Absurdist video urges policymakers and users to resist deliberate deterioration of platforms and devices

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/56890254

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.

  • other_cat@piefed.zipEnglish
    1·
    21 minutes ago

    Love this but I will say that “IRL enshittification” is absolutely a thing. Just take shrinkflation for example.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    4 hours ago

    “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.”

    We’re at a point where tech companies have given away easy solutions to all of our problems to the point that nobody actually knows how to use the technology that they rely on.

    How do people listen to music? Spotify

    How do people watch videos? Netflix

    How do people talk to your friends? Meta/X/Whatever

    All of those services seem like a great deal, they give you things for free/cheap and you never have to take the effort to figure out what a codec is or how to manage your own media. People pay for these services with their privacy, freedom and permanent reliance on tech companies to give them access to technology (and $10/mo, $12/mo, $13.99/mo, $15/mo, $20/mo)

    These services have created a dependency that they’re now exploiting. What does someone do when Netflix raises their prices? Their technological skillset limits them to operating the Play/App Store so all of their other options are similarly bad options offering the same Faustian bargain.

    The solution is simple and also difficult: learn to use the technology that you depend on and stop using the services that require you give up your privacy and freedom.

    There are entire communities of people who’ve already made this leap. Look into the Privacy/Self-Hosted/Homelab communities, they are full of people who’ve rejected the idea that technological services are only available as a product where you have to give up control over your digital life to purchase. The Free and Open Source community is made up of a huge amount of people who volunteer their time to create software that is available for you to use or modify as you’d like.

    It isn’t easy. Most people have spent the majority of their lives learning to use software created by Microsoft, Google and Apple. They’ve spent hundreds of hours learning how to use Facebook or iOS and this creates a strong incentive to stay on these services. Learning these things was a waste of time and have become the hook that keeps you stuck in enshittification land.

    I know that people don’t want to hear ‘Well, you just need to learn Linux/Docker/FOSS software’, but that’s the solution that we have collectively arrived at in this alternate world where we’re rejecting commercial software/service providers.

    Nobody is coming to save you from this problem, there’s isn’t going to be a not-enshittified Norwegian Netflix opening up next year for you to subscribe to. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world.

    Come and join us.

    • RblScmNerfHerder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 hour ago

      “…there’s isn’t going to be a not-enshittified Norwegian Netflix opening up next year for you to subscribe to.”

      Yes, but there could be. There’s no actual mechanism besides pure greed that leads to enshittification.

      Imagine a service with a set price, no ads, never increases prices except to maintain operation in the face of inflation. Not beholden to shareholders, but rather to stakeholders.

      Corporations have a legal obligation to make profit for their shareholders. However, being incorporated can also add legal protections for employees. So, we need such companies who are beholden once again to their stakeholders.

      • Murdoc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        10 minutes ago

        Yeah, there is a mechanism that ensures it, and that’s the interaction between competition and artificial scarcity. Companies that try to do things in the best interests of their customers and society end up either getting bought out, or out competed and die. It’s a simple matter of survival given the rules of the game that we have set up. Greed is the mechanism that keeps these rules in place and even makes them worse, sure, but then, the rules are designed to encourage and reward greed as well; a positive feedback loop. To stop it, the rules need to be changed at a deeper level than most realize or are comfortable with, despite all the many benefits.

      • W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        13 minutes ago

        Imagine a service with a set price, no ads, never increases prices except to maintain operation in the face of inflation. Not beholden to shareholders, but rather to stakeholders.

        Yarrrrr

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        20 minutes ago

        Imagine a service with a set price, no ads, never increases prices except to maintain operation in the face of inflation. Not beholden to shareholders, but rather to stakeholders.

        I think that would be amazing and, in the US at least, there is a new business entity that could do that.

        One of the issues with trying to make Netflix not enshittify is that companies have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value (Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919) is the case if you want to read further). So if Netflix decided to try what you’re suggesting then some shareholder could sue the company and show that they’re not doing everything to maximize returns.

        There are around 40 states in the US that recognize a new corporate entity type called a Public Benefit Corporation, which is allowed to operate without the legal obligation towards profit so that the company can pursue goals other than making money. The AI company Anthropic is an example, they are a Public Benefit Corporation. Because of that fact, they’re able to take a moral stand against the US Government… a decision that will cost them money, without worrying about shareholder retaliation.

        I think eventually we’ll see more of these companies forming and I will certainly support them. However, as it stands now, we’re on our own and have to work together as a community to mitigate the worst of it. I’d certainly be interested in running a Public Benefit Corporation towards those ends, if you know anyone with a few tens of millions of dollars to burn!

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    4 hours ago

    Been on my mind quite a bit lately. We need a “sub-net” or something, like those community mesh nets, that isn’t controlled by Big Data and infested with Big Corpo. A Fediverse of ‘nets.

    However, just as we’ve discovered in the Fediverse, there are going to be size disparities, out-groups, in-groups, radicals, etc.

    There is no perfect system. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth having, just pointing out there will be no utopia.

  • Bloefz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    6 hours ago

    It feels like we need a new internet yes. With all the enshittification, commercialisation, surveillance by governments and industry, age verification etc, the old internet is ruined.

    Maybe something like the dark web but more mainstream and less creepy.

  • fakeman_pretendname@feddit.ukEnglish
    11·
    9 hours ago

    I think many of the bugs were introduced in “Web 2.0”, so surely we can just fork Web 1.0 and start again from there? :P