cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17602033
You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.
It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.
These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.
Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.
This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today I’m going to explain why. It’s going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem.
If one uses Spotify instead of a personal music collection one controls, this is what one gets. If one uses Facebook, Google or similar, this is what one gets.
I read about 1/3rd of the piece until I was sure that not a single one of the problems described concerns me. Because I don't use Sonos, I don't use Spotify and every other shitty service described as enshittified in this text.
I feel sorry for the technologically poor, every single sod who totally relinquishes control of most of their digital life, in a time when more and more of our daily live becomes digital, to people they know are out to get them. I will never understand it.
It doesn't have to be just the listed examples. It's just anything that ceases to listen to the community and starts making changes on a whim. I'm sure you've had some experience with any service changing just for the sake of changing.
Sure, that's why I self-host or use trusted services from people I actually know for EVERYTHING I can, not just the stuff that's too awful to accept. I can't be bothered with being disappointed and jump ships yet again.