Can Cory Doctorow's 'Enshittification' Transform the Tech Industry Debate? (nytimes.com) 76
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Over the course of a nearly four-decade career, Cory Doctorow has written 15 novels, four graphic novels, dozens of short stories, six nonfiction books, approximately 60,000 blog posts and thousands of essays. And yet for all the millions of words he's published, these days the award-winning science fiction author and veteran internet activist is best known for just a single one: Enshittification. The term, which Doctorow, 54, popularized in essays in 2022 and 2023, refers to the way that online platforms become worse to use over time, as the corporations that own them try to make more money. Though the coinage is cheeky, in Doctorow's telling the phenomenon it describes is a specific, nearly scientific process that progresses according to discrete stages, like a disease.
Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe -- a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself. "It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying," Doctorow said in a 2024 speech. On Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Doctorow's book-length elaboration on his essays, complete with case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop) and his prescriptions for change, which revolve around breaking up big tech companies and regulating them more robustly. Further reading: The Enshittification Hall of Shame
Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe -- a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself. "It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying," Doctorow said in a 2024 speech. On Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Doctorow's book-length elaboration on his essays, complete with case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop) and his prescriptions for change, which revolve around breaking up big tech companies and regulating them more robustly. Further reading: The Enshittification Hall of Shame
Disintermediation in tech (Score:5, Insightful)
Limit the number of internet connected, soon to be bricked, devices you have.
Buy less unnecessary disposable tech (Score:2)
Cut your own e-waste.
Cut the number of times an Amazon truck delivers a product and a cardboard box to you.
Keep your phone an extra month.
Recycling is 100% effective and pollution free if you did not buy the thing to be recycled in the first place.
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Limit the number of internet connected, soon to be bricked, devices you have.
That's just saying to limit the number of devices you have since it's really hard to find anything that doesn't "phone home" for something.
I got new fiber internet service as soon as it was offered in my area, which was a couple years ago now. The stupid router/modem/whatever had horrible documentation and to do anything on changing settings meant I'd have to create an account on some website. I've had internet modems before but this was the first time I had one "phone home" to do anything as simple as ch
Re:Disintermediation in tech (Score:4, Interesting)
To your question, I have a legacy Carrier infinity 10 zone system that only has RS422 interface.
Carrier makes expensive touch screen Wifi thermostats that phone home.
I hooked up a Raspberry Pi 3B+ through the RS422 bus with a USB interface.
I run software called Infinitive. It is connected to Home assistant via MQTT.
I connect to Home assistant via a Wireguard VPN on my pfSense router.
None of it phones Home.
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I also run home assistant. There's a few problems with what you want to do -
1) The easiest devices to integrate are *already* in the cloud, and you add some credentials to let HA automate the API
2) Using local automation protocols like Zigbee or Z-wave
3) Hackery via various serial protocols or MODBUS or something to get it to work as you expect.
The average internet user has ZERO experience with almost any of this which is why alexa/google home are so popular. It Just Works, except when it doesn't, and you c
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Actually this is one area where things are slowly getting un-shittified. Now we have Matter for IoT devices, they can all work locally using a common API for discovery and control. Home Assistant supports it. Even if the manufacturer abandons the product, it will still work.
It's not perfect. Some devices still need a special app to set them up initially. But it's improving too. We could do with some built in firewalling in consumer routers too, to improve security. Like they usually come with a guest WiFi f
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I'm not incompetent at Linux, installing things isn't normally too difficult, with exceptions.
HA being one.
HA has been made so complex that it cannot, by a casual user, be installed into an existing Linux system. Either install the HAOS, or run it in a container, which brings you to the caveat, ' Home Assistant Container installations don’t have access to add-ons.'
'and manually handle updates.'
Quotes from the HA website. Official notices.
Or buy a preinstalled hardware solution. And if you choose 'Adva
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It's really not too tough to run it in a VM. VMs get full plugin support. I went from knowing nothing about running VMs under Linux to standing up a KVM instance of HA in a couple hours of research. I used the virt-manager tool.
I've had very good experience with it, with the caveat that I only used Z-Wave and Matter. I don't bother trying to integrate most of the other stuff it discovers.
