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.
The problem here is - in my opinion - caused by:
The right always chasing “deregulation”? Well, here is the result. High profits, high prices, shitty products and services.
And the people suffer.
“the commons” has largely been privatized online. That is the result of what you have stated.
We should all be ashamed, and afraid.
Also the mental disease which is known as “wanting to be a billionaire”. Everything in the world is structured around making that status the ultimate goal. It is like endorsing sociopathy.
With Elon Musk soon to be a trillionaire and maybe Zuckerberg and Bezos, too. Being a billionaire won’t be the dream goal anymore.
And every time you try to undo at least some deregulation, you get likened to Stalin, no matter how bad that deregulation was.