Well, yeah. The majority of IT people understand unionizing would benefit them. It’s the work, the fear, and the unknown holding them back.

I’d vote to unionize in a heartbeat, but I’m not going to kid myself by pretending I’d put in the legwork to get that ball rolling. I have too much else going on in my life, I can barely hold together what responsibilities I do have.

I wonder how many of them would actually stand in solidarity with, say, warehouse workers.

His ideas aren't monetizable. They're a throwback to the golden age when tools and utilities were built for passion or need.

Now, tooling is built by for-profit corporations. It satisfies users enough that there isn't enough room for passion projects. For-profit tooling tends to get usability right.

Look at the fediverse: it's a workable system that users would be fine with, if more usable for-profit alternatives didn't exist.

i for one have never heard of this guy, i had read this talk but didnt even know the name of the person until just now. i am rather new to super niche internet spaces beyond the bigger niches though so i may not be a good representation.

This feels like a First Follower problem.

He’s clearly on the right track, but the first steps have a lot of inertia holding them back. Also, is hard to act as a community when we’re looking for those first few leaders to do something on their own that we as individuals can get behind.

We need some frameworks for action. I don’t think we know what that looks like yet.

tech community isn’t listening

I know I've posted basically this comment before, but they're listening.

They just don't care.

Nothing that's been enshittified has hurt their stock options or base pay or caused massive layoffs, and until all (most?) of those become true, they're not going to care.

Their customers keep eating the shit sandwich, they keep making $300k a year, and getting option refreshers, so nobody is going to rock the boat.

It's like with people who are stuck in traffic. They are frustrated and so they wish for for change. They wish for more lanes and more roads (and bigger cars, faster cars, more cars). The natural human reaction when something doesn't work is: Try the same thing harder! It's not to try something else.

I think we have all been in situations where we failed to push a door open, and so we angrily pushed again harder before easily pulling the door open.

I see lots of people agreeing that there is a problem, as evidenced by the popularity of the term "enshittification". But the reaction is to double down on the policies that got us here.

You can see that in AI threads here. People call for more intellectual property, more silo-ing of data. Of course, that won't work and Doctorow has explained that on several occasions. https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-13-spooky-action-at-a-close-up-invisible-hand-5c873636eb47

Other institutions that are apparently considered trustworthy also "side with AI companies", in that they understand that fair use is in the interest of society. For example, libraries including the Internet Archive. https://www.librarycopyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AI-principles.pdf https://blog.archive.org/2023/11/02/internet-archive-submits-comments-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence/

That's activism for you... 95% of people don't listen, but if 5% do, you already made a mark.

There’s Upton Sinclair’s famous remark that it’s “difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. There’s a part of them that does hear, but holds the understanding in abeyance, saving it for use when circumstances change and it no longer threatens their self-interest.

It's hard to convince tech people to be activists. There's this other term, in between bougie and proletariat that classifies the people in between. Something like, the people who have it just good enough to not give a shit.

And that's like all of tech.

Kinda surprising that this comment got downvotes on this video.

I thought that was kind of funny. “Here is a talk about enshitification, click on this YouTube link!” One of the primary enshitifiers.

Great! Like this, transcripts should be published more often

Your head is going to hurt even more if you are a German: The prefix "ent" usually means to lose or get rid of something. I.e. "I got rid of it" -> "Ich habe es entsorgt" so everytime I read "enshittification" I had to remind myself it's the process of making something worse not better.

So "disenshittification" is a double knot in my brain. I propose "disshittification" as alternative.

Because if one uses the word "good" sea lions en masse migrate immediately and surround the speaker demanding to change the subject to are ethics real and why the mean tone and is that even a word.

If it really had to be a word, couldn’t it be unshittify?