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Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

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Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

#131

Post by aredox »

philipallstar wrote: post #40
aredox wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you wanted a "free enterprise" society, why do you complain now? Isn't that freedom? Of expression, of commerce, of association... ...Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist ?

> Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist? If you were in a communist country you are definitely worried about the power asymmetry, and rushing to go to West Germany or just out of the USSR, or to the USA from Cuba or out of pre-capitalist China if you could.

I should have gone with "socialist" to avoid all you "ackchually" people who try to educate me on the evils of Soviet Communism while the discourse in the USA is that anything slightly to the left of Pinochet is "COMMUNISM"

Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

#132

Post by rolandog »

pjc50 wrote: post #26
keiferski wrote: post #11

It’s unfortunate that he is continuing to use the term enshittification, because that pretty much guarantees that no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly. Which is a shame, as many of the solutions here are explicitly legal ones. Words and names matter, especially when it comes to political actions.

> no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly Eh. Either they weren't going to do so anyway, because doing so goes against the money, or they can come up with a more public-friendly term.

Yes, agree. I think this fake outrage at the rudeness of the word is performative pearl clutching from staunch capitalism apologists.

Everyone knows that synonyms exist, and them not having found the more "polite term" in Wikipedia — platform decay — says more about them and their reluctance to engage with the subject and the proposed solutions.

Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

#133

Post by ragebol »

> There once was an ""old good internet"", Doctorow said, but it was too difficult for non-technical people to connect up to; web 2.0 changed that, making it easy for everyone to get online, but that led directly into hard-to-escape walled gardens.

Maybe we should not 'democratize' some technologies and keep a bit of difficulty as a gatekeeper.

(Yes, I know this is not really a moral position to hold)

Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

#134

Post by krzyk »

Mindwipe wrote: post #68
krzyk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services Is anywhere in EU reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, and modifying any products illegal?

Every country has an anti-circumvention law in the EU. It is a condition of membership. Not that that makes Doctorow's argument any better or make any more sense.

(all below - IANAL)

Strange, my country (Poland) has a law that allows reverse engineering to allow given software to work on given hardware. If (and only if) consumer has bought given software.

So e.g. I could reverse engineer MS Word to make it work on Linux and that is within my legal right, any EULA prohibiting that is void.

Same probably applies for jailbreaking - all withing legal right of customer.

I think there is something in EU law also about that, considering SAS Institute Inc. versus World Programming Ltd.

Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

#135

Post by patapong »

rolandog wrote: post #90
patapong wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this - beyond the sound of the term, it is also not very obious in what it refers to. In the beginning, it was used with a very specific meaning, of platforms squeezing market participants on both sides. Now, it seems to have come to refer to all instances of online services getting worse and more user-hostile over time. Dare I say, enshittification of the term enshittification?

I disagree with your definition; from Wikipedia [0]: > Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. [...] > platforms squeezing market participants on both sides. Wasn't that chokepoint capitalism? [1] (i.e. controlling supply and demand IIRC) From Cory Doctorow's original article [2], one might say that en…

Fair enough! That was not precise of me.

I guess my concern is that the term is broad enough to shift this way, from a very precise (and important!) issue to a more broad concept. I feel like picking a more specific term (such as indeed, platform decay), would have made it easier to keep the concepts apart and discuss them. Alas, it is good that the term was coined at all, as it gives a word to something that many of us clearly experience.

Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

#136

Post by philipallstar »

aredox wrote: post #131
philipallstar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist? If you were in a communist country you are definitely worried about the power asymmetry, and rushing to go to West Germany or just out of the USSR, or to the USA from Cuba or out of pre-capitalist China if you could.

I should have gone with "socialist" to avoid all you "ackchually" people who try to educate me on the evils of Soviet Communism while the discourse in the USA is that anything slightly to the left of Pinochet is "COMMUNISM"

> I should have gone with "socialist" to avoid all you "ackchually" people who try to educate me on the evils of Soviet Communism

Socialist the same in practice. Still state-controlled economy in the name of fairness and starvation soon following.

Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

#137

Post by eyesofgod »

rolandog wrote: post #132
pjc50 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly Eh. Either they weren't going to do so anyway, because doing so goes against the money, or they can come up with a more public-friendly term.

Yes, agree. I think this fake outrage at the rudeness of the word is performative pearl clutching from staunch capitalism apologists. Everyone knows that synonyms exist, and them not having found the more "polite term" in Wikipedia — platform decay — says more about them and their reluctance to engage with the subject and the proposed solutions.

[flagged]

Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

#138

Post by ethersteeds »

ragebol wrote: post #133

> There once was an ""old good internet"", Doctorow said, but it was too difficult for non-technical people to connect up to; web 2.0 changed that, making it easy for everyone to get online, but that led directly into hard-to-escape walled gardens. Maybe we should not 'democratize' some technologies and keep a bit of difficulty as a gatekeeper. (Yes, I know this is not really a moral position to hold)

It might forestall the problem, but not solve.

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for"

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