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.

8/

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.

--

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

1/

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.

3/

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.

2/

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.

4/

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.

5/

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/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

2/

The crybabies who freak out about *The Communist Manifesto* appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it - chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

1/

Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: #greenwashing, #genderwashing, #queerwashing, #wokewashing - all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.

3/

Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of #openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."

5/

The point of #SoftwareFreedom was #TechnologicalSelfDetermination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology *does*, but who it does it *to* and who it does it *for*:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement.

7/

The idea behind open source was to rebrand free software in a less ambiguous - and more instrumental - package that stressed cost-savings and software quality, as well as "ecosystem benefits" from a co-operative form of development that recruited tinkerers, independents, and rivals to contribute to a robust infrastructural commons.

9/

The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "#FreeAsInBeer" when really it means "#FreeAsInSpeech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").

8/

But "open" doesn't merely resolve the linguistic ambiguity of libre vs gratis - it does so by removing the "liberty" from "libre," the "freedom" from "free." "Open" changes the pole-star that movement participants follow as they set their course. Rather than asking "Which course of action makes us more free?" they ask, "Which course of action makes our software better?"

10/

Thus, by dribs and drabs, freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves - they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

11/

It's time for action

#horology #anarchism #sign #nola

Don't trust anyone under thirty

#NOLA #Bars

The internet is embroiled in a vicious polycrisis: child safety, surveillance, discrimination, disinformation, polarization, monopoly, journalism collapse - not only have we failed to agree on what to do about these, there's not even a consensus that all of these *are* problems.

--

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/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

1/

@JoeBeam @defcon @eff As noted in my bio, I post long threads from this account and there are many ways to get my essays if my Mastodon style doesn't suit - RSS, newsletter, Medium, Tumblr, a blog, etc. I recommend unfollowing me here and subscribing to one of those if you prefer. Links at pluralistic.net.

@JoeBeam

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/17/so-youve-decided-to-unfollow-me/