EDITED TO MAKE THE TITLE MORE APPROPRIATE. The previous title of this post was “I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life” which was the slug line as it appeared in my mailing-list-to-RSS reader. Although this is the first paragraph of the linked essay, it does not do a good job of explaining the thrust of the essay, and some people (not you though) seem to be arguing with the title instead of the essay.
(Thanks to ski11erboi@lemmy.world for the heads up.)
END OF EDITED SECTION
Here’s why you’re getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they’ve amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about “fighting for the user.” Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.
Capitalism can’t be reformed into something good/worthwhile. That’s why its state was allowed to pass anti-trust laws. Even if companies are “broken up”, it’s just a legal restructuring. The system still profits, controls, etc. It’s political theater, not any kind of real change.
Defeatism will get us nowhere. The power of the people dethroned kings, and it will dethrone capitalism too.
I do agree that the actions of a single person are a drop in the bucket, but we can only fill the bucket if many of us offer their single drop. We each must do our part, no matter how insignificant that part may be.
Defeatism will get us nowhere.
I agree! And, I think the linked essay agrees, also? I mean the last sentence literally says, “You can’t fight enshittification. But together, we can.”
That sounds very different than, “Acceptance of or resignation to the prospect of defeat. Acceptance of the inevitability of defeat. Acceptance of defeat without struggle.”
I actually didn’t even notice the link to the article. Oops. Thanks for pointing that out.
I think the point this article is trying to make is that while individualistic consumer-level ways to sidestep enshittification do work for those who follow them, they don’t fight the bad actors back efficiently and to achieve that it needs to be done collectively.
Thank you for pointing this out. I honestly missed the link completely! I’m not usually the type to comment on a post that links to an article without reading it. Oops.
Oh yeah the blog post is helper not doomer, but actually your point still stands anyways.
disagree.
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i stopped using most social media, and what little social media I do use now is FOSS like lemmy.
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I cancelled my youtubeTV subscription and now pirate all my media. Along with this I also stopped watching sports which have been greatly enshittified over my lifetime.
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I stopped using Plex (enshittifying) and switched to Jellyfin which is FOSS.
these actions have significantly reduced enshittification in my life. Not saying it’s possible for everything, but sometimes there absolutely are non-enshittified alternatives.
That’s wonderful! It’s good to diminish the amount of enshittification you experience in your life!
Enshittification, writ large, goes on regardless. The point of the essay is that avoiding it in your personal life is good (if sometimes tiresome, depending on the specifics of your life) and you should totally do that, but the root causes of enshittification can be defeated by organized collective action.
the root causes of enshittification can be defeated by organized collective action.
This is the fly in the ointment. I (and most here) do all the things to avoid enshittified products, but as you’ve mentioned it is work. Some of the “work” is fun because I am “technologia” oriented, but many of the people I know simply cannot be bothered to consider alternatives to these shit products. They don’t know it is shit and think that’s the only choice and follow along. I can’t blame them for their choices too much. Life is full of other things they are occupied with, so I do try and help when I can.
Many that are obligated to be advocates for the common man and these issues have abandoned their obligations to the people they are supposed to serve. They have essentially been enshittified too and we haven’t yet organized to solve that issue which seems to be the most important enshittification to date. More to come later, I am sure.
This is not only very similar to my experience and entirely possible, but it’s also extremely healthy mentally and, date I say, physically.
Getting rid of social media will improve your mood dramatically.
I also like doing homelab stuff, and it’s even more satisfying to know I’m having a better experience than, say, someone subscribing to every streaming service but still having to watch ads.
I’m still using YouTube with smarttube or whatever it’s called now and vanced. They have adblocking and sponsor block so I don’t get shitty ads and I can still pick who I watch. I did go and download a bunch of kids videos since someone watches the same show all the time and now just use jelyfin for that.
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While this article has some good points, it really is sad, and kind of ironic, that the first paragraph of it is bullshit clickbait that completely undermines the rest of the text.
Yep. The title and the intro are both clickbait designed to drag in people incensed by the suggestion that their positive individual actions won’t have impact - which are absolutely the same people that don’t need to be fucking converted into the belief that regulations and enforcing laws already on the books would be good things.
The people that do need to read the article will read the title and intro paragraph (as is often auto-copied into posts on social media pages) and they’ll chuckle to themselves that they know that already and move on with their day.
Tl;dr. This article annoys the converted, and misses the ideal demographic.
