To be clear, this is just how Doctorow has always been, he’s always been that annoying nerd who needs to come up with new words/phrases. Enshittification is just the one that caught one.

See also: Whuffie, metacrap, and Schneider’s law. Those are all from before 2005. Like I said, this is who he has always been.

I am of two minds on Doctorow: One one hand, I appreciate his thoughtfulness and insight, and on the other hand I cannot stand how much of a weirdly pedantic nerd he is, especially when it comes to his own ideas.

Also I remember him kind of really sucking at journalism at first in the early 2000’s. I recall an article about Napster where he said “Napster’s original goal was to sell music to people” which blew my fucking mind because it was always meant to be a peer-to-peer network and my god, we have both lived through this era, how could he manage to get it so fucking wrong? I was especially galled because he had just been given a class to teach at UCLA while my friend who actually had a masters degree and his thesis was on the social network aspects of piracy and the co-evolution of control and resistance in computer networks was struggling to find a job as a teacher.

So due to those early memories, I may be a little biased.

This is an article by the guy who coined the term enshittification, so uhhh, pretty sure he knows what he means.

After reading the article:

Enshittification: The process by which a company starts by giving away everything seemingly for free, doing everything they can for both users and business customers. Then, after they have achieved enough network effect to keep people tied to their product, they begin to degrade the experience for users to make more money. Eventually, the same process happens to their business customers as well, as they have an effective monopoly over the space.

Technocarcinization: The tendency of technology companies to become both more surveillant and controlling of their devices (which they truly treat as theirs, not as ours) over time. Essentially tech companies all slowly become 1984 Nanny States in corporate digital form. Yes, enshittification is part of this process, but they are different things.

True, but I still think there would be plenty for HR to be mediating in terms of employee-to-employee relationships. However, it’s a big ask for HR to stop being a “cover your ass” department that is otherwise dedicated to making sure things like sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments don’t impact the company itself despite existing in the company all the same. Because that too is a large function of HR.

I dunno about an xyz domain specifically but njal.la has good privacy protection with domains starting at 15€ annually.

edit: sorry nevermind just noticed you said ten years somehow my brain skipped over that.

If only there was a whole department at schools that was made for exactly this… I heard they used to have one way back in the olden days. What would it be called? God the art of naming things is so difficult!

(Seriously, this is what happens when you defund the arts programs in education, you end up with teachers who are not trained in art doing their best… and their best is really really bad)

Like how Ford just had to hire back all their old greybeard engineers after the AI was not actually up to snuff (shocker).

Isn’t this enough proof that these chucklefucks are a drain on company resources and time and the FIRST thing to replace AI with is the bosses so workers can organize collectively while the AI helps them stay organized without the AI being in control.

I mean, I guess that would make too much sense.

Genuinely though, if the first thing they do with AI is outsource their own decision making, isn’t it just rock solid evidence that these people are useless at their fucking jobs to begin with? They aren’t even making the decisions anymore, the AI is. Let’s cut out the middleman, which is all a boss is now if AI is running the show. I mean, it’s what they did with all the junior developers, because they had forced the juniors into using AI and then asked themselves “why not cut out the middleman.” And they hadn’t even considered that maybe the cost of AI would outpace the cost of an employee. How the fuck are these short term thinking idiots in fucking charge anyway? A lot of bosses are just fucking charlatans.

EDIT: Clarified first sentence.

“we are so corrupt this anti-corruption law didn’t stop us, so we are going to rescind the law because obviously it’s not working.”

There’s nothing more important than protecting deeply unpopular decision makers who are unaccountable to society.

Apple has always banned you from sideloading anything on an iPhone and now Google is following suit. Soon Google will make sidelong a giant pain in the ass and only available to “developers” with the reason being to scare normal people into thinking doing things how they are done now is “too dangerous” and that they need to nanny us and not give us full control of our devices.

Microsoft is still desperately trying to shove everyone onto their Microsoft store and their “universal” appx bullshit or whatever. Once enough people have been switched over, its game over for traditional executables.

For context the Microsoft Store came out in 2012 and was a big reason why Valve went all-in on Linux because they could see what Microsoft’s long term goal was here from a mile away.

It’s been 13 years of slow build up to this.

You are the frog in the slowly boiling pot.

It’s from a fake website from a fake news channel that was actually a UHF channel that closed shop 50 years ago

https://wkna49.com/news/technology-companies-face-scrutiny-over-data-accuracy-following-jd-vance-tragedy

You can also buy music directly from artists on Bandcamp Fridays where they still get 100% of the sale going to the artists. I was afraid that would stop when it got sold but it’s not dead yet.

Also, another option is to have a locally hosted Jellyfin or Plex (ha) server and stream to yourself. My music collection is over 600GB so there’s not many phones that can hold it all.

I also self-host a music scrobbling service with Maloja and Multi-Scrobbler docker containers so I can get similar types of stats as last.fm while also having more privacy. I was able to import my stats from last.fm to it as well.

Literally all of them because there is no way for a game to exist without physical media. If it’s on your SSD/HDD, it’s on physical media. If it’s in “the cloud” it’s in someone else’s SSD/HDD. It’s always on physical media, just not a nice little disk in a box.