this is (if you're me) actually a really important point. I feel like something can only really become shit if it starts from a shit place. Even if along the way it managed to be good at *something* it still started from a opportunity of the means to a self-serving ends
I haven't entirely lost my techno optimism. The seeds of enshittification are planted by grafting monetization onto a technology. I have become convinced over the years that this is a law of economics and that there is no possibility of an exception to this rule. The only unenshittified technology is an unmonetized technology.
The only sense in which it was always shit is the rules of the capitalist system that allowed someone to "own" the type of control that could enshittify it.
@dalias It was always shit because it was funded by venture capital and thus, from Day 1, had to work towards its exit (sale). As long as this is how tech is funded, it is always going to be shit.
Ownership of information is a real danger zone, as it opens the door to information asymmetry and other unfair arrangements. Notice how many Silicon Valley business models basically amount to creating informational one-way valves, that collect information in wholesale quantities and dispense it one data point at a time, or worse, systems that transmit high-value signal (direct observations of human behavior) in one direction, and noise (bloat) in the other direction. Unfortunately, information wants to be valuable, not free. If there is hope, it is in the fact that many people want information to be free, and the actions of those people in the aggregate (or better yet collective action) might be able to free large amounts of information, even some information that doesn't want to be free. Also unfortunately, the hacker ethic is largely dead. Hopefully it is not too late to revive it. #pubwan
Stephen Farrugia
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Lorraine Lee likes this.
Aral Balkan
in reply to Stephen Farrugia • • •Stephen Farrugia
in reply to Stephen Farrugia • • •Lorraine Lee
in reply to Stephen Farrugia • •like this
Baldur Bjarnason and clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 like this.
n8chz 🩎 reshared this.
Lorraine Lee
in reply to Lorraine Lee • •I wrote this (afaik) before Doctorow gave us the more descriptive term.
astoundingteam.com/wordpress/2…
like this
Baldur Bjarnason and Chris Dolunt like this.
reshared this
n8chz 🩎 and Wietze Brandsma reshared this.
Cassandrich
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Cassandrich • • •Lorraine Lee
in reply to Cassandrich • •n8chz 🩎 reshared this.
Clinton Anderson SwordForHire
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •