<
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet>
"There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about
enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces
of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit
online world.
In other words, they class enshittification as an
ideological phenomenon,
rather than as a
material phenomenon. Corporate leaders have
always felt
the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users,
business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of
largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate
leaders with better ideas or purer hearts. Those years were the result of
constraints on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and
happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to act better than they
do today, even if they were not any better:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they
came from
fear. Fear that a competitor would take away a disgruntled customer
or worker. Fear that a regulator would punish the company so severely that all
gains from cheating would be wiped out. Fear that a rival technology –
alternative clients, tracker blockers, third-party mods and plugins – would
emerge that permanently severed the company's relationship with their
customers. Fears that key workers in their impossible-to-replace workforce
would leave for a job somewhere else rather than participate in the
enshittification of the services they worked so hard to build:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it
When those constraints melted away – thanks to decades of official tolerance
for monopolies, which led to regulatory capture and victory over the tech
workforce – the same mediocre sociopaths found themselves able to pursue their
most enshittificatory impulses without fear."
Via
Linux Weekly News:
https://lwn.net/Articles/972893/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
