to build it. If you go and look, the Internet is slowing down. It isn't being innovated, despite the need to do so. Instead, the big players see something grow, and they use their massive resources to buy it and kill it.
That's why I love open source: what is being built has long term plans. The main way that open source projects get enshittified is when they close source innovation and then follow the same trajectory as the big companies.
I think you're being overly optimistic about the dying part. Folks here are not exactly a random sample - even if many people see the enshittification of Facebook or Reddit, they will feel unable to leave. Especially for social media there's a huge network effect - the value of the product is in the fact that "everyone" is there. Or for Google products: there are just so many different problems for the user to solve (if there's a current solution at all!) before being able to move. So yes, the focusing on quarterly profits extracts value at the cost of everyone else, but it might not be enough to kill the product. Or at least not for quite a long time. For me the root of the problem is that we gave up on countering monopolies. This has always been a grave enemy of "efficient" capitalism, but over the last few decades we kind of stopped efforts to prevent this. It automatically leads to worse service for any client, not just in the digital sector. Worse, it leass to concentration of power in such few hands that any political system shifts into an oligarchy.
Yeah, I do get it. I made fun of my younger brother because he still uses a yahoo.com email address, and then my older brother chimed in from his hotmail account.
Also agree on the dangers of monopolies. It may just have happened that the FTC was unable to crush them before they got too big, a side effect of Internet growth. The processes to control corporations could not cope with the phenomenal growth of Google, Facebook, and lately openAI.
Here's the video, it's funny cause it's infuriatingly true.
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