I am sickly fascinated by how awful and weird mobile game ads have become. I'm part of a Facebook group where we share terrible ads and make up lore for the recurring characters. My phone is full of screenshots like this. Some actors from Eastern Europe, who appear in some of the ads, are also in the group. #enshittify#roteconomy#capitalism
@jsnell As for the #DOJ howling at the #Apple, I see some valid concerns. But fellow geeks, we’ve been here before. It’s going to take forever, be basically #irrelevant by the time it’s done, and any actual changes will mostly #enshittify whatever they touch.
So how is any of this supposed to be about #consumers…? That’s the part I just don’t buy. This is not the path. We’ve been here before and the wood’s all rotted or disintegrated.
The worst thing about online learning is that everything has become a video. Every code tutorial. Every design tutorial. Nobody actually writes out a guide anymore.
It's just "hey guys welcome to my tutorial" and watching 10 minutes of content that mostly isn't relevant...
Science and industry were well aware of the dangers of leaded gasoline when it was first introduced in the 1920s. But adding tetraethyl lead to motor fuel made internal combustion engines work better. And that made it possible to turn the automobile into a mass market product. The result was the biggest mass-poisoning in human history. Bestselling author Steven Johnson joins us to mark the 100th anniversary of the invention of leaded gas. Episode 112 is here: https://thewaroncars.org/2023/10/10/112-unintended-consequences-with-steven-johnson
However, it is precisely things with OSS and Datenschutz that improve peoples' lives.
Things lacking it merely #enshittify it and that's basic consensus from the start, so why would they get bogged down in holy wars about these unless someone wanted to foist things lacking OSS and Datenschutz on society?
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare - but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.
This is the reason that automakers are willing to #enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they'd reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then "securitizing" the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.
I agree with this take on proposals to block #Meta's rumoured #ActivityPub-based service. We should encourage adoption of this defederated approach, even if there is a risk that Meta will try #enshittify it.
Call me a conspiratorialist if you must. But when CEOs get on earnings calls and brag about how covid, war, and scare-stories about #inflation let them hike their prices and rake in never-before-seen profit margins, I think it's reasonable to blame inflation on greed, not on workers getting a couple of relief checks during the lockdown.
This fragility is magnified by monopoly. When a sector is dominated by just a few companies, they can collude to stay out of each other's way, tacitly or explicitly deciding not to compete. When that happens, the companies are no longer disciplined by competition and can #enshittify their services to an ever-greater extent.