All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:
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We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge - when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union:
Vor neuem Unionsantrag sorgt der "Taurus" weiter für Unruhe
Kommende Woche will die Union erneut über eine "Taurus"-Lieferung an die Ukraine abstimmen lassen. SPD-Generalsekretär Kühnert sieht das gelassen. Doch die Kritik am Kurs des Kanzlers reißt nicht ab.
@tagesschau Zu Recht reißt die Kritik am #Kanzler nicht ab. Es geht um mehr als die Ukraine. Und da müssen auch wir in Deutschland mehr Initiative zeigen und mehr Verantwortung übernehmen. Mehr #Churchill, weniger #Chamberlain. Russland ist ein Terrorstaat. Es geht um unsere Freiheit, und die unserer Kinder.
We're living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
#AdversarialInteroperability is one of the most reliable ways to protect users from predatory corporations: it's when someone reverse-engineers a product to reconfigure or mod it (interoperability) in ways its users like, but which its manufacturer objects to (adversarial):
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Apple has many tools at its disposal that Microsoft lacked in the early 2000s. Radical new interpretations of existing copyright, contract, patent and trademark law allows Apple - and other tech giants - to threaten rivals who engage in comcom with both criminal and civil penalties. That's right, you can go to prison for comcom these days. No wonder calls this #FelonyContemptOfBusinessModel:
This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening - in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit - did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:
This gives rise to #JayFreeman's perfectly named doctrine of "#FelonyContemptOfBusinessModel," in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:
Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like?
How could this happen? Owners of #Chamberlain#MyQ automatic garage door openers just woke up to discover that the company had confiscated valuable features overnight, and that there was nothing they could do about it.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Enshittification hits garage door openers. My garage opener has the ability to open remotely through the app. Now, they want to use the app that has ads so they can sell you more products.(no wonder my workaround to make it work with Homekit hasn't been working)
Isn't this an abuse of monopoly since they control like most of the garage door opener market.