Yesterday, parliament heard that the major parties will come together and pass a law banning teenagers from social media, after a period of careful thought roughly commensurate with that of a 15-year-old making a Black Friday impulse buy at Shein.com.
Ah great, the word ‘enshittification’ is already going to shit.
@eureka @Gorgritch_umie_killa suggestions for a new one?
Meh, never liked the term.
I never felt it captured the seriousness of the undermining of the public’s access to reliable information, by the ownership of these public sphere’s being captured by profit maximising entities.
The temptation to skew algorithms to profit maximisation instead of best information delivery has proven too great, its why a fundamental shift away from the walled garden concept is required. In my view.
‘Platform decay’ is more serious and more descriptive to boot.
Certainly is better. But i don’t think it needs a ‘technology industry’ specific term.
Old terms like market monopolisation, or corruption of the public sphere.
Or something like those are better, because nothing the tech platforms have done is new, their tactics aren’t different from any other company seeking to dominate their respective product market. The key difference being the speed at which their product travels around the world.
You make a reasonable point. I think there is difference, though, which is the degree to which ‘the customer is the product’ for these platforms, and that’s a key ingredient in Doctorow’s original post:
Sure, advertising is nothing new, but the degree to which these platforms can target content and ads to the individual is qualitatively different to ‘old media’. Emphasis on ‘the customer’, singular, being the product, not ‘the readers/viewers’ as a whole.
I’s talking about products in general, not new v old media. I actually had Jack Welch of GE in my mind when i wrote the comment yesterday.
That doctorow was a longer read than i’s expecting, clicked on a lot of links as well. This is why its taken soblong for me to reply :p I really liked the part about ‘heating’.
The heating part made me think about how youtube rarely showed me videos from channels i’d liked previously, i had to go looking for them, while the recommended videos showed so much weird crap.
I still think its no different to the ‘ever lasting search for the latest eFficiEnCeeeeee saving’ every MBA learns by rote.
But i take your point, User Attention is what these companies are selling. Like good little MBA’s they are doing everything they can to exploit that value from the user attention assets they have, and are singularly failing to build any new assets of any value.
@eureka @Gorgritch_umie_killa If it helps, CoPilot reckons
"still thinking of a playful use of an alternative word
Got it! Here are a few playful alternatives to “enshittification” that convey a similar idea:
Crapification: The process by which something becomes crappy.
Bummification: When things start to become a real bummer.
Suckification: The act of something starting to suck.
Trashification: Transforming into trash-quality.
Downslopification: Going down the slope of quality.
Flopification: The journey from success to flop.
Funkification: Things taking a turn for the worse in a funky way.
These options keep the humorous and playful tone while conveying the decline or deterioration of something. Do any of these fit the bill for what you had in mind? 😊
"
I do appreciate the irony of using CoPilot to find adjectives for “enshitification”.
If you want a more accurate and useful definition of “enshitification”, try “Microsoft CoPilot”
@Salvo CoPilot is the only “AI” thing not recently blocked on our work network. Knee-jerk, but OK. They’re worried about data exfiltration and storage. But trust me, that should really be very far down the list of security/technology concerns.
I think it is justified for any commercial interest to block all LLM data exfiltration technologies from all corporate workplaces. This includes CoPilot, Adobe AI Assistant, Google Whatever-they-want-to-call-it-this-week, ChatGPT and even on-device, but corporate-managed technologies like Apple Intelligence.
They should also block employees from using social media that use Algorithms to analyse and manipulate users.