Cory Doctorow's linkblog
There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Fears that workers in their impossible-to-replace workforce would take a job somewhere else rather than participate in the enshittification of services they worked so hard to build:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it
When those constraints melted away - thanks to decades of official tolerance for monopolies, which led to regulatory capture and victory over the tech workforce - the same mediocre sociopaths found themselves able to pursue their most enshittificatory impulses without fear.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Fear that a regulator would punish the company so severely that all gains from cheating would be wiped out. Fear that a rival technology - alternative clients, tracker blockers, third-party mods and plugins - would emerge that permanently severed the company's relationship with their customers.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
In other words, they class enshittification as an *ideological* phenomenon, rather than as a *material* phenomenon. Corporate leaders have *always* felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Those years were the result of *constraints* on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to *act* better than they do today, even if the were not any better:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from *fear*. Fear that a competitor would take away a disgruntled customer or worker.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
The new Berjon paper is narrower in scope, but still packed with material examples of the way the internet goes wrong and how it can be put right. It's called "The Fiduciary Duties of User Agents":
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3827421
In "Fiduciary Duties," Berjon focuses on the technical term "user agent," which is how web browsers are described in formal standards documents.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
I (re)discovered this Farrell quote in a paper by Robin Berjon, who recently co-authored a *magnificent* paper with Farrell entitled "We Need to Rewild the Internet":
https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
The effects of this are all around us. In *This Is Your Phone On Feminism*, the great @mariafarrell describes how audiences at her lectures profess both love for their smartphones *and* mistrust for them. Farrell says, "We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship":
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
This notion of a "user agent" is a holdover from a more civilized age, when technologists tried to to build a new digital space where tech served users.
A browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.
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