Personal review:
A good recap of his previous writings and talks on the subject for the first third, but a bit long. Having paid attention to them for the past year or two, my attention started drifting a few times. I ended up being more impressed with how much he’s managed to condense explaining “enshittification” from 45+ minutes down to around 15.
As soon as he starts building off of that to work towards the core of his message for this talk, I was more-or-less glued to the screen. At first because it’s not exactly clear where he’s going, and there are (what felt like) many specific court rulings to keep up with. Thankfully, once he has laid enough groundwork he gets straight his point. I don’t want to spoil or otherwise lessen the performance he gives, so I won’t directly comment on what his point is in the body of this post - I think the comments are better suited for that anyways.
I found the rest to be pretty compelling. He rides the fine line between directionless discontent and overenthusiastic activist-with-a-plan as he doubles down on his narrative by calling back to the various bits of groundwork he laid before - now that we’re “in” on the idea, what felt like stumbling around in the dark turns into an illuminating path through some of the specifics of the last twenty to forty years of the dynamics of power between tech bosses and their employees. The rousing call to action was also great way to end and wrap it all up.
I’ve become very biased towards Cory Doctorow’s ideas, in part because they line up with a lot of the impressions I have from my few years working as a dev in a big-ish multinational tech company. This talk has done nothing to diminish that bias - on the contrary.
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i for one have never heard of this guy, i had read this talk but didnt even know the name of the person until just now. i am rather new to super niche internet spaces beyond the bigger niches though so i may not be a good representation.
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A lot of his science fiction writing is available with a Creative Commons license, meaning that you can download and read it for free. I really enjoy his quirky, sardonic style.
https://craphound.com/tag/creative-commons/
Gets you to a page where you can download.
His ideas aren’t monetizable. They’re a throwback to the golden age when tools and utilities were built for passion or need.
Now, tooling is built by for-profit corporations. It satisfies users enough that there isn’t enough room for passion projects. For-profit tooling tends to get usability right.
Look at the fediverse: it’s a workable system that users would be fine with, if more usable for-profit alternatives didn’t exist.
For-profit tooling tends to get usability right
Until enshittification happens and the photo-editer that’s turned into the shorthand slang for editing a picture is suddenly an unaffordable subscription.
If we crowdsource such tools, or otherwise make them FOSS then they dont fall into that trap. Even one that sells out can be split off back into a FOSS project.
tech community isn’t listening
I know I’ve posted basically this comment before, but they’re listening.
They just don’t care.
Nothing that’s been enshittified has hurt their stock options or base pay or caused massive layoffs, and until all (most?) of those become true, they’re not going to care.
Their customers keep eating the shit sandwich, they keep making $300k a year, and getting option refreshers, so nobody is going to rock the boat.
I think who you mean by tech community here is important too. CEOs? Their pay depends in part on them not listening.
Enthusiasts? Engineers? People who use technology more than incidentally? Left-leaning tech circles? Some have heard him, the idea of enshittification has spread well.
Sometimes ideas don’t spread very much until they do in a big way. This feels to me like one where that point exists, and people will take notice when it’s hit.
The problem is that if you’re working in any of the big tech companies we’re talking about, at basically any level, a substantial portion of your compensation is stock.
The dude writing the code and the CEO are sharing the same set of incentives, if not the same value ($) of incentive.
It’s shockingly good at taking otherwise decent people and flipping the moral center off because now you’re deeply deeply invested in value extraction via stock prices, regardless of what you have to do to get there.
I’ve had more than a few friends turn utterly unrecognizable and defensive over shit they absolutely would have thought was gross as fuck in the past, except now they look to make six or even seven figures from it, so whatever, it’s fine. If not them, then someone else, and they might as well be the ones to cash in.
So you’re not wrong, but stock options are shockingly good at getting everyone’s goals and desires aligned and while I don’t have enough of a supply of tinfoil to think that might actually be the point of giving everyone options, eh, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t at least an understood outcome.
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Well, I don’t think all the guys writing the code and building the servers are dismissing it outright: there’s no question the MBAs and c-suite are, but they’re worthless fucks in general. (Sorry MBA havers, but it’s true and you know it.)
The tech bros just want the money and are willing to be as amoral as they have to be, but that’s going to last only and exactly as long as they’re getting overpaid and are being bribed into not caring.
Ultimately these guys (probably) have sufficient power to force change if they really really wanted to, but it’s firmly a case of change-will-hurt-them and so… they listen, but do nothing.
This feels like a First Follower problem.
He’s clearly on the right track, but the first steps have a lot of inertia holding them back. Also, is hard to act as a community when we’re looking for those first few leaders to do something on their own that we as individuals can get behind.
We need some frameworks for action. I don’t think we know what that looks like yet.
