#enshittification

See tagged statuses in the local Rambling Readers community

I have been involved with the tech industry since the early 1980s - first as an employee and always as a user. It was fun and interesting and opened so many doors to me. Now, I avoid it as much as I can and choose carefully - weeding my tech garden aggressively.

“…The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years…”
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

So Macquarie chose @pluralistic as their word of the year last week and now Oxford chose "brain rot."

I can't help but feel there are two very different perspectives at play here: while "enshittification" correctly points the finger at the source (i.e. the services that are shittified), "brain rot" places the blame solely on the consumer, who "overconsumes material considered to be trivial or unchallenging" that just seems to somehow magically appear on their feeds.

reviewed Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis

No cover

Yanis Varoufakis: Technofeudalism (2023, Random House Children's Books)

 4 stars

In his boldest and most far-reaching book yet, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism …

Late-stage capitalism has given way to cloud-based fiefs

4 stars

Late-stage capitalism has given way to cloud-based fiefs, and we are the serfs. I need convincing on some of the detail (e.g. how effective are they at manipulating our desires?), but mostly agree with his main argument. Pairs well with Cory Doctorow's #enshittification ideas (@pluralistic@mamot.fr).

replied to Nina Kalinina's status

@nina_kali_nina I ultimately got so frustrated with LinkedIn I had to deactivate my account. They offer no way to actually prevent people from contacting you who you don't know and don't want to hear from. Effectively, recruiters and recruiting firms can pay to bypass your privacy settings, and there's nothing you can do to stop them.

The only way to win is not to play.

So, have you ever thought your devices were listening to what you were saying, and then ads for that thing would show up...and all the pundits kept telling us it was coincidence and we were just seeing patterns because people seek patterns?

Yeah...naw. @404mediaco in their tradition of breaking all kinds of news, would like to tell you that you're not insane, and the pundits were wrong.

404 brings receipts: Cox Media Group (CMG) says it can target adverts based on what potential customers said out loud near device microphones, and explicitly points to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Bing as CMG partners.

MindSift boasted about targeting advertisements by listening to peoples’ everyday conversations through microphones in their smart speakers.

Here's the deck, read it for yourself: https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

(free signup may be required, iirc, but if you've got spare change, consider subscribing too. They're doing yeoman's work out …