17 lines
1,009 B
Markdown
17 lines
1,009 B
Markdown
+++
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title = "Enshittification"
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glassblowers = ["felixstalder.md"]
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+++
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A term [proposed](https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc) by Cory Doctorow in 2023, to make sense of why most of
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the commercial Internet services not only got objectively worse (Google
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Search is less capable of finding relevant stuff today than it was 10
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years ago), but also why it has become an outright hostile environment.
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He describes it as this:
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> It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
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The most hopeful part is „Then, they die“. Because it points towards a
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configuration of social infrastructures beyond the one we know and hate.
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To help imagine this “beyond”, we can look at projects and their
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infrastructures that never entered this process in the first place.
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