this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Pretty convincing explanation of why we should hold Silicon Valley morally accountable for their shitty management. As usual, Ed could have stood to be a little more Marxist; in particular, there is a reason why enshittification and rot naturally happens to companies as they age, and it's precisely the tendency for profits to decline over time!

Bonus sneer: it got double-secret-shadow-banned on HN; here is the submission. Cowards.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Where The Rot Economy separates is that growth is, in and of itself, the force that drives companies to enshittify.

Not finished reading the article yet, but my reaction to reading this line is that Zitron is missing the mark in the same way he qualifies Doctorow's Enshittification does.

I don't think growth directly drives companies to enshittify. Rather, infinite (and especially constant-or-better) growth in a finite space is only possible when things degrade. Physical widgets do this pretty decently on their own, though we (humans) had to come up with planned obsolescence to keep degradation above a certain threshhold. Software, on the other hand, doesn't naturally degrade over time. It only seems to do so because the different actors in its ecosystem, from the software "bricks" to the underlying hardware, are similarly incentivized to churn out new things that deprecate the old, indirectly degrading them.

We'll see where Zitron goes from here to the end of the article.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Good stuff near the end:

I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer, and the more I learn about both their intentions and actions the more certain I am that they are unrepentant and that their greed will never be sated.

These men lace our digital lives with asbestos and get told they’re geniuses for doing so because money comes out.

I care about you. The user. The person reading this. The person that may have felt stupid, or deficient, or ignorant, all because the services you pay for or that monetize you have been intentionally rigged against you.

You aren't the failure. The services, the devices, and the executives are.

I don't feel like Zitron completely addressed my remark in the parent comment, but the end result/destination is the same.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Spicy take. Good tech commentary served alongside a steaming pile of disgusting political ideology from a sick and mad man.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

remember your coat when you leave

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

But even if we assume that this is the case, and even if there are a lot of people that simply don’t try [to learn new technology]…should companies really take advantage of them?

DISGUSTING POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

just you wait until you hear about the scandalous lunch date I had with my political rivals

(we had ~burgers~)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

That's gotta be one of my favorite Zitron piece to date. Ed managed to articulate some points which have been floating around in my mind for a while which I did not have the words to explain. Especially how using any form of out-of-the-box computer these days is just a completely user-hostile pile of steaming horseshit, and why I am anal-retentive about what software gets installed on my devices and how exactly my window manager has to work, &c.

I mean, it's probably because I'm an obsessive nerd, but the fact that it makes me feel in control when I can rip shit of the source code that bugs me (or put shit in that I miss) is a major factor, too.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Btw slur against people who refuse to use ai apparently dropped. "Refuseniks". A very Bruce noo moment.

Also a very, google that new word you just invented because this is a very weird reference moment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refusenik (even if the term itself is very grokAI (aka wordplay that 60 year olds think is edgy or cool, but actually so without edge it will not cut warm butter)).

E: whoops wrong thread, imagine this was in the random sneers thread

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Apropos Bruce, I have this writeup sitting around half-finished, where I go over the AI chapters of A Hackers Mind and try to pinpoint his naivité (however you spell that) of the subject. I really should dump that in a Snubstack.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

I honestly had no idea of the original Russian meaning of the gloss. To me "refusenik" implies some sort of hard-left hippie.