Here the command I used. The only thing that would differ between instances would be the --hostdev flag which was use
Re: Disintermediation in tech (Score:2)
Ah. Well, using a RPi 5 makes this interesting. I'll try spinning this up on a spare. This looks like trying to do an HAOS type install, raspberries are fun.
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Can confirm, except in my case I used Proxmox. Just downloaded the HAOS (Generic x86-64), created a bootable USB drive with Balena Etcher, assigned that to the VM (hardware passthrough) and let the VM boot. The installer of HAOS will do its thing and soon after you will be able to access the web-interface from HA via whatever device in your LAN (or VLAN).
Almost forgot to mention: What I did beforehand was to assign a DHCP reservation in my DHCP server for this VM, in order to give this VM a static IP addres
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I've thought about this kind of thing, but realized that in many cases the time and energy needed to build and maintain such a system outweighs the cost of replacing a commercial solution when it enshittifies every 5-10 years.
Similar thing with data. I could spend time sorting through all my photos and music, my old projects, freeing up space... But it's cheaper to just buy more storage, assuming I value my free time as low as minimum wage.
There are times when it is worth it. An OpenWRT router is a good exa
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Pretty much the same here. The only "appliance" I maintain myself is my firewall/fileserver/router, which is my now 15 year old former gaming PC now running Linux. Has 3-way RAID 1 for reliable storage (2.5" disks kept falling out of the 2-way RAID 1 when I set that up and yes, I have backups and reserve hardware), several network cards (had to replace 2 in 15 years) and is entirely fine and fast enough for GbE. Yes, I could get 10GbE without paying more, but what for?
Home automation? No interest. There is
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I prefer dedicated router hardware for routers. As well as being lower power and usually not needing a fan, I just find them more reliable. Also if they support OpenWRT then you can be use that the WiFi is probably decent.
For home automation the main thing is energy management. When you have solar and batteries it's quite a useful system. Also for EVs. You can tie it in to things like Octopus Agile to take advantage of low and negative prices. I also like having some temperature sensors in there.
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Energy management is done by the electricity supplier here. They do a lot of solar, with water as backup.
I do understand that if you run your own solar, some home automation becomes interesting. In the matter of reliability, I am still at zero outages with that Linux-based solution and I do not invest a lot of time.
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I mean you can optimize your bill a lot. For example, say you have an EV, solar, and a battery. You get the EV rate at night, or just use Agile where you pay an amount based on demand. You charge the battery and EV when energy is cheap, or available from solar. You run your house from the battery and solar when energy is expensive. You discharge your battery into the grid when it is most profitable to do so.
With a decent size battery and typical consumption, your bill can be around £-250/year. A
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Obviously, if that is the situation. And in that case some home-automation makes a lot of sense.
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Why would I add any automation (that then leeches my time and makes things less reliable) on top of that?
Sounds your are not going to be receptive to the upcoming wave of products that automate your home "but with AI".
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You can't have a wifi device that doesn't phone home because the manufacturer keeps the price down by selling your data. While the fee per user may not be much, in aggregate it allows them to reduce prices enough that nobody can compete without doing this. It's been tried quite a few time with seversl different types of device, but the increase in price to pay for not selling your data is more than most people are willing to pay and so none of these attempts were successful. So if you want a wifi thermostat
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There are zigbee thermostats (at least for radiators) that do not require a cloud connection. The trade off to not having a cloud connection and hence a centralized app is user-supplied technical skill, which is lacking in 99% of the population, thus why cloud connected devices are popular.
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If you buy brand name HVAC, you rarely get to choose the connection method. Mine is Z-Wave. The HVAC is worth it. YMMV.
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You can buy super cheap wifi devices that doesn't phone home from Ali or similar. Much cheaper than the ones that phone home. A wifi thermostat is super cheap. What you can't buy is plug and play software which doesn't phone home. That's what's costly. Not the device itself. The software infrastructure.
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Set up a separate wifi network with no outside connection.
Re: Disintermediation in tech (Score:1)
A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 costs $15 and has 2.4 GHz WiFi. WiFi enabled microcontrollers that manufacturers use are cheaper.
