While it is no secret that exploitative practices are interlaced with capitalistic tendencies, the practices are becoming intolerable. Signing up to pay usually takes only two clicks that are prominently visible whereas cancelation options are hidden away in deep settings requiring multiple clicks. Pricing often feel arbitrary with no reference points. Every large company grows with the intention of exhibiting monopolistic behavior. This is not sustainable and should not be tolerated.
That’s not even what pisses me off the most about the whole situation. I’m upset that my friends and family don’t care.
gestures to everything else I mean… we are fucking drowning in situations to care about.
…fuckkkk. that’s fair.
…and then your friend and family don’t care about those either 🙃
I do think some of this is just fatigue. The usual way to deal with this is to either pick one or a few things to try to actively address, or just buckle down and wait for things to improve. Both lead naturally to a situation where it’s hard to get a critical mass of people to respond on any one subject.
But at a certain point, it’s still a cop out. And part of the trick. If you drown anyone in enough bullshit, you can’t expect it to all get called out – but that doesn’t mean it’s not all bullshit. It is divide and conquer in another form.
How so? You can’t work on everything at the same time. And the more immediate and direct an issue is, the more it needs your direct focus.
Meaning that issues such as dark patterns in cookie signups are automatically lowest-tier-ever-for-once-I-got-fuck-all-left-to-worry-about.
There is no war other then class war. It all ties back into our way of life. People don’t like to think about it because it’s such a huge cultural and political shift to fix it, that they can more easily imagine a post apocalyptic future. Rather then a future where you and your children aren’t exploited from cradle to grave.
Covid has shown the world that we can drown the world in bullshit. Before that, people used to care more and companies had a name to lose, now there’s just apathy and greed left.
I short of have a theory with this. There’s this belief that “netflix killed piracy” because they provided an actual service with a fair price and the commodity that people wanted to watch shows. And that later on, it got enshittified. But I kinda think that, collaterally, a very important factor that explains people not even knowing how to download a torrent or having 0 critical mind when it comes to the other companies abusing their power has been the surge of smartphones
They were designed to have idiot-proof protection, but more and more they distanced newer generations from having a minimal technical background on how to use computers, which then leads to a more ignorant society incapable of saying no to such companies
I’m not saying this has been the main factor but I have my suspicions to believe it might be related
This is such a good observation. We all assumed the “digital natives” generation was going to be able to just be hacker-level familiar with technology. And for those who grew up with just PCs, it’s probably true. But the “smartphone native” generation followed so quickly it changed the learning patterns. They understand tech generally and specific apps, but get lost with troubleshooting general problems because computers became appliances.
Scary to think but…Are the same young people who a decade ago were tech support for their parents and grandparents going to have to also do it for their adult children and grandchildren?
I am running into this problem at work all the time! I am a Millennial who does corporate training for new recruits in a field that we will almost completely train you on. I.e. you don’t have to have a specific degree or certification because we’ll train you on the job.
I have found that almost all of the Gen Z hires don’t have more than a basic level of computer literacy. They didn’t learn the hard way in middle school that if you don’t save your essay, it will be deleted. They had auto-save. They don’t how to ctrl+alt+delete to get to their task manager to force shut down a frozen program because they (often) used chromebooks or phones/tablets where it was basically an internet machine that could be restarted if need be, but didn’t have more involved software. They have never had to troubleshoot issues with burning data onto a CD (archaic, I know, but our job requires it). They don’t know how to format a lot of things in Word because Google docs does a lot of it for you (or doesn’t even have the option). Hell, they don’t always know what a proper address on a letter looks like because they don’t send snail mail - although this only relates to tech in the formatting and printing of letters.
So now I’m training them on the new material they have to learn for the job, but also computer intricacies that I learned in middle school on my Gateway computer with like 1 gig of ram and floppy disks. When you needed to format something perfectly for school, but nothing was user friendly, you had to learn a lot of weird tricks and workarounds.
They are generally still better at using the computer than Gen X or Boomers, but the Millenials get computers on a different level because we grew with the tech. Gen Z can pick up new software quicker, but still don’t always get how things actually work.
I also thought that as true digital natives, they would know a lot more than they actually do. I agree with the likelihood that we will more than likely have to translate for our elders and the younger generation as well.
It’s definitely a thing.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
Yes! Exactly this!
the bad news is that, despite growing up with pc’s and having had some level of troubleshooting skill as a result, i have forgotten most of it in the last 10 years as computing/tech has become pushy and handholdy. i suspect this is not uncommon.
edit - but i still miss xp. 😔
I would have to agree. Dumb shit like “brand loyalty” probably comes into play as well.
That’s because your perspective is quite skewed if you think about it.
To many many people, being at a level where issues such as “dark patterns in muh apps” is a big thing that might annoy them in their life would be absolute heaven. That means all their big issues are long solved and they got the mental and physical capability spare to worry about such, comparatively menial, issues.
If your health is struggling, whether to accept cookies or not (at least digital ones) is really the least of your worries. Especially given that the vast vast majority wouldn’t know what it means either way, or even why it is a thing that anybody would ever care about. It’s like how you don’t care, until reading this sentence now, which parts of the print of a grocery product packaging inks are biodegradable and which are not and hence whether you should throw that empty cardboard box on your compost heap or actually shouldn’t do that.