EDITED TO MAKE THE TITLE MORE APPROPRIATE. The previous title of this post was “I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life” which was the slug line as it appeared in my mailing-list-to-RSS reader. Although this is the first paragraph of the linked essay, it does not do a good job of explaining the thrust of the essay, and some people (not you though) seem to be arguing with the title instead of the essay.
(Thanks to [email protected] for the heads up.)
END OF EDITED SECTION
Here’s why you’re getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they’ve amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about “fighting for the user.” Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.
Tldr; Join physical movements like a union to focus on actual laws being created and/or enforced while shitting on people for doing anything that else that may be positive
Also tries to sell their book bragging about how early reviews are raving about it. Provocative for clicks to say obvious shit that they’re selling. "Bruh, join a union. We need to organize a popular political party. "
Also their conclusion doesn’t read to me like it actually goes against personal conscious consumption choice. Like saying join a movement as if a movement doesn’t start with a bunch of individuals making choices about how they spend their time, use their money, speak their opinion, etc and figuring out all these individuals have a lot in common and have a common point to organize around
Article is like, “ya Linux, Signal, Mastodon, etc. But they’re all niche and you as an individual make so little difference so join a movement.”
Linux is probably the most used kernel for operating systems in the world. Not a good example. Backend operating system for the Internet. Signal is far more popular than a decade ago. Don’t know about Mastodon. Regardless if people aren’t being encouraged to engage in more private and/or decentralized Internet, why the fuck would they be engaged enough to go to some political meetup about something they don’t individually engage with and develop personal interest towards. Collective action starts with developing individual interests that converge to a collective group of individuals with shared interests.
Telling people to join movements while telling people, well actually not those movements
Also shit on people’s good causes and their small actions and not realize that those little things keep people engaged and they’re potential conversation points to bring people into more direct organized action.
Then after complaining about small niche movements that apparently won’t amount to anything long term, they point out small niche organizations that for some reason will grow and amount to something long term for reasons I imagine being that they care more about those than using decentralized and open source software (services)
The great news is that he’s on Mastodon, if you’d like to reach out: @[email protected]
He might care a little about distributed services.
I read his article and won’t read his book. I won’t reach out to him. If he wants to engage better with people, he should try not starting with belittling people’s efforts that they can do in there individual lives of which doesn’t preclude anything they can do communally. I don’t start with environmental or moral vegetarians and vegans with, “what you’re doing will change nothing and not worth the effort. Join a animal rights organization. What you’re doing now is weak.” Just start with saying join an animal rights group and why they should framed not why what they’re currently doing is a waste of effort but what else they could also be doing and how that can be effective
“Do all this! Do more! You’ll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better.”
It would better if that came off paragraph after but instead they dipped into simultaneously dunking on individual efforts to build up poorly detailed communal efforts. Spends more time complaining about peoples individual efforts than explaining the how to’s and benefits of communal efforts
He should focus better on making his argument more tight and focused with minimal collateral damage. How does using Linux, Signal, Mastodon isolate people. People can have all that installed and more. Terrible examples.
Yes recycling is mostly green washing as it gets dumped/burned elsewhere. Why try make people feel like they were fools for sending things to recycling. They tried.
Not effective writing, not effective communication, not effective persuasion and so far in this thread he’s not even hitting with leftist let alone centrist and conservatives. People are focusing on the hot take because the writer thought it’d be smart to frame his wants with a hot take about the individual actions people take as weak. Frame with click bait so get lambasted for being a click bait artist
If I may chime in, like Sundray, I am used to the author’s style, which preempts critics by acknowledging the difficulty before getting to the positive. He’s had enough people tell him ‘recycling plastic is a joke!’ to now start by saying, yes, I know, BUT you should still do it and then he’ll get to the positive. He’s not suggesting people are foolish for doing it, he’s simply letting the reader know that it ought to work better than it does and the failure is NOT on the citizenry, but on the deep pockets trying to escape blame. He wants you to know how they profit off the backs of the working class and he wants us to fight back together (and to keep recycling).