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That is the US situation, where people apparently do not know how to vote in their own best interest. In Europe that would be a crime without informed consent (and needs to be default-off and must be sold without the need to turn it on) and hence does not happen.
This really is a problem that stems from the US being effectively a 3rd world "shithole" with regards to privacy laws.
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the manufacturer keeps the price down by selling your data.
Except for Amazon (Ring). Amazon never sells customer data, hasn't since its foundation. Of course it will flog that data unmercifully to try to extract useful information from it to try to sell you shit, but they'll never let it out of their own hands. At Google on the other hand that's their entire business model.
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Limit the number of internet connected, soon to be bricked, devices you have.
That's just saying to limit the number of devices you have since it's really hard to find anything that doesn't "phone home" for something.
Counterpoint: no it isn't; you just want dogshit things in your life (such as a Wi-Fi -enabled thermostat).
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It should be cheaper, but it isn't, because standalone devices often come with a huge support cost. It's standalone but now you have to tell people how to configure the device and get it on the network.
You can't use an app, because an app eventually grows stale - you're depending on the app store. There are more than a few devices out there where the app is gone and there's no way to do anything with the device.
You can do the classic "we do wifi access point you connect to" but now you run into problems on
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Can't I just have an app on my phone to check the humidity without an internet connection?
1) If thingy doesn't work without internet put it back in the box and return it. 2) Never use ISPs built in router, just buy a good router, and use it with any ISP. You don't have to reset the router, when not if, the modem goes kaput.
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AFAIK the Ecobee WiFi thermostat works with HomeKit or whatever Google's equivalent is. Sh
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Not a problem. My Windows PCs (when MS collapses and becomes unusable) will go to Linux. I do not fear for my Android phone, because it is a Fairphone and custom ROM installation (or even patching the original build-image) is not an issue. I do not have any other cloud-dependent stuff.
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Me too!
Now go forth [youtube.com]
No. (Score:2)
The right cashflows could. Alas, they all appear to go in the other direction.
There is no debate (Score:5, Interesting)
Large companies have too much power to go up against with anything except government or massive amounts of organization AKA unions.
About half the country has laid down their arms and chosen to comply in advance rather than fight back with the only weapons they have. A little bit of voter suppression and a little bit of threats of violence is enough to keep the other half in line.
For the time being there letting us bitch and moan but it won't be long before we lose even that privilege.
I would be curious to get honest answers from the half that has given up on what they think they got in return. But that's kind of a moot point.
Anything we could use to stop everything from getting worse isn't on the table and all that's left are fools fantasizing about fighting back against heavily armed and trained and supplied soldiers and militarized police with their little semi-automatic rifles. Maybe fully automatic if they know how to use a machine shop...
I would love for somebody to explain specifically what they expect us to do against large tech companies. You could say don't buy their products but let's not kid ourselves here. Boycotts don't work in the face of mega corporations that control basically every market. You dropping Linux on a few of your home computers doesn't stop Facebook from materially affecting your life in a negative way.
I'm open to solutions but I've yet to have anyone give me anything useful or concrete. Just a lot of cope and a lot of bitching
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Yes, it is (just) a dream. Because the customers dream is to buy a cheap product. And buy again when it breaks early.
80% of small businesses fail (Score:3)
It is extremely hard to start a small business. When you look at people who start businesses most of the time they did it because they either used to have a extremely high paying job and have a ton of savings and/or they have family backing them.
Je
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I recently looked for a locksmith shop and found the closest is two towns away (it
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Lack of single payer healthcare also keeps tons of people from starting a business for themself. By the time someone has built up enough experience to have a good chance of making it on their own, they'll have a family depending on them so they can't take the big risk of leaving a steady job.
The spouse/kids have a medical issue that isn't a huge deal in any other civilized country, but you're now dependent on healthcare subsidized by your employer for them to get treatment without bankrupting the family. Mo
Re:There is no debate (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be curious to get honest answers from the half that has given up on what they think they got in return.