Aside from echoing @[email protected] and Doctorow’s statements about unionizing, I am aware of a few others who are trying things that I’d describe as complimentary to unions.
This is a panel titled “Why hasn’t Open Source Won?” where several of the speakers attempt to sketch out a framework wherein a programmer would have more decision over how their code is used: https://youtu.be/k3eycjekIAk . I’ll admit, I’m not the most impressed with where they get to in the limited time they have. Nevertheless, I think it’s a useful angle of consideration to have in the tool belt.
This is an org/foundation that is trying to walk the walk with regards to governing tech democratically: https://nivenly.org/ I haven’t kept up with any recent developments of theirs.
“framework wherein a programmer would have more decision over how their code is used” <> “governing tech democratically”
That’s a bit of a contradiction, no?
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It’s like with people who are stuck in traffic. They are frustrated and so they wish for for change. They wish for more lanes and more roads (and bigger cars, faster cars, more cars). The natural human reaction when something doesn’t work is: Try the same thing harder! It’s not to try something else.
I think we have all been in situations where we failed to push a door open, and so we angrily pushed again harder before easily pulling the door open.
I see lots of people agreeing that there is a problem, as evidenced by the popularity of the term “enshittification”. But the reaction is to double down on the policies that got us here.
You can see that in AI threads here. People call for more intellectual property, more silo-ing of data. Of course, that won’t work and Doctorow has explained that on several occasions. https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-13-spooky-action-at-a-close-up-invisible-hand-5c873636eb47
Other institutions that are apparently considered trustworthy also “side with AI companies”, in that they understand that fair use is in the interest of society. For example, libraries including the Internet Archive. https://www.librarycopyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AI-principles.pdf https://blog.archive.org/2023/11/02/internet-archive-submits-comments-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence/
There’s Upton Sinclair’s famous remark that it’s “difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. There’s a part of them that does hear, but holds the understanding in abeyance, saving it for use when circumstances change and it no longer threatens their self-interest.
That’s activism for you… 95% of people don’t listen, but if 5% do, you already made a mark.
It’s hard to convince tech people to be activists. There’s this other term, in between bougie and proletariat that classifies the people in between. Something like, the people who have it just good enough to not give a shit.
And that’s like all of tech.
You don’t even need 15 minutes. Just one short paragraph.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
- Doctor Cory Doctorow, 2023
The most encouraging thing in the whole talk for me was when he told a roomful of IT folks that they need to join or form Unions and they cheered.
Well, yeah. The majority of IT people understand unionizing would benefit them. It’s the work, the fear, and the unknown holding them back.
I’d vote to unionize in a heartbeat, but I’m not going to kid myself by pretending I’d put in the legwork to get that ball rolling. I have too much else going on in my life, I can barely hold together what responsibilities I do have.
I wonder how many of them would actually stand in solidarity with, say, warehouse workers.
Please try to host your stuff on a peertube instance, dodge youtube
Kinda surprising that this comment got downvotes on this video.
It’s probably because the uploader will not see these comments
I thought that was kind of funny. “Here is a talk about enshitification, click on this YouTube link!” One of the primary enshitifiers.
Cory Doctorow came to the office I worked for Amazon in, to give a talk at Goodreads (we shared an office). I always thought it was ironic. I got him to autograph my Kindle, and he wrote “if you can’t open it you don’t own it” on it, so it’s definitely not lost on him.
disenshittify
This was never supposed to be a word. Why are we doing this
Your head is going to hurt even more if you are a German: The prefix “ent” usually means to lose or get rid of something. I.e. “I got rid of it” -> “Ich habe es entsorgt” so everytime I read “enshittification” I had to remind myself it’s the process of making something worse not better.
So “disenshittification” is a double knot in my brain. I propose “disshittification” as alternative.
Your proposal is so much better than the original word itself, too.
I hate it. I’m soooo tired of reading it.
My suggestion would be to do treat it like German has other potential loan words and make a new word that is a literal translation.
Maybe something like “sheißemachen” / “entsheißemachen”?
I’ve started just mentally replacing it with “rot”
Because if one uses the word “good” sea lions en masse migrate immediately and surround the speaker demanding to change the subject to are ethics real and why the mean tone and is that even a word.
Doctorow also published a transcript of his speech: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-08-17-hack-the-planet-how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess-a26c73418baf
Great! Like this, transcripts should be published more often
Will be screening this for my high school classes!
I mean I understand his sentiment but the system is working exactly as defined. When he says stuff like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft used to work it’s not for a lack of trying. Their MO has not changed since the 80’s. What has changed is the ability to execute on their MO.
The companies are fine. The problem is societal. Hackers ain’t gonna fix shit.
That was really interesting, thanks for posting
