Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.Oct 23Pluralistic: Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs (23 Oct 2025)
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.Aug 20, 2025Pluralistic: Become unoptimizable (20 Aug 2025)
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.Jul 30, 2025Pluralistic: Delta's AI-based price-gouging (30 Jul 2025)
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/
"Twiddling represents the big cognitive hazard from enshittification during the AI bubble: the parts of your UI that matter most to you are the parts that you use as vital cognitive prostheses. A product team whose KPI is "get users to tap on an AI button" is going to use the fine-grained data they have on your technological activities to preferentially target these UI elements that you rely on with AI boobytraps. You are too happy, so they are leaving money on the table, and they're coming for it.
This is a form of "attention rent": the companies are taxing your muscle-memory, forcing you to produce deceptive usage statistics at the price of either diverting your cognition from completing a task to hunt around for the button that banishes the AI and lets you get back to what you were doing; or to simply abandon that cognitive prosthesis:
(...)
It's true "engagement-hacking": not performing acts of dopamine manipulation; but rather, spying on your habitual usage of a digital tool in order to swap buttons around in order to get you to make a number go up. It's exploiting the fact that you engage with something useful and good to make it less useful and worse, because if you're too happy, some enshittifier is leaving money on the table."
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/28/twiddlehazard/#outboard-brains-considered-harmful
#Twiddling #Enshittification #AI #GenerativeAI #AttentionRent #EngagementHacking #Capitalism
BTW let's be clear: Almost all #twiddling is "illegal but it's OK because we're doing it digitally".
In no sane society are you allowed to sell an apple, then reach across the counter & replace it with a rock as the customer is about to bite into it. You promise & receive money for a thing, you're obliged to deliver THAT thing, not something else & you CERTAINLY can't change the thing later without the buyer's consent.
We know what to do about this. We just don't.
Attached: 1 image "- while corporations are (legally) people, they are decidedly not human. They are artificial lifeforms, "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" (as HG Wells said of the marauding aliens in War of the Worlds) [...] These alien invaders are busily xenoforming the planet, rendering it unfit for human habitation." - @[email protected] The most salient part of the article is still the attached bit, but it's too long for a toot, hence the also pretty good quote above. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/
Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist Cory Doctorow @pluralistic speech at the 2025 Ursula Franklin Lecture. >
#enshitification #monopsonies #twiddling #locked_users #locked_sellers #gafam #lecture #algorithmic_wage_discrimination
#speech #surveillance_capitalism #interoperability #competition #regulation #workers_power #big_data #sellers #users #techno_feudalism #employment #ratings #uberisation #queries #jediblue #profiling #enshitified #internet #abuse #data_brokers #antitrust_law #tech_layoffs #regulatory_captures #technological_abuse #privacy #value #giant_pile_of_shit #technical_mechanism #rankings #unions #digitalisation #nursing #speech #lecture #video #coporatocracy #monopoly
Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist Cory Doctorow presents the 2025 Ursula Franklin Lecture.
Amazonがプライバシー設定をなし崩しで破壊、Alexaの音声アップロードを強行
BCG Consulting will help you (Retail Grocer) use #AI to enter the Dynamic Game and "improve volumes, margins, and customer value perception simultaneously." -- "customer value perception" is very different than customer value, of course, which tends to reduce "volumes and margins". #dynamicpricing #enshittification #twiddling
https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/overcoming-retail-complexity-with-ai-powered-pricing
The effect of #twiddling puts us up-and-coming writers in a dilemma that we didn't ask to be put in. We would like that qualitative feedback that Doctorow talks about, but our audience is a zygote that only divides based on a chain of arbitrary whims.
12/
This audience generator, this lottery/gacha/"market logic," is called #twiddling. It's not a fair game. I urge you, with every fibre of my being, to listen to this excerpt from a talk @pluralistic gave at DEF CON 32 last year about #enshittification:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8&t=878s
11/
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