cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: 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. It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
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I’ve read this guy blog for some weeks now, what he says about tech is real but his solutions boil down to vote blue.
He is a useful tool for pointing out the thesis and antithesis for the revolution. He contributes to the revolution by pointing out those problems earnestly. However what can be given by bourgeoisie politicians can be taken away by bourgeoisie politicians. Those of us on the western left need to provide that synthesis in a manner controlled by a proletarian party.
Yeah the first half—the problem statement—is really good. As a tech worker at ground zero since the mid-90s, I’ve been following Doctorow for decades. He’s not necessarily a dirty pinko but he knows his stuff.
The thirty year descent of the tech worker:
Tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years before striking out on their own to start their own business that put that big company out of business. Then that dream shrank to working for a tech giant for a few years, quitting, and doing a fake startup to get aquihired back by your own boss and the world’s most inefficient way to get a raise. And then it shrank even further to working for a tech giant for your whole life but there’d be free kombucha in the cafeteria and you get massages on Wednesdays. And now that dream is over, and all that’s left is work for a tech guy until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
