“Well, you bought a Dodge Ram, so we know you’re gullible as hell. Now to let the advertisers have their way with you.”

You’re a… brave person, posting this on Lemmy of all places. The only thing more dangerous would posting the word f*ck OH SHIT LOOK OUT HERE THEY COME!

Fair, thank you. There does seem to be some confusion about enshittification vis a vis personal effects, versus Enshittification that exists in the world. (Reducing the former doesn’t reduce the latter, and the latter still remains everyone’s problem.) I used a bookmarklet to grab the link and tagline. I’ll update the title to more accurately reflect the content of the essay.

Would you say individual choices have slowed or reversed enshittification?

I love how unshitty Lemmy is 😊 . That’s why I post here so much!

But Reddit isn’t less shitty as a result. I think it’s even getting worse.

Great!

Is… is someone trying to stop you from doing that?

The irony

How so?

That’s wonderful! It’s good to diminish the amount of enshittification you experience in your life!

Enshittification, writ large, goes on regardless. The point of the essay is that avoiding it in your personal life is good (if sometimes tiresome, depending on the specifics of your life) and you should totally do that, but the root causes of enshittification can be defeated by organized collective action.

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

“Do all this! Do more! You’ll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better.”

Valve nor the Canadian government started either of those efforts, but they helped signal-boost and take concrete supportive actions when they see that even a small group of people independently have supported that change already.

It’s nice when that happens, when big-money players take notice of grass-roots movements and push forward their agendas. Pretty rare, though.

“Do all this! Do more! You’ll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better.”

The great news is that he’s on Mastodon, if you’d like to reach out: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

He might care a little about distributed services.

First, it looks like this may be a dressed up advertisement for their newly released book:

To be fair, this is a web archive of Cory Doctorow’s email newsletter, normally sent to a self-selecting audience that expects to see Cory try to sell us his stuff. But also, as the coiner of “enshittification” this is a subject he’s been examining for many years.

I’m not going to bankrupt them, but I’m not helping them.

That’s good!

If you ever want to step up to hurting them, you’ll probably need to party up.

Defeatism will get us nowhere.

I agree! And, I think the linked essay agrees, also? I mean the last sentence literally says, “You can’t fight enshittification. But together, we can.”

That sounds very different than, “Acceptance of or resignation to the prospect of defeat. Acceptance of the inevitability of defeat. Acceptance of defeat without struggle.”

Well, it’s Cory Doctorow doing the saying.

But in my own opinion, boycotts work for products and services that you pay for; personally refusing to use services that rely on money from other business, less so. The #DeleteFacebook movement has existed since at least 2017. Twitter loudly hemorrhaged users after the Musk buyout. “DeGoogle” has been a thing since 2006. Small business, progressives, and others have been advocating boycotting Amazon for over a decade… and yet they all still exist, they are all still bad actors, and show no signs of getting any better.

The people who have left those services are better off, and that’s good – better than good! But these corporate ogres haven’t stopped destroying society because of it. They haven’t even slowed down.

To look at it another way: ALL of these corpos fear government regulation, especially in labor and fair business practices: You know that’s true because they ALL spend billions fighting it tooth and nail.

Far be it from me to defend a jumping-off point for discussion, but I didn’t see anything in the essay saying that people shouldn’t “do the right thing.” Just the opposite, in fact (“Do all this! Do more! You’ll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better.”)

No worries! I know it’s silly but I’m still in love with the Vita, so I had that link in my back pocket.

Elon: “I want Grok to be an infallible source of truth.”

Engineer: “But that’s impos–you just want it to be you, don’t you.”

Elon: “Yes, make it me.”