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.
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.
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.
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.)
This is why I only seed torrents
They’ll also sue your neighbour if your plants spread seeds to their land.
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.
Or they can just unfairly fuck you over even though it’s hypocritical and illegal and makes no sense
I have no experience agriculture patents, but couldn’t Monsanto make it illegal for someone to modify “their product” without their explicit permission?
I left it in the sun too long, oops. Well, now that this is no longer one of your seeds as it contains distinct genetic differences which differentiate it from the genes listed in your patents, I guess there’s no issue with me running experiments on it?
Bit worse than that isn’t it?
https://cases.open.ubc.ca/monsanto-and-terminator-seeds/
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).
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.
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.
can’t beat physical media
Yeah but I’m not putting my turn table in my back pack to go fishing with ;-)
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.
This is why I love plex. Plexamp makes it so worth it.
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.
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.