<
https://doctorow.medium.com/the-moral-injury-of-having-your-work-enshittified-2860c586ed44>
"This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening — in which all the digital
services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit — did not result
from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the
collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:
https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/
The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their
rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key
parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:
<
https://www.engadget.com/google-reportedly-pays-apple-36-percent-of-ad-search-revenues-from-safari-191730783.html>
The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms
were stupendously wealthy, and cozy enough that they could agree on a common
legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to
violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law
doesn’t apply when you use an app to violate it:
<
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men>
But the regulatory capture isn’t just about
preventing regulation: it’s also
about
creating regulation — laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer,
scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back
value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives
rise to Jay Freeman’s perfectly named doctrine of “felony contempt of
business-model,” in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that
anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:
<
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain>
Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral
modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But
what does that actually
look like? I say that enshittification is always
precipitated by a lost argument.
It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something
that’s bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the
discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers
who are disgusted by this course of action can say, “I think doing this would
be gross, and what’s more, it’s going to make the company poorer,” and so they
win the argument.
But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, “Don’t do
this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make
the company richer.” Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification
begin!"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
