• https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc

Doctorow’s ideas has a lot of radlib stuff in it.

It’s a three stage process: 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.

No, the platform was never good to their users because the platform was proprietary. He keeps praising the civilized “European/Western data privacy laws” but doesn’t actually confront the origin of the problem which, in its essence is nonfree software and capitalism.

That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?

Yuck.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

No, the capitalism of 20 years ago is the introduction of NDAs and nonfree licenses, of large corporate interests accumulating capital and training university researchers to become worker drones, essentially robbing the academic field to be put into factories. It was always bad, especially for minorities to be on the internet where there was little to no representation as technology used to be only an upper class hobby. The beginning of the end was 20 years ago when MIT researchers saw more value in proprietary software and control rather than keeping the software free. The material analysis stretches as far as Doctorow can retrace the steps of corporate giants and not those resisting the takeover since the 80s.

Wild and wooly internet is just a libertarian nostalgic fantasy. Bullshit takeovers were happening then and are happening now.

Martin Luther King said ‘It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.’

Yuck, why are you quoting MLK here in a talk about your social media treats going bad, real radlib energy.

He mentions nothing concrete you can go and support, just explains the problem in a milquetoast fashion. No mention of the GNU Project, Fediverse, Open Source Initiative, Right to Repair, Freedesktop, Linux etc. It’s the same level of analysis as succdems going over why capitalism is broken but saying nothing of the solution except “we got to do better y’all”.

He mentions nothing about software freedom, and that’s what I take issue with. There are more people in tech (especially em_poc and queer people) than ever yet still a frightening fraction of them actually know the history of resistance. Enshittification doesn’t help build a platform, it just builds resentment, the fact that it blew up in liberal circles is just making it seem like more of a red flag.

GNU Project despite not taking a clear stance against capitalism, is still more helpful since it provides people with an alternative worldview.

I might make a more organized post about this, but that’s just my ranty response to the term enshittification being as popular as it is.