“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.”

We’re at a point where tech companies have given away easy solutions to all of our problems to the point that nobody actually knows how to use the technology that they rely on.

How do people listen to music? Spotify

How do people watch videos? Netflix

How do people talk to your friends? Meta/X/Whatever

All of those services seem like a great deal, they give you things for free/cheap and you never have to take the effort to figure out what a codec is or how to manage your own media. People pay for these services with their privacy, freedom and permanent reliance on tech companies to give them access to technology (and $10/mo, $12/mo, $13.99/mo, $15/mo, $20/mo)

These services have created a dependency that they’re now exploiting. What does someone do when Netflix raises their prices? Their technological skillset limits them to operating the Play/App Store so all of their other options are similarly bad options offering the same Faustian bargain.

The solution is simple and also difficult: learn to use the technology that you depend on and stop using the services that require you give up your privacy and freedom.

There are entire communities of people who’ve already made this leap. Look into the Privacy/Self-Hosted/Homelab communities, they are full of people who’ve rejected the idea that technological services are only available as a product where you have to give up control over your digital life to purchase. The Free and Open Source community is made up of a huge amount of people who volunteer their time to create software that is available for you to use or modify as you’d like.

It isn’t easy. Most people have spent the majority of their lives learning to use software created by Microsoft, Google and Apple. They’ve spent hundreds of hours learning how to use Facebook or iOS and this creates a strong incentive to stay on these services. Learning these things was a waste of time and have become the hook that keeps you stuck in enshittification land.

I know that people don’t want to hear ‘Well, you just need to learn Linux/Docker/FOSS software’, but that’s the solution that we have collectively arrived at in this alternate world where we’re rejecting commercial software/service providers.

Nobody is coming to save you from this problem, there’s isn’t going to be a not-enshittified Norwegian Netflix opening up next year for you to subscribe to. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world.

Come and join us.

“…there’s isn’t going to be a not-enshittified Norwegian Netflix opening up next year for you to subscribe to.”

Yes, but there could be. There’s no actual mechanism besides pure greed that leads to enshittification.

Imagine a service with a set price, no ads, never increases prices except to maintain operation in the face of inflation. Not beholden to shareholders, but rather to stakeholders.

Corporations have a legal obligation to make profit for their shareholders. However, being incorporated can also add legal protections for employees. So, we need such companies who are beholden once again to their stakeholders.