If they are anything like me, it's simple really. At one point I realized I cannot fix the world, so rather than sulk about what is happening, I simply adapt to the ever changing world and do what is best for me and my family. For example, I don't use almost any social media, never had a FB account, or WhatsUp, or Instagram, or Twitter/X, etc, but I've made money on some of their stock. Same for some companies making internet dependent appliances, most people love them, I paid extra for few of my appliances to not have an internet connection. Once they become pay per use, or simply bricked because manufacturer discontinues the service, I say you sleep in the bed you made for yourself. People will do what people will do regardless of what I think, even if I think it's stupid or bad for them, so that is irrelevant, therefore why not hookup to that gravy train to benefit me or my family if I can. Democracy, whether in politics or in markets where people vote with their money or giving away their personal information, means the majority rules. Majority of humanity is not that bright, and I think getting dumber with time, so you have to treat their decisions like natural disasters - try to avoid areas at risk, and have contingency plans if one hits you.
You can't adapt to 25% unemployment (Score:2, Insightful)
You can get lucky, very very lucky and maybe you will avoid all those little disasters until you get to die peacefully in your sleep. But that's not adaption that's blind dumb luck.
And every year as
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You can't adapt to complete total economic collapses every 5 to 10 years
Except we don't have total economic collapse every 5 to 10 years. Think carefully what you think "total economic collapse" means.
I've been through downturns (the dot-com, the great recession and contract freezes during the 2013 government shutdown.) But none of them were total collapse.
PS. We will all experience an economic shit show once in our lives, and yes, we can adapt. And if we are wise, we can learn to prepare (and perhaps even better, elect politicians that work with the private sector to preve
Total collapse (Score:2)
A total economic collapse would result in 10% to 50% of the entire population starving to death around the entire world.
One solution to unwind the risk level is to slowly reduce the amount of debt and amount of financial derivatives over a decade or two.
Not a solution but there is a modern example where Russia defaulted on its foreign owned debt in 2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:There is no debate (Score:5, Insightful)
The EU is doing stuff about it. Requirements to make products repairable, batteries swappable, minimum support periods, clear warnings that paid services are requires, refunds where functionality is significantly changed.
Props to Doctorow though. Coining such a compelling and accurate word has really helped with consumer understanding of the issue. Even in places like the US where the corporations make the rules, consumers are starting to understand and demand better.
Here's an old song that seems to fit (Score:2)
https://loudroundrecords.com/I... [loudroundrecords.com]
Unsubscribe (Score:3)
unsubscribe
Betteridge's Law (Score:2)
NT
Prompted by the Algorithm (Score:2)
Don’t fall into declinism (Score:2)
Enshittification fits dominant, ad-funded, high-lock-in platforms (subsidize -> lock-in -> extract). Generalizing to "tech is getting worse" or "Everything Suddenly Got Worse" is selection bias: declinism.
Anti-trust (Score:2)
Large companies have too much power to go up against with anything except government or massive amounts of organization AKA unions.
This is exactly the problem. The related problem is that politicians are too beholden to lobbyists paid by those large companies. Hence, the necessary enforcement of anti-trust legislation never happens, or it happens in slow-motion over decades of court cases.
The cure? Make ant-trust enforcement fast and automatic. Determine a maximum allowed size for a company, measured by turnover. Any company reaching half of this size is prohibited from M&A activity. Any company that reaches that size must divest.
Greed is a social cancer (Score:3)
It's contagious. It's killing the host.
The wealthiest are hording and the majority they are crushing in the process are pissed off.
There is no good and evil in it, it's a natural process, a disease we don't manage properly and the prognosis is War.
The wealthiest have most influence over the lawmakers who also want to be wealthy, or need the money for campaigns.
The poorest are so desperate they'll reach out for anything to stay afloat. Even voting to be poorer.
The politicians have failed to fix this. Perhaps the people need to show them how, a project 2025 of their own, a crowd sourced manifesto of what you really want to see for your country. I'd start with what you define as "Freedom" , you look like rent slaves from here.
no it can't (Score:2)
the major reason enshittification happens is because of how software development is financed.
basically, as a company creating a product, you front the dev costs to build something that usually can’t justify those costs on its own. in other words, if you just put that money into an investment fund instead, you’d probably end up with a higher NPV.
but you still do it, because you expect the project to eventually consume itself through enshittification... and in the process, recoup the costs and hop
I'm going to read this... (Score:2)
... but I don't believe an effective and sustainable solution can even be possible in a world under a global operating system the kernel of which is running on the principle of the maximization of exploitation of potentially everyone and everything to create monetary profit, the principle of all against all. A world in which only the richest are getting richer who are also the only ones with the means to further shape the world to their advantage, which tends to be hardly anyone else's advantage.
