Mastodawn

‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’

https://sh.itjust.works/post/56890254

‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’ - sh.itjust.works

The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.” The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services. “We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.” Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.

For me it’s a tale about loss of ownership in a dematerialised world. No one is going to cut a piece of my dining table because I own it and physically have it entirely at my side.

I’ll never own (my locally installed) Spotify nor the songs I listen to. Though for the later I have vinyl alternatives which no one is touching.

Ariselas Mar 16

can’t beat physical media

Yeah but I’m not putting my turn table in my back back to go fishing with ;-)

I don’t know about fishing, but I use a portable turntable to listen to records outside.

The power cable is USB, so it runs fine on a powerbank. The speakers are horrible, so I also bring a portable battery powered speaker.

It’s not really worth the hassle in comparison to just using a Bluetooth speaker, but it’s an excellent way to waste time on a long summers night.

the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere

That’s not exactly what it is, though. Enshittification is the deliberate degradation of a product for the purpose of extracting maximum revenue, where the product is progressively degraded up to the point where the consumer ditches it, but not exactly to it.

Without the tie to maximum revenue and measurement of consumer ability to cope, it’s hard to understand why enshittification is so brutally frustrating.

HellsBelle Mar 16

Cory Doctorow describes the stages of enshittification as follows:

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.

And for good measure he reminds us of the why and how things used to be better:

The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

…medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittificatio…

My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

Live from Berlin.

Medium

Was there a “pre-enshittifcation era” or were we merely at the first stage of system-wide enshitification?

HellsBelle Mar 16

The late 90’s, early 00’s were pre-. About 2003-05 it started becoming enshittified, ie: ISPs started throttling, a lot of forums were bought out and/or priced out, etc.

merdaverse Mar 16

Feels very fitting for The Guardian to downplay how the profit motive inherent in capitalism contributes to enshittification, even when Doctorow’s original definition clearly includes it.

ExLisper Mar 16

Here are the proposals: …forbrukerradet.no/…/2026-02-27-final-letter-to-e…

Rebalance power between service providers and consumers.

Tackle dependency on Big Tech

Double down on the enforcement of existing laws.

Close the existing legal loopholes by adopting a strong Digital Fairness Act.

Nothing concrete. 3, 4 are mainly about enforcing GDPR. 2 is a job for public sector. All this is not really related to enshitification, it’s more about independence from US tech.

That leaves us with 1, which they describe as “It should be possible and practical to switch to alternative service providers, or tweak services they already use to suit their needs and preferences”.

Sounds great but what does it really mean? You can already switch to alternative provides. You don’t have to use Google or Facebook. Are they suggesting I should be able to move my facebook account to some other site? Which one? Other than some sort of interoperability between messaging apps I don’t really see how this would work.

Tweak the services? I don’t think trying to fix Big Tech is the right way to go. What tweaks would save Reddit for example? The issue was moderation and bots. What tweaks would fix Instagram?

I think the only alternative to current shitty internet is internet paid for by the users based on common protocols, self-hosting and federation. You want to post things on the internet? Host some open source service or pay someone else to host it for you. Most people will still prefer to pay corporations with their data and watch endless ads instead of paying directly to the service providers but at least there would be an alternative. And as Bit Tech enshittifies more and more people would jump to open source the way we’re seeing with Windows and Linux. For me, what EU should be doing is pouring money into open source project and hosting open source services.

UltraGiGaGigantic Mar 16

Other than some sort of interoperability between messaging apps I don’t really see how this would work.

IIRC, when telephones were in their infancy, you would only be able to contact people within your network. Imagine only being able to call other T mobile customers.

We did it back then, we can do it now. No more walled gardens.

EvacuateSoul Mar 16

Why is the thumbnail Zach Galifianakis?

HellsBelle Mar 16

It’s a screenshot from the ad on Norwegian tv.

Always good to check the article before commenting.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,”

Ummm… It’s happening constantly in the “analogue” world.

Modern_medicine_isnt Mar 16

As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue. It is a race to the bottom.
How do you fix that without massive upheaval for the people you are trying to help. I don’t know.
Companies used to have a smaller reach, meaning less total and potential customers. So they had to balance what what was good for the shareholders qith what was good for the customers or risk losing both. But products are often global now, especially digital ones. There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose. And investors don’t care as much about the long term since they can trade stocks so quickly. Maybe the solution is required holding periods for stocks or something. Higher short term capital gains taxes, and better incentives for long term gains.

It won’t stop until stocks are no longer a thing.

Honestly it seems like a bad idea to have stocks in the first place

Like a loan shark you can never get rid of.

Why does this even exist ?

I remember learning about the stock market in grade school and I thought it was stupid then and I think it’s stupid now.

It’s harmful in pretty much every way.

vaultdweller013 Mar 16

Stocks aren’t necessarily a bad thing since they in theory represent abstract ownership of a thing. Perfectly fine when privately held, it becomes an increasingly problematic thing when. Traded on an open market though.

I think whenever stocks exist, regardless if private or public, the goal of the company becomes focused on increasingly profits instead of sustainability.

Not that non-traded companies don’t want profits too. But the goal of “forever-increases” in profits will ultimately be destructive to a company as it will lead to lower quality, more exploitation, and intense focus on monopolizing their industry as that will be the only way to retain customers.

I think investing in companies is not really a bad thing. But it should be more like a set contract with an end date and/or amount.

More like a loan with interest. From a bank. Or how some contracts are made with movie actors and such.

A percentage of profits over a 10 year period or something.

Idk. There has to be a better way to do this.

The stock market has too much influence on the economy without bringing a benefit that surpasses the damage it does.

vaultdweller013 Mar 16

The nature of non-traded and private stocks can be debated for days, especially when you get into the minutiae of stuff like mining stocks for example where it can represent the payout to workers, investors, and owners at the end of a season. But what has made itself evident is that the stock market should not be allowed to exist as it is. Maybe it can be devolved back into resource stocks but that’s just getting into your contract loan/payout idea.

UnderpantsWeevil Mar 16

As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue.

I’d say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people’s pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they’d have made long term.

It isn’t merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they’re gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.

It isn’t enough for Zuckerberg’s company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into… the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they’re doing, to make human labor irrelevant!

Because they’ve bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.

There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose.

So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.

It’s increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.

Modern_medicine_isnt Mar 17

So I will disagree on one point. If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders. Shareholders only make money if the stock price goes up, which requires people to buy it at the higher price. And if the company isn’t growing double digits, buyers will go elsewhere. So the drive to produce shareholder value forces companies to chase the double digit growth or die. And shareholders want quick gains, so they can move on to the next company with double digit growth.

It’s not the ceos who are the reason for all this. It’s that all this causes boards to chose ceos that operate this way. People see that, and then aspire to do the same so they can be rich. This is why ceos spend so much time essentially marketing thier companies ideas. Thats how you get the stock price to go up. Buyers buy on the perception that a company is doing great things, or will. Reality doesn’t often factor in like people think it does.

As for AI. They don’t care about replacing humans. All they care about is a sales pitch that makes the stock price go up. If telling people that there software will replace humans does that, then that is what they will say. They don’t let reality get in the way.

If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders. Shareholders only make money if the stock price goes up, which requires people to buy it at the higher price.

www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dividend.asp

Puddinghelmet Mar 17

Yeah well america is one big business, they don’t care for regular citizens, they wanna know how they can make profit of citizens. I bet that wont ever change

Blackmist Mar 17

We just need Rache Bartmoss to kill the old one…