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As they say. The cloud is someone else's computer.

Emphasis on someone else

Funny, just today I found out my subscription to addy.io, the email alias company, was somehow deactivated, and I reactivated it today. Unfortunately, any emails or email metadata sent to deactivated aliases are not kept on their servers, which is fantastic for privacy, but then I start thinking, "what if these were important emails I couldn't get because my subscription was fucked with?", or "what happens if the email alias service goes down and I can't get any emails I was expecting?”. Now I'm at a crossroads as to whether or not I should continue primarily using my aliases for my emails, or just provide my true email for important services and leave potential spam/junk to the aliases.

Sidenote, the reason I wanted to use my aliases as my primary email contact was because of breaches I discovered via Have I Been Pwned. I think I did go a bit too far in the opposite direction, so now I need to find that middle ground. Definitely gonna make some changes over the next few days with my email addresses on my accounts.

A few days ago I tried to find the best frame of the video to turn into a meme. This is what I came up with.

Not sure I agree with the statement that we wouldnt accpet enshittification in our analog lives... ovens and refrigerators with screens and becoming unrepairable, cars are only sold with onboard computers and power windows with no other price point, materials for most household items becoming plastic / single use / or deliberately designed with a failure lifetime. I recently started buying clothing with no synthetics and they are unfathomably better performing in terms of breathing, odor, comfort and warmth. We've forgotten what physical products used to be like, in 20 years we will have similarly forgotten what un-enshittified internet / tech was like.

I think, and perhaps it's scarier than anyone wants to admit, we've already gotten accustomed to or given up fighting against enshittification of the analog world.

The common thread is capital and financialization and there can be never be progress until the ideas in "how to win friends and influence people" are called out as demonic and unhuman.

You'd need to make better humans first. oops

https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ

Here's the video, it's funny cause it's infuriatingly true.

As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue. It is a race to the bottom.
How do you fix that without massive upheaval for the people you are trying to help. I don't know.
Companies used to have a smaller reach, meaning less total and potential customers. So they had to balance what what was good for the shareholders qith what was good for the customers or risk losing both. But products are often global now, especially digital ones. There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose. And investors don't care as much about the long term since they can trade stocks so quickly. Maybe the solution is required holding periods for stocks or something. Higher short term capital gains taxes, and better incentives for long term gains.

The problem is capitalism. Specifically, the consolidation of power in a small number of decision makers.

Break up the big companies. Stop letting them do mergers and acquisitions. You don't even have to do something radical like dismantling capitalism entirely.

For me it’s a tale about loss of ownership in a dematerialised world. No one is going to cut a piece of my dining table because I own it and physically have it entirely at my side.

I’ll never own (my locally installed) Spotify nor the songs I listen to. Though for the later I have vinyl alternatives which no one is touching.

the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere

That's not exactly what it is, though. Enshittification is the deliberate degradation of a product for the purpose of extracting maximum revenue, where the product is progressively degraded up to the point where the consumer ditches it, but not exactly to it.

Without the tie to maximum revenue and measurement of consumer ability to cope, it's hard to understand why enshittification is so brutally frustrating.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,”

Ummm... It's happening constantly in the "analogue" world.

Here are the proposals: https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/2026-02-27-final-letter-to-eu-policymakers-2.pdf

1. Rebalance power between service providers and consumers.

2. Tackle dependency on Big Tech

3. Double down on the enforcement of existing laws.

4. Close the existing legal loopholes by adopting a strong Digital Fairness Act.

Nothing concrete. 3, 4 are mainly about enforcing GDPR. 2 is a job for public sector. All this is not really related to enshitification, it's more about independence from US tech.

That leaves us with 1, which they describe as "It should be possible and practical to switch to alternative service providers, or tweak services they already use to suit their needs and preferences".

Sounds great but what does it really mean? You can already switch to alternative provides. You don't have to use Google or Facebook. Are they suggesting I should be able to move my facebook account to some other site? Which one? Other than some sort of interoperability between messaging apps I don't really see how this would work.

Tweak the services? Are they going to mandate some preferences? I don't see what preferences would stop Instagram from being shitty.

I don't think trying to fix Big Tech is the right way to go. What tweaks would save Reddit for example? The issue was moderation and bots. What tweaks would fix Instagram?

I think the only alternative to current shitty internet is internet paid for by the users based on common protocols, self-hosting and federation. You want to post things on the internet? Host some open source service or pay someone else to host it for you. Most people will still prefer to pay corporations with their data and watch endless ads instead of paying directly to the service providers but at least there would be an alternative. And as Bit Tech enshittifies more and more people would jump to open source the way we're seeing with Windows and Linux. For me, what EU should be doing is pouring money into open source project and hosting open source services.