Everythinf that could be bad about an article. (Score:2)
Headline is a question?
Paragraph of Cory Doctrow attention whoring before getting to the point.
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Just had to add "anonymous reader". Fuckoff back to boingboing cory.
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Yep, posted on boingboing just fine for years.
Then suddenly one day some 10 year master chief of the BBS or something got upset with me and was clearly trying to stir up a mob.. I didn't even bother responding and just sent kenh an email to delete my account and any private data they have. Fuck those guys.
It got me curious who jarden and doctorow and all those other clowns were to be so famous anyhow. Literal nobodies who spun tall and interesting tales to the press and not really anything more. Literall
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Holy cats they did move to substack and charge $5.
This is probably a good move for them. Everyone who went there knew all the ads were for shitty wish.com crap and probably stopped buying off the store years ago. This was they can have a safe walled garden to talk to their friends.
I'm sure some shills tried to post there in the past but literally the only reason i was there was because the site was obscure enough that the economics of propagandizing the site don't really work out. Probably an issue betw
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And it has a link to a paywalled article on the New York Times. Yeah... this is peak Slashdot Enshittification as well.
What does data cost? (Score:2)
Does anyone have any real numbers about the monetary values involved with the internets?
Sony/Microsoft/EA/Whoever cannot keep a game validation server running for a moment more than necessary lest the costs immediately bankrupt their $multibillion global enterprise, yet my IOT toilet brush sends high definition AV which is then sold on advertisers desperate to personalise their AI presentations about air fresheners.
Streaming services need to increase their fees every few months because sending data over the
Wait until Cory starts buying tools (Score:3)
Re:Wait until Cory starts buying tools (Score:4, Insightful)
Enshittification isn't just "products getting worse over time" - it is where companies take an existing service, and either add features that benefit another party at your expense, or remove necessary features for it to function. Ex: You buy an ad-free streaming service to stream a certain TV series. The company then puts ads on it and removes the series you were watching. Or you visit a web site regularly, but now you have to sign-up to access it. Or the site now displays a bunch of pop-ups and only works on a particular operating system or browser.
If it was capitalism, you would just switch to a different streaming provider / web site. But with enshittification, there are barriers preventing that. Ex: No one else streams that series, or all the similar web sites require a login. In capitalism someone wins and someone loses, but with enshittification everyone loses.
This is different from "You buy a new pair of jeans, and it isn't manufactured as well as their previous line of jeans."
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I'd argue what Enshitification is in this context is demands that are implemented to maximize short term revenues. My take: it's a lack of proper life cycle planning for products and/or software.
The products and/or software life cycles either exceed or fail to meet the actual market demand(s). In the first case it is a kind of squeeze the juice from a platform past it's prime, aka free money. The second case is about recouping as much money as possible while possible to do so, i.e. before it completely
Not likely (Score:2)
Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe
Tells you all you need to know right there. The term has lost all meaning. It is now one of those things a lot like 'fascist' which used to mean something but now just means 'anyone who voted differently than I did.'
A "vibe" might influence peoples willingness to embrace pessimistic vs optimistic approaches to problem solving, risk adversity vs courage to try new things. It can't however help us get to actual solutions. Those have to come from people actually thinking intelligently about the problem.
W
No, and here's why: (Score:2)
No (Score:2)
The IT industry is mostly broken by greed, big egos, massive concentration, lack of innovation, lack of any interest in what would benefit the customer, etc.
Most of the tech industry needs to collapse and it needs to become obvious what incredible fragile houses-of-cards they build. Then we can start over, this time with real liability, punishment of liars and regulation that makes sure products are actually fit-for-purpose. You know, like basically every engineering discipline had to do.