from HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to world@lemmy.world on 16 Mar 10:05
https://sh.itjust.works/post/56890254
The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
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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.
If you want a specific variety of a plant that’s patented by, say, Monsanto, you don’t own the seeds you get but rather their permission to plant them.
If you re-plant seeds in your own field produced by the crops of the previous year on that same field they can sue you and they will win (see Bowman v. Monsanto Co.)
Indeed. IP / patents is clearly a source of issue in physical objects as well. But once you buy them seeds they stay « according to the initial specs ». They won’t suddenly grow another plant once you have them.
You might not be allowed to do anything you want but that’s another annex issue.
They’ll also sue your neighbour if your plants spread seeds to their land.
Enshittification is the product of high-barriers to entry in markets, especially monopolies.
As it so happens, the entirety of Intellectual Property legislation purposefully and artificially creates monopolies where they would naturally never exist and give said monopolies to specific people, supposedly the creators of intellectual works and inventions, but in practice it’s to companies.
So, unsurprisingly, it’s in the domains were Intellectual Property dominates - were monopolies are not just common but actually the norm - that the most enshittification happens.
So yeah, Patents, anything to do with Music or Video distribution, Software and because of things like anti-circunvention legislation (which is supposed to block unautorized copy of copyrighted materials) in general any form of digital content since for-profit companies invariably place digital content under some form of access control exactly because they can use anti-circumvention legislation to block their customers from moving to better products and services without incurring significant inconvenience.
IMHO, tearing down Intellectual Property legislation (or at least have it include forced interoperability as well as make consumer data be owned by the actual consumers with company-bankrupting fines for abuse) would reverse most enshittification, at least in the digital world (were anti-circumvention legislation is especially bad in terms of destroying even the smallest element of a Free Market).
This is why I only seed torrents
That’s cool. Good thing I have a black light, and can modify the seeds the same way they do. Therefore, not the same seeds.
Edit: didn’t make this clear enough, the idea is to lightly modify their seeds just enough to make it legal. If they want to be shitty, we can be shitty right back. Any rule they make for us they make exceptions for the rich. Therefore, with enough cleverness and a stubborn refusal to accept others bullshit(and a bit of spite) you can exploit their rules and bend them to your will.
can’t beat physical media
Yeah but I’m not putting my turn table in my back pack to go fishing with ;-)
I don’t know about fishing, but I use a portable turntable to listen to records outside.
The power cable is USB, so it runs fine on a powerbank. The speakers are horrible, so I also bring a portable battery powered speaker.
It’s not really worth the hassle in comparison to just using a Bluetooth speaker, but it’s an excellent way to waste time on a long summers night.
There’s always the in between “ipod-era” setup, which is what I’m trying to transition back to: ripping and collecting media locally, then listening to it on my phone without streaming.
Ha yeah the times of my creatives « something ». It was so easy to manage. Less convenient than Spotify but that was super nice. Though it’s bound that there a plex equivalent for audio that I could look into. Family sharing is one of the functions I would miss going back to the dedicated player.
I use Jellyfin for simplicity, which probably isn’t the most preferred service for music, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re accessing it from your choice of mobile app anyway. You can set it up to stream your music library to your phone anywhere if you want also. (Android Auto even has an app)
I’m not confident enough to open up my media server to the outside world yet because I’m still a noob at this stuff, so I just have my full library when I’m at home and anything I’ve downloaded to my phone while I’m out.
You can even set up family sharing - you just give them a login, and they have access to all the same music.
On the open to the outside world I bypassed the issue by only allowing vpn into the local network and the particular subnet allowed to vpn users is itself limited to specific resources on our internal network. Removes a lot of headaches but in general I don’t go for the hassle to setup the vpn accounts for rando / acquaintances.
I looked into jellyfin but my first attempt was not the success I hoped it would be hence why I use plex for videos.
Smart idea to use such a solution for audio but it likely comes with limited playlists features and no lyrics ?
Playlists are easy enough so far. It just depends on what app you use to access it, I think. I don’t know if there’s a limit. I’ve never looked into lyrics, but I would assume it doesn’t offer that unless it’s pulled with the metadata or something.
You can have digital no problem. I have 25 year old mp3s. It just needs to be physically on your drives. You can pirate or purchase music today without issues. Spotify just scratched that laziness itch at one point in time and now you are locked in.
For anyone who is interested in returning to simple mp3 players, check out the Snowsky range by Fiio.
The Echo Mini and soon to be released Echo Nano are pretty great little pieces that inhabit the offline music (and not your phone) space.
Edit - and Bandcamp or Soulseek to fill the drives up :)
I have some cowon player around here but cannot find it anymore. That old thing supports 128gb via SD card.
What I would like is something modern, small player with a clip and Bluetooth for the buds.
