81–90 of 138 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same could come to Europe (lowballing broke people), because you can just make employees give their consent by baking it into all employment contracts. Just like the working time directive opt-out (HR say "take it or leave it" to 99.9% of people). It probably already happens where it's already acceptable to request financial checks such as the finance industry.
That would violate privacy laws. They could put it into the contract but they would be void
A similar thing happened with the Working Time Directive - almost all contracts in my country make you agree to opt-out and that's been like that for over 15 years
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Why should it be illegal? Seems to me that the illegal part would be the cartel of the 3 apps that cornered the whole market. An app that doesn’t do this could eat their lunch. Nurses work at hospitals, the supply of which is constrained artificially by the state, so once you sell all of the ones in a region on your app, you have a monopoly. It is a type of regulatory capture.
To clarify, what I think should be made illegal is to take advantage of people by using information about how much debt that they have to lowball them.
The lowballing should be counteracted by competition. There isn’t any competition because the number of hospitals is artificially constrained by the state and a cartel can go to all of them in a region (usually a single digit number) and capture all of them, cornering the market for purchasing labor in that field.
The problem is not that the bidders have the information. The problem is that there is effectively only one bidder: the cartel.
An app that doesn’t do this (and thus pays more) would quickly have access to the entire labor pool by offering higher wages. It doesn’t exist because of illegal activity. That’s not caused by the cartel having access to, or using, information.
You are addressing the symptoms of the cartel, not the root cause.
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.
Value engineering. When you can't grow by selling more widgets, your only real choice is to make (almost) the same thing, but cheaper. But Cory's a polemicist. He'd absolutely prefer the memorable word he coined himself to the acceptable, drab one that already exists. (Plus value engineering is only one way to enshittify a product. There's also subscription models, selling data, jamming ads in everywhere... the advan…
The article is very long; that part is fascinating and a fantastic suggestion: > 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 count…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To clarify, what I think should be made illegal is to take advantage of people by using information about how much debt that they have to lowball them.
Yes, why? This is the market working as it should. Market participants should be free to use all available information. The lowballing should be counteracted by competition. There isn’t any competition because the number of hospitals is artificially constrained by the state and a cartel can go to all of them in a region (usually a single digit number) and capture all of them, cornering the market for purchasing labor…
However, I am curious to know how you think we can avoid the problem of cartels.
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> What laws have been passed that explicitly use vulgar words in their names? Is that the argument? I understood your argument to mean that the term "enshittification" is holding back the movement because nobody will use it. As others are saying, I don't think there's any issue people take with some drop-in term being used if actual laws are passed discussing the topic. Plenty of movements involving vulgar language,…
The argument is: There is a phenomenon that is very clearly happening. Doctorow and others use a vulgar term to describe this phenomenon. Because this vulgar term is used, it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon. As an analogy: imagine if the concepts of inequality or social injustice were primarily described by…
Financial Times: The enshittification of apps is real. But is it bad? https://www.ft.com/content/acaf3fb1-d971-48ad-8efb-c82787cdd...
Not in the title, but Warzel uses the term in his Atlantic article, "Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/strea...
ABC Radio National interviewed Professor Inger Mewburn, Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University, and titled the interview "'Enshittification' and social media for academics" https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/saturdayextra/enshitt...
Bonus: The Italians are using the term. "Anche TikTok sta andando in malora (il fenomeno dell'enshitting)" https://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/blog/stazione-futuro/20...
So I guess I'm just not seeing how this is limiting anyone's abilities in any way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument is: There is a phenomenon that is very clearly happening. Doctorow and others use a vulgar term to describe this phenomenon. Because this vulgar term is used, it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon. As an analogy: imagine if the concepts of inequality or social injustice were primarily described by…
I don't understand, Doctorow of course uses enshittification all the time but I've see "platform decay" used plenty of times as well. But also, plenty of "Serious" people seem to be discussing it Financial Times: The enshittification of apps is real. But is it bad? https://www.ft.com/content/acaf3fb1-d971-48ad-8efb-c82787cdd... Not in the title, but Warzel uses the term in his Atlantic article, "Streaming Has Reached…
> it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon.
Now, to be fair, I don't think the word is going to sink the whole attempt. But I think it's just juvenile and unhelpful. Why pick a word that is deliberately impractical, and then critique anyone that says, "I agree with your ideas, but maybe pick a more political-friendly name, so it's easier to do something about it?"
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.
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?
> 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 enshittification is the degradation of a platform that transforms it from being customer-centric to prioritizing profit extraction at the expense of user experience. I think that the definition has expanded to include other things non-platform, but I feel that that isn't too far a stretch. Nowadays, I might say that enshittification is just unchecked capitalism doing its thing (and we need to be protected from exploiting us).
But I do concede that Cory was indeed exploring some ideas on his original post [2] that may have made it to his book (and thus, are related to your definition):
> Amazon's monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[1]: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
[2]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittificaiton/#relentl...