Absurdist video urges policymakers and users to resist deliberate deterioration of platforms and devices

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/56890254

The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”

The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    14 hours ago

    This happens with restaurant franchises. The chain starts usually with the personal attention of the founder. They insist on a level of quality, like Kentucky Fried Chicken. They sell it or die and then the MBAs come in. Hmmm, using these cheaper seasonings could shave a few cents and make us millions more. Bonus! Stock gain! Using lower grade chicken and slightly smaller portions. More savings! Another bonus! Reduce the 10 piece to an 8 piece meal but keep the price. Reduce the seasoning mix to fewer ingredients. Cheaper frying oil. More artificial flavorings. Eventually the quality and amount for the dollar becomes so poor the customers can’t ignore it anymore. They stop going, profits drop. Do they improve the product? Hell no! Cut costs even more. Leave the oil in the fryers longer. Reduce staff. Customers drop off even more.

    Keep cutting, then sell it to someone with “equity” or “capital” in their name to take a loan out against the company. Pocket the loan. Sell the property to another side company and then make the first company pay rent. Let the company die from debt, fire all the employees, leave debts unpaid and sell off what is left.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    1 day ago

    “We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

    We’re at a point where tech companies have given away easy solutions to all of our problems to the point that nobody actually knows how to use the technology that they rely on.

    How do people listen to music? Spotify

    How do people watch videos? Netflix

    How do people talk to your friends? Meta/X/Whatever

    All of those services seem like a great deal, they give you things for free/cheap and you never have to take the effort to figure out what a codec is or how to manage your own media. People pay for these services with their privacy, freedom and permanent reliance on tech companies to give them access to technology (and $10/mo, $12/mo, $13.99/mo, $15/mo, $20/mo)

    These services have created a dependency that they’re now exploiting. What does someone do when Netflix raises their prices? Their technological skillset limits them to operating the Play/App Store so all of their other options are similarly bad options offering the same Faustian bargain.

    The solution is simple and also difficult: learn to use the technology that you depend on and stop using the services that require you give up your privacy and freedom.

    There are entire communities of people who’ve already made this leap. Look into the Privacy/Self-Hosted/Homelab communities, they are full of people who’ve rejected the idea that technological services are only available as a product where you have to give up control over your digital life to purchase. The Free and Open Source community is made up of a huge amount of people who volunteer their time to create software that is available for you to use or modify as you’d like.

    It isn’t easy. Most people have spent the majority of their lives learning to use software created by Microsoft, Google and Apple. They’ve spent hundreds of hours learning how to use Facebook or iOS and this creates a strong incentive to stay on these services. Learning these things was a waste of time and have become the hook that keeps you stuck in enshittification land.

    I know that people don’t want to hear ‘Well, you just need to learn Linux/Docker/FOSS software’, but that’s the solution that we have collectively arrived at in this alternate world where we’re rejecting commercial software/service providers.

    Nobody is coming to save you from this problem, there’s isn’t going to be a not-enshittified Norwegian Netflix opening up next year for you to subscribe to. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world.

    Come and join us.

    • FiberJungle@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      15 hours ago

      As a newbie where do I start? I’m new to Linux but have been playing w a distribution for about a month. I’m having fun but feel in over my head. I’m looking to build a NAS and a separate Jellyfin server. Where should I look for resources? It’s been a long time since over learned anything really new and not having context for a lot of this is hard. I’m excited and having fun but not doing anything well yet.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        6 hours ago

        Since you’re just starting you’ll want to make sure you have a good foundational understand of what Linux is and how it works. Understanding the File System Hierarchy, file permissions, user/groups management, etc will help the ‘feeling over your head’ part. There are a lot of Youtube videos/playlist talking about the basics, skim a few to see if you like how they’re presenting the information and pick whichever works best for you.

        For a more structured approach, look for books (or a class at a vocational school if that’s something you’d do) teaching Linux+. This is an entry level certification by CompTIA and the course will cover all of the fundamental things that you need to understand.

        Have a project in mind to motivate you. In the end, you’re learning all of this so that you can do something with Linux so pick a something that would improve your setup. Jellyfin running on a NAS is an good and achievable goal to start with.

        Join some of the Linux/selfhost/homelab communities: !linux@lemmy.ml, !linux@programming.dev, !selfhosted@lemmy.world, !linuxmemes@lemmy.world. These are great when you’re stuck on something and need to ask for help.

        On Reddit the homelab, linux and selfhosted subreddits are also good to read.

        When you’re getting started and also when you have a problem remember: RTFM - Always, ALWAYS read the manual/docs and also check the Arch wiki and Gentoo wiki. Asking for help without first reading the documentation and wiki is… frowned upon in the community. Some people will give you a hard time if your question is answerable in a Google search or in a wiki article.

        LLMs can be useful as well. You have to be careful here because they can hallucinate and provide you with wrong information. LLMs that search and summarize based on your question will generally be more accurate but generally don’t run any terminal commands that they give you without first verifying what they do. Treat them like a search engine, a starting off point for you to do your own research. You could probably just ask for the exact terminal commands to setup a Jellyfin server on docker and get pretty far, but you wouldn’t learn anything and that will hurt your efforts to learn. I’ve been using Kagi’s AI assistant which includes a research agent option that has been pretty useful.

        Finally, don’t avoid using the terminal, you can do a lot with a GUI but being comfortable with terminal use is fairly mandatory for anything but casual desktop use.

    • MasterBlaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      22 hours ago

      GenX entered the chat.

      Sufficient enshitification results in us simply reverting to how we did it in 1990. I am using actually useful software, but when that becomes unavailable, I will walk away like I already did with so much.

      I’ve been using Linux since 1995, for this very reason.

      Increasingly, when I find services don’t work any more, support says, “we don’t support linux”. I stop using that service and find an alternative. Never been on Facebook, and it’s stopped me from spending money at several retailers. Oh, well. Their loss, not mine.

    • RblScmNerfHerder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      “…there’s isn’t going to be a not-enshittified Norwegian Netflix opening up next year for you to subscribe to.”

      Yes, but there could be. There’s no actual mechanism besides pure greed that leads to enshittification.

      Imagine a service with a set price, no ads, never increases prices except to maintain operation in the face of inflation. Not beholden to shareholders, but rather to stakeholders.

      Corporations have a legal obligation to make profit for their shareholders. However, being incorporated can also add legal protections for employees. So, we need such companies who are beholden once again to their stakeholders.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        Imagine a service with a set price, no ads, never increases prices except to maintain operation in the face of inflation. Not beholden to shareholders, but rather to stakeholders.

        I think that would be amazing and, in the US at least, there is a new business entity that could do that.

        One of the issues with trying to make Netflix not enshittify is that companies have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value (Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919) is the case if you want to read further). So if Netflix decided to try what you’re suggesting then some shareholder could sue the company and show that they’re not doing everything to maximize returns.

        There are around 40 states in the US that recognize a new corporate entity type called a Public Benefit Corporation, which is allowed to operate without the legal obligation towards profit so that the company can pursue goals other than making money. The AI company Anthropic is an example, they are a Public Benefit Corporation. Because of that fact, they’re able to take a moral stand against the US Government… a decision that will cost them money, without worrying about shareholder retaliation.

        I think eventually we’ll see more of these companies forming and I will certainly support them. However, as it stands now, we’re on our own and have to work together as a community to mitigate the worst of it. I’d certainly be interested in running a Public Benefit Corporation towards those ends, if you know anyone with a few tens of millions of dollars to burn!

      • ianonavy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        What you are describing is basically a worker co-op: workers decide collectively how to distribute or reinvest retained earnings and plan for down years, and there’s no rich guy who owns the company and needs it to keep growing their wealth, so there’s no one with the power and incentive to direct everyone to screw over the customers. These exist today but have a hard time scaling in capital-intensive industries like global streaming where you have to pay the thousands of laborers who work to produce the content.

        The problem is that private capital is always going to want something back; equity means ceding control, and debt at commercial rates means the repayment pressure recreates the same growth imperative you were trying to escape. This is essentially the socialist critique of capitalism. One of the more interesting socialist answers to the scaling problem is public investment banks, which can capitalize co-ops at patient rates without taking equity.

          • ianonavy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            7 hours ago

            A PBC still has outside equity owners who need returns and have voting power. The designation gives the board permission to weigh stakeholder interests to avoid lawsuit, but: 1) it doesn’t change what the investors who funded the company actually need from it, and 2) it doesn’t change the fact that those investors own the equity and can replace the board if they’re unhappy.

            As the other person mentioned, the problem with our current system capitalism is they still need to know someone “with tens of millions of dollars to burn.” Someone who, once they own a controlling interest, can just replace the board with people who prioritize returns. If we lived under socialism, those tens of millions of dollars would just come from the state as a low-interest loan that doesn’t confer control.

      • Murdoc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Yeah, there is a mechanism that ensures it, and that’s the interaction between competition and artificial scarcity. Companies that try to do things in the best interests of their customers and society end up either getting bought out, or out competed and die. It’s a simple matter of survival given the rules of the game that we have set up. Greed is the mechanism that keeps these rules in place and even makes them worse, sure, but then, the rules are designed to encourage and reward greed as well; a positive feedback loop. To stop it, the rules need to be changed at a deeper level than most realize or are comfortable with, despite all the many benefits.

      • W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        21·
        1 day ago

        Imagine a service with a set price, no ads, never increases prices except to maintain operation in the face of inflation. Not beholden to shareholders, but rather to stakeholders.

        Yarrrrr

  • other_cat@piefed.zipEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    Love this but I will say that “IRL enshittification” is absolutely a thing. Just take shrinkflation for example.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    Been on my mind quite a bit lately. We need a “sub-net” or something, like those community mesh nets, that isn’t controlled by Big Data and infested with Big Corpo. A Fediverse of ‘nets.

    However, just as we’ve discovered in the Fediverse, there are going to be size disparities, out-groups, in-groups, radicals, etc.

    There is no perfect system. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth having, just pointing out there will be no utopia.

  • fakeman_pretendname@feddit.ukEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    I think many of the bugs were introduced in “Web 2.0”, so surely we can just fork Web 1.0 and start again from there? :P

  • Bloefz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    It feels like we need a new internet yes. With all the enshittification, commercialisation, surveillance by governments and industry, age verification etc, the old internet is ruined.

    Maybe something like the dark web but more mainstream and less creepy.

  • imjustmsk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    327·
    14 hours ago

    What else did they do, I know about the video…

    Edit: wow, I’m an idiot for wording that in the most stupid way, Its on me for not conveyin what I meant properly, I sincerely didn’t mean to downplay what they were doing in any way, I just wanted to know if they were doing anything else, But I guess I sounded like mocking them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