Running could be so awesome but here we are running around with heavy phones. I guess some people use watches like that.
In his Enshittification book, Cory referred to this as “technofeudalism” —essentially the return to the feudal society where there are owner elites and peasant subjects. The owners control everything, and the peasant have to rent access under the terms and conditions set by the owners. In the technofeudalism model, everybody (the peasants) have to subscribe to access anything from the corporations (the owner elites), with the corporations retaining all the power.
Sadly, enshittification on wiki is defined somewhat different and without official sources they well not change it.
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.
Actually, I think that’s the main process of enshittification, but I don’t think enshittification is always deliberate.
Very often software products are tweaked, changed, or even degraded in an attempt to “simplify” or “improve” a particular user experience at the expense of another UX.
And to make matters worse, some companies end up with a Frankenstein product of confusing functions because they are trying to cater to two entirely different user bases within the same product.
E.g. Microsoft may genuinely have believed that changing their system settings UI in Windows 11 to “consolidate and reduce drift” of system configurations would improve the everyday user experience, but they failed to account for the decades of inertia they’d built up from their prior OS user base and how that would piss off a not-insignificant number of other users who had grown accustomed to the way the product had previously worked.
Cory Doctorow describes the stages of enshittification as follows:
And for good measure he reminds us of the why and how things used to be better:
…medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittificatio…
Was there a “pre-enshittifcation era” or were we merely at the first stage of system-wide enshitification?
The late 90’s, early 00’s were pre-. About 2003-05 it started becoming enshittified, ie: ISPs started throttling, a lot of forums were bought out and/or priced out, etc.
That’s still not it, though. Extracting maximum revenue is just the default state for all things in capitalism, so it is not a qualifier or distinction that is useful to identify enshitification.
Enshitification is a model specifically for platforms. It’s not enshitification if it isn’t a platform; that’s just sparkling greed.
The “for the purpose of extracting maximum revenue” is a bit redundant, though.
Everything a corporation does is for that purpose.
Feels very fitting for The Guardian to downplay how the profit motive inherent in capitalism contributes to enshittification, even when Doctorow’s original definition clearly includes it.
More of this plz
Here are the proposals: …forbrukerradet.no/…/2026-02-27-final-letter-to-e…
Rebalance power between service providers and consumers.
Tackle dependency on Big Tech
Double down on the enforcement of existing laws.
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? 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.
IIRC, when telephones were in their infancy, you would only be able to contact people within your network. Imagine only being able to call other T mobile customers.
We did it back then, we can do it now. No more walled gardens.
Interoperability between messengers was already proposed, that’s why I mentioned it. But other than that? Are they proposing TikTok, Instagram and Youtube Shorts to somehow exchange content and let users from one service interact with content from other service? Messages have very similar functionality but other services not necessarily. What kind of interoperability are we talking about?
Why is the thumbnail Zach Galifianakis?
It’s a screenshot from the ad on Norwegian tv.
Always good to check the article before commenting.
It was a joke due to the resemblance
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.
Ummm… It’s happening constantly in the “analogue” world.
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.
It can change, but it’ll require a large number of people seeing it as a problem worth addressing. Companies currently don’t value customer experience very well and haven’t for a long time, witness how phone customer service has become loaded with automated services standing between users and a small phone support staff. But if that were change, if stockholders were to come to see how much users hate that, and more importantly if users were to base their habits on that decision, it might cause things to improve. Money people, despite their near-legendary density, tend to be very nervous about trends. It might be possible to spook them.
Well, I think it could happen. I’ve been wrong before.
Remove shareholders from the equation.
It won’t stop until stocks are no longer a thing.
Honestly it seems like a bad idea to have stocks in the first place
Like a loan shark you can never get rid of.
Why does this even exist ?
I remember learning about the stock market in grade school and I thought it was stupid then and I think it’s stupid now.
It’s harmful in pretty much every way.
Stocks aren’t necessarily a bad thing since they in theory represent abstract ownership of a thing. Perfectly fine when privately held, it becomes an increasingly problematic thing when. Traded on an open market though.
Government should be the balancing act in response to this. Regulations enforced by Governments.
The problem is upload speeds are too low on consumer ISP, and monopolies like Microsoft that Norwegian countries many times break their own procurement laws to use.
Not sure I agree with the statement that we wouldnt accept 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.
Absolutely - enshittification isn’t just an internet phenomenon, but literally everything has been getting worse because oligarchs are squeezing more money out of us.
I think the point was if it was a person physically doing it to you, you wouldn’t just sit there watching them do it.
I agree with everything you said, but why you gotta do power windows dirty like that 😭
Someone call Richard Hendricks
youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ
Here’s the video, it’s funny cause it’s infuriatingly true.
Genius
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.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2d082910-efcc-4352-86cb-578a16396827.png">