Take my fucking money (I know, they sold out in a day).

Ha! 😆

Yes! I’ve been ‘degoogling’ for a while. Shifted email, searching, shopping etc elsewhere.

However, Cory Doctorow (‘Enshittification’) points out that even if you’re the advertiser or business customer, you’re the product. They get screwed as well. Companies that are too big to care are extracting value from everyone. The policy decisions that allowed them to get that way were made in living memory by named individuals, and can be reversed.

Yes, the ‘greed is good’ neoliberal lunatics have taken over the economics asylum and are privileging capital over labour.

However, Doctorow specifically addresses the question, ‘Isn’t enshittification just late-stage capitalism’. He talks about specific government policy decisions, made by named individuals, that have ensured that the people making the worst choices will ‘succeed’ in business at the expense of human rights. He wants us to fight for elected governments not to be pushed around by monopolies and oligarchs, and for a ‘new good internet’ where adversarial interoperability is allowed to mitigate the worst crimes of the enshittifiers.

Yup. Guess who’s doing the ID work - Persona. Yes the Persona that has the code to route every face scan via US checks. ‘Governance’ via coercion and control. ‘The beatings will continue until social cohesion improves.’ They’re all jealous of China. And we have no sovereignty. We’re full of US software and doing whatever ‘Five Eyes’ wants.

They know how dangerous AI is for cybersecurity and they’re just pushing it through anyway and expecting engineers to deal with it. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/must-act-now-to-counter-ai-borne-cyber-attacks-five-eyes-says-626815

Andy Burnham is in favour of the social media ban in the UK, and we continue to roll forward: 10 Dec 2025 No accounts for under-16s; ‘reasonable steps’ to detect and remove underage accounts 9 Mar 2026 ‘Age assurance’, i.e. ID check for adult sites 27 Jun 2026 ‘Age assurance’, i.e. ID check, for all search engines Dec 2026 Private companies can be accredited as part of the Digital ID system. Oh we’re so ready. Nothing bad will happen.

You might want to encourage your friends to get Mastodon accounts. Mastodon is federated like Lemmy, and there’s a mastodon.au instance. There’s a beginners guide here: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-use-mastodon-social-beginners-guide

What you’re seeing is called ‘enshittification’. In this particular example, in 2019, Prabhakar Raghavan – the ex-McKinsey, ex-Yahoo MBA who ran ad revenue for Google – came up with an ingenious solution: just make search worse. If you have to run multiple searches to find what you’re looking for, that creates multiple chances to show you an ad. No really. This is real. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Why do people put up with this? You can find out more about enshittification here:

Short explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE

Longer explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZaoWpQ-3Zs

Book: https://craphound.com/shop/

I’m going to have a difficult time calling Gina ‘Your Majesty’. She seems more like a Grand Poobah. I guess her official title is Gina the Hutt? Still love the painting. I wonder what thought bubble she’ll fart out next for her minions to smilingly inhale.

My thoughts exactly :)

In defense of the ‘drunken sailors’ of Steam, many of the games they’ve bought are likely to still be playable for a long time, some were bought in half-yearly sales, and some were part of ‘bundles’ that were bought for a different game. The 30% also pays for the Content Delivery Network, marketing, a forum and sometimes moderation, and a genuine customer feedback mechanism. Who wouldn’t want to be part of an un-enshittified system? Fanboy? You bet. I’m not saying they can do no wrong, but they’re doing a lot right.

My friend said, “He’s so insane he must have lead pipes for plumbing.”

@sh.itjust.works Yes it does, whether you want it to or not

Religious people seem to think so. But we can restate again: If your religion leads you to hate, your religion may cause you to act unethically.

Ok, we can restate it. If your religion leads you to hate, you aren’t on the side of good, you’re on the side of bad?

In Australia they’re now called ‘intentional communities’. That might help with searching. Some are religious but some are not. Quite a few are just science/sustainability based.

This is needed here:

https://youtu.be/zQUw9kDXB3k

Man knows his fallacies! Excellent. This bodes well for interesting discussion!

I, too, am interested in having serious good faith discussions, and will not become shrill if you present nuanced views, or criticism of mine.

Love the image. Can only imagine the prompts… “evil lizard men make stupid amounts of money selling utter shit.”?

Me fast forwarding through the underwater stuff so I don’t have to hold my breath. Might get the books for the same reason.