What combats enshittification is the commons itself. That is: if you can download a car, car manufacturers can't be rentiers. The commons isn't the same as "open", because it's about the norms, not the artifacts.<p>And sufficiently complex rentier schemes eventually collapse to the commons, because they resemble Ponzis: they get into the business of enslaving their neighbors because that keeps the scheme going. That's why historical empires have a definite lifespan to them.<p>What we've been going through with rapid progress in computing and networking is a series of these schemes, which have been the basis of "tech" as a distinct industry - IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. At this point everyone is in on the game and looking for ways to make "smart" devices.<p>But what ordinary people are doing in response is a kind of turtling of their behavior: doing fewer things that are more aligned with the commons that remains. The pandemic lockdown experience saw a wave of this, with a lot of preference shifts that reverberated through the supply chain.<p>And so I see a vibrant "future of tech" existing in terms of defining robust commons spaces with norms that resist an entity coming in and saying "let me <i>help</i> you with that". It's just the nature of things that rentiers can always deploy an army of mercenaries to claim the space first, and then the commons gradually catches up by being more survivable in turmoil.
The author nails so many points, it's a bit overwhelming.<p>The war on general computing seems to be the common underlying culprit, but how can this exploit ever be mitigated? The average person just wants "iPhone", and the subject of purchased hardware not serving them is even something they are interested in discussing or bothering trying to understand.<p>Computers are sneaky because what a computer is really up to can be made opaque to the end user.<p>Remember that experiment a few months back that made the computer beep everytime the web browser sent telemetry?<p><a href="https://twitter.com/bert_hu_bert/status/1561466204602220544" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/bert_hu_bert/status/1561466204602220544</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32617787">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32617787</a> (11 months ago, 108 comments)
Man, at this point, I just want a shitty old car that I can fix everything myself without tons of computer stuff in them. But there's always the issue of parts availability.<p>Anyone know of a dumb(ish) car that is user repairable with decently easy to find replacement parts?
I wonder how hard it is to fight these trends.<p>I see large-screen televisions for so little money - because you can't turn off the data collection. People don't want to pay more, let alone 3x for something with privacy.<p>And the people who sell system with privacy, they can take it all away with an update. silently.<p>For example, <a href="https://puri.sm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://puri.sm</a> sells phones that are linux-based, but they have to charge a lot and the experience is sub-par.<p>I think there's a market for it, but I don't know if it can catch up with the steep drop in "price" for goods where the true costs are hidden.<p>Maybe legislation?
TL;DR, the App store has evolved from your computer and smart phone, onto your car, and some people miss fiddling with their knobs.<p>Google is rolling out tech to websits to stop people using web blockers, but this might just create a new type of dark web.<p>And technofuedalism is killing capitalism and democracy, so now might be the time to learn to program or design circuitboards for the masses.