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‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’ (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 19 hours ago by HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to c/world@lemmy.world
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The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”

The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.

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[–] HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works 36 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

Cory Doctorow describes the stages of enshittification as follows:

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.

And for good measure he reminds us of the why and how things used to be better:

The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

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

[–] manxu@piefed.social 6 points 8 hours ago

You know, I agree with him that the pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership, but I don't think he got the reason for the change right. I think what we call Late Stage Capitalism comes from a single source: corporations don't give a rat's ass any longer if they exist in ten years. They are willing to toss reputation and long-term prospects out the window because the only metric that matters is quarterly numbers.

It's a thing I noticed on the Internet. I wondered why so many sites become big and then shoot themselves in the foot. We are on Lemmy (well, I am on Piefed) now, many of us from enshittified Reddit. But Reddit was the savior from an enshittified Digg, which was the savior from an enshittified Slashdot, etc. It figures that each iteration knew they were going to die making the choice they made, but also knew the quarter would be spectacular.

That worries me, because it's much easier to destroy something than to build it. If you go and look, the Internet is slowing down. It isn't being innovated, despite the need to do so. Instead, the big players see something grow, and they use their massive resources to buy it and kill it.

That's why I love open source: what is being built has long term plans. The main way that open source projects get enshittified is when they close source innovation and then follow the same trajectory as the big companies.

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Was there a "pre-enshittifcation era" or were we merely at the first stage of system-wide enshitification?

[–] HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

The late 90's, early 00's were pre-. About 2003-05 it started becoming enshittified, ie: ISPs started throttling, a lot of forums were bought out and/or priced out, etc.