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.
Funny, just today I found out my subscription to addy.io, the email alias company, was somehow deactivated, and I reactivated it today. Unfortunately, any emails or email metadata sent to deactivated aliases are not kept on their servers, which is fantastic for privacy, but then I start thinking, “what if these were important emails I couldn’t get because my subscription was fucked with?”, or "what happens if the email alias service goes down and I can’t get any emails I was expecting?”. Now I’m at a crossroads as to whether or not I should continue primarily using my aliases for my emails, or just provide my true email for important services and leave potential spam/junk to the aliases.
Sidenote, the reason I wanted to use my aliases as my primary email contact was because of breaches I discovered via Have I Been Pwned. I think I did go a bit too far in the opposite direction, so now I need to find that middle ground. Definitely gonna make some changes over the next few days with my email addresses on my accounts.
Exactly why I only use email aliases for newsletters and stuff
I have one primary email and one that goes to a «not important» folder that I check irregularly.
Seems a good middleground, don’t have to create a new alias for each service
Hmm maybe i’ll do something similar. I was thinking recently of using a new alias when doing purchases online but haven’t decided yet. Kinda don’t want to over-complicate things you know?
Works for me. Mail there gets auto «read» too so I don’t have notifications or indicators of new mail :p
You can use a custom domain in many cases, which you control (not sure about addy.io though). Still has the dependency on the service, but you can at least quickly transfer if it goes to shit.
For me important stuff gets the real email address and the secondary/beyond gets the aliases