It's a nice article, but like so many I feel like it has a reluctance to address some of the issues head-on. Like this:
> I’m not calling the tech industry evil.
Well. . . why not? I think at this point the tech industry is evil. Not in the sense that water is wet, and maybe not even in the sense that mammals birth live young, but sort of in the sense that ice occurs near the Earth's poles. There are some bits and pieces here and there that don't follow the pattern but they are the exception and they're getting smaller.
That doesn't mean that technology is evil, but the ways its being used and developed often are.
And that gets to another aspect of this that I feel like people in the tech world sometimes overlook when talking about this: enshittification is not a technological phenomenon. It's a social phenomenon that is driven by our socio-legal apparatus which allows and encourages high-risk pursuit of sky-high profits. Corporate raiding a la the Sears debacle, consolidation in grocery stores, even something like tobacco/health or oil/climate-change coverups, all these are forms of enshittification. Tech is the most prominent venue, maybe because it's especially suited to certain forms of vendor lock, but it's by no means the only one.
Enshittification happens because we are not willing to take a sledgehammer to the idea that making businesses bigger and bigger is a good thing. Timid reforms focused on things like data privacy are woefully inadequate. Large companies need to be directly dismantled, wealth needs to be directly deconcentrated, and broad swaths of behavior that are currently happening left and right need to become the kind of thing that will land you in prison for 10 years.
I'm not optimistic this is going to happen without some kind of "hitting bottom", though, whatever form that may take.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but too many people in power directly benefit fom enshittification for anything about it to change. Even just the problem of fixing the housing market while the majority of politicians own several properties is an example of this. There's zero incentive for anything to change.
I'm cynical enough to basically agree. :-) I do think it may change, but that's what I mean about hitting bottom. It may have to get so bad that there is some kind of violent uprising or societal collapse/fracturing.
Just by the by, ironically, I've heard, from my tenuous connections into ideological spheres outside my own, that a decent number of people voted for Trump out of a similar desire to shake the foundations of the system. Of course they've likely been hoodwinked, but I think the opportunity is there for a Bernie Sanders-esque person on the other side to make some change by whipping up a frenzy of rage at the status quo and promising to get out the pitchforks. The question is whether such a frenzy can be accompanied by enough cool-headed calculation to be effective.
> I’m not calling the tech industry evil.
Well. . . why not? I think at this point the tech industry is evil. Not in the sense that water is wet, and maybe not even in the sense that mammals birth live young, but sort of in the sense that ice occurs near the Earth's poles. There are some bits and pieces here and there that don't follow the pattern but they are the exception and they're getting smaller.
That doesn't mean that technology is evil, but the ways its being used and developed often are.
And that gets to another aspect of this that I feel like people in the tech world sometimes overlook when talking about this: enshittification is not a technological phenomenon. It's a social phenomenon that is driven by our socio-legal apparatus which allows and encourages high-risk pursuit of sky-high profits. Corporate raiding a la the Sears debacle, consolidation in grocery stores, even something like tobacco/health or oil/climate-change coverups, all these are forms of enshittification. Tech is the most prominent venue, maybe because it's especially suited to certain forms of vendor lock, but it's by no means the only one.
Enshittification happens because we are not willing to take a sledgehammer to the idea that making businesses bigger and bigger is a good thing. Timid reforms focused on things like data privacy are woefully inadequate. Large companies need to be directly dismantled, wealth needs to be directly deconcentrated, and broad swaths of behavior that are currently happening left and right need to become the kind of thing that will land you in prison for 10 years.
I'm not optimistic this is going to happen without some kind of "hitting bottom", though, whatever form that may take.