Its like global warming. Is what im doing going to stop it. No. Do I want to be as little responsible for it as possible yest. If my consumption is half anothers then I have reduced my share of the responsibility by half. If my consumption further is in a way that causes half as much harm. Well now im down to a quarter share. Does it mean anything overall? Maybe not but it means something to me.
I’m still going to buy the French and German glass jars with rubber seals I am eyeing for food storage, instead of anything involving plastic and silicone. Suck it.
Great!
Is… is someone trying to stop you from doing that?
I might.
Counterpoint: 🏴☠️
Also:
Would have been better to use a gif of the luigi death stare
Corollary: yar har fiddle-dee-dee
Other counterpoint: good choices and not being an asshole make me happy.
And another: consumption and people being shitty are unrelated.
Some times, to both statements 😂
Nah, fuck off with all this.
Would you say individual choices have slowed or reversed enshittification?
I reject your premise. Good day.
The irony of posting this on Lemmy and not Reddit. lmao
The irony
How so?
Most of us are here on Lemmy having individually made the decision to evade the enshitification of other sites.
…And it’s worked.Naaaah, it’s still in the wrong paradigm, just a taste of the better world.
Like Hanseatic league and Hussites and Cossacks were not quite the revolution you’d want, and the same with Dutchies, but at some point angry Frenchies decided it’s time to show how it’s done, and around the same general period of time some unrefined colonials decided they are tired of tea.
I love how unshitty Lemmy is 😊 . That’s why I post here so much!
But Reddit isn’t less shitty as a result. I think it’s even getting worse.
I think maybe the wording in your title is throwing people off because as a lot of people are pointing out we CAN make make choices that limit the amount of enshittification we experience in our own lives. Seems like what you’re trying to say is choosing not to support enshittification doesn’t stop companies from continuing enshittification.
Fair, thank you. There does seem to be some confusion about enshittification vis a vis personal effects, versus Enshittification that exists in the world. (Reducing the former doesn’t reduce the latter, and the latter still remains everyone’s problem.) I used a bookmarklet to grab the link and tagline. I’ll update the title to more accurately reflect the content of the essay.
Don’t care if I end up naked in the woods siphoning Internet with a tin can, I will always try and encourage others to do so.
“Do all this! Do more! You’ll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better.”
Tldr; Join physical movements like a union to focus on actual laws being created and/or enforced while shitting on people for doing anything that else that may be positive
Also tries to sell their book bragging about how early reviews are raving about it. Provocative for clicks to say obvious shit that they’re selling. "Bruh, join a union. We need to organize a popular political party. "
Also their conclusion doesn’t read to me like it actually goes against personal conscious consumption choice. Like saying join a movement as if a movement doesn’t start with a bunch of individuals making choices about how they spend their time, use their money, speak their opinion, etc and figuring out all these individuals have a lot in common and have a common point to organize around
Article is like, “ya Linux, Signal, Mastodon, etc. But they’re all niche and you as an individual make so little difference so join a movement.”
Linux is probably the most used kernel for operating systems in the world. Not a good example. Backend operating system for the Internet. Signal is far more popular than a decade ago. Don’t know about Mastodon. Regardless if people aren’t being encouraged to engage in more private and/or decentralized Internet, why the fuck would they be engaged enough to go to some political meetup about something they don’t individually engage with and develop personal interest towards. Collective action starts with developing individual interests that converge to a collective group of individuals with shared interests.
Telling people to join movements while telling people, well actually not those movements
Also shit on people’s good causes and their small actions and not realize that those little things keep people engaged and they’re potential conversation points to bring people into more direct organized action.
Then after complaining about small niche movements that apparently won’t amount to anything long term, they point out small niche organizations that for some reason will grow and amount to something long term for reasons I imagine being that they care more about those than using decentralized and open source software (services)
The great news is that he’s on Mastodon, if you’d like to reach out: @pluralistic@mamot.fr
He might care a little about distributed services.
I read his article and won’t read his book. I won’t reach out to him. If he wants to engage better with people, he should try not starting with belittling people’s efforts that they can do in there individual lives of which doesn’t preclude anything they can do communally. I don’t start with environmental or moral vegetarians and vegans with, “what you’re doing will change nothing and not worth the effort. Join a animal rights organization. What you’re doing now is weak.” Just start with saying join an animal rights group and why they should framed not why what they’re currently doing is a waste of effort but what else they could also be doing and how that can be effective
he should try not starting with belittling people’s efforts that they can do in there individual lives of which doesn’t preclude anything they can do communally
“Do all this! Do more! You’ll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better.”
It would better if that came off paragraph after but instead they dipped into simultaneously dunking on individual efforts to build up poorly detailed communal efforts. Spends more time complaining about peoples individual efforts than explaining the how to’s and benefits of communal efforts
When all your friends are going to a festival, are you really going to opt out because the event requires you to use the Ticketmaster app (because Ticketmaster has a monopoly over event ticketing)? If so, you’re not gonna have a lot of friends, which is a pretty shitty way to live.
If you turn your personal campaign to live an enshittification-free life into a set of rigid practices that isolate you from your community, you will be miserable – and you will undermine your ability to address the systemic roots of enshittification.
He should focus better on making his argument more tight and focused with minimal collateral damage. How does using Linux, Signal, Mastodon isolate people. People can have all that installed and more. Terrible examples.
Yes recycling is mostly green washing as it gets dumped/burned elsewhere. Why try make people feel like they were fools for sending things to recycling. They tried.
Not effective writing, not effective communication, not effective persuasion and so far in this thread he’s not even hitting with leftist let alone centrist and conservatives. People are focusing on the hot take because the writer thought it’d be smart to frame his wants with a hot take about the individual actions people take as weak. Frame with click bait so get lambasted for being a click bait artist
If I may chime in, like Sundray, I am used to the author’s style, which preempts critics by acknowledging the difficulty before getting to the positive. He’s had enough people tell him ‘recycling plastic is a joke!’ to now start by saying, yes, I know, BUT you should still do it and then he’ll get to the positive. He’s not suggesting people are foolish for doing it, he’s simply letting the reader know that it ought to work better than it does and the failure is NOT on the citizenry, but on the deep pockets trying to escape blame. He wants you to know how they profit off the backs of the working class and he wants us to fight back together (and to keep recycling).
First, it looks like this may be a dressed up advertisement for their newly released book:
My book on Enshittification is coming out in a couple of months, and the early reviews are already coming in, and they are gratifyingly glowing.
That fact alone doesn’t discount their argument, but it should be considered.
Second, I disagree with this premise of the author:
Because this isn’t an individual problem, it’s a systemic one.
I disagree, its both.
As the author rightly identifies, there are somethings that are only addressable systemically such as healthcare of mass transport. However a whole other host of items the author references are absolutely individual problems. Example from the author:
When all your friends are going to a festival, are you really going to opt out because the event requires you to use the Ticketmaster app (because Ticketmaster has a monopoly over event ticketing)?
Yes, I opt-out of nearly every Ticketmaster event. It is an individual problem with an individual solution.
If so, you’re not gonna have a lot of friends, which is a pretty shitty way to live.
My friends largely also opt out. Perhaps we self select for like-mindedness.
This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete.
They can still lose my business if I opt out of the entire industry, such as corporate social media. No amount of competitors changes my mind on that. This could also be done on streaming services, choosing to read instead etc.
This isn’t just a systemic problem as the author suggests.
Your assessment is spot on.
If so, you’re not gonna have a lot of friends, which is a pretty shitty way to live.
Or you choose friends who will stay your friends even if you miss a concert???
I would argue that, if that is a requisite for them being your friends, they are not your friends. Win - win.
First, it looks like this may be a dressed up advertisement for their newly released book:
To be fair, this is a web archive of Cory Doctorow’s email newsletter, normally sent to a self-selecting audience that expects to see Cory try to sell us his stuff. But also, as the coiner of “enshittification” this is a subject he’s been examining for many years.
I don’t care.
I avoid the services as a protest and I also enjoy the alternatives.
I’m not going to bankrupt them, but I’m not helping them.
I’m not going to bankrupt them, but I’m not helping them.
That’s good!
If you ever want to step up to hurting them, you’ll probably need to party up.
I self-host open source software, pay for services that I don’t want to host (email, etc) and I prefer buying things to subscribing/renting things. I experience far less enshittification than most as a result.
Yeah fuck doing the right thing, just consume as you are told by corporationa… DEFF don’t eat any broccoli, they are gross!
Far be it from me to defend a jumping-off point for discussion, but I didn’t see anything in the essay saying that people shouldn’t “do the right thing.” Just the opposite, in fact (“Do all this! Do more! You’ll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better.”)
