Google refuses to translate this webpage to me, are there any chances it does it because Google refuses to ship the criticism of Google?
Google services might be banned from LWN due to excessive traffic from their AS: https://social.kernel.org/notice/AqJkUigsjad3gQc664
Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
21–30 of 138 posts
Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Academics are completely free to rebrand the naming if they need to sound more pompous and serious, the semantics are the same.
It has nothing to do with being pompous, and this attitude is precisely why none of these solutions will ever go anywhere. If you want laws to be passed, you need senators and judges and legal scholars to engage with your ideas. None of those people are going to take the idea of “enshittification” seriously with a name like that, nor are they going to put their name on a bill referencing it. There are plenty of examp…
The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name.
Government itself has been enshittified, clearly and comprehensively.
Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Market decay?
Surely there is a better synonym: decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc. Enshittification sounds like an immature bad joke.
It’s not because some underlying physical law.
decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc. all sound like the poor companies couldn’t do anything about it
Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
#24> In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. "Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying." I think this should be mad…
...Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist?
Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
#25It’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.
Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot of his writing, and the site he used to run (boingboing) serve the market of people for whom disgusting things are entertaining or funny, so I think he has a blind spot here.
Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
#26It’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.
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.
Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
#27> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has nothing to do with being pompous, and this attitude is precisely why none of these solutions will ever go anywhere. If you want laws to be passed, you need senators and judges and legal scholars to engage with your ideas. None of those people are going to take the idea of “enshittification” seriously with a name like that, nor are they going to put their name on a bill referencing it. There are plenty of examp…
This is tone policing. "Why are you being so impolite about your abuse?" The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name. Government itself has been enshittified, clearly and comprehensively.
Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
#29Re: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
#30It’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.
I totally agree. The term is a puerile way of "owning the cons" following Haidt's idea that conservatives have a strong sense of disgust and liberals do not. The problem is that a) many conservatives are also a potential constituency for increasing integrity in the private sector, and b) many people on the political left also have a strong sense of disgust. Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot…
...as evidenced by the responses to my comment – the sheer hostility to the idea that maybe it's not a great idea to use the word shit in an activist project that aims at political change.
And so you're really not going to get any real change here, because it's easier to complain online and do nothing, while simultaneously shouting away anyone that suggests some minor changes would be more productive. The exact same conversation happens in the open source / free source movement.