Big Tech likes to push the trope that things are moving and changing too quickly and there's no way that regulators could really keep up --- better (on their view) to just let the innovators innovate. This is false: many of the issues stay stable over quite some time. Case in point: Here's me **5 years ago** pointing out that large language models shouldn't be used as sources of information about the world, and that doing so poses risks to the information ecosystem:

https://x.com/emilymbender/status/1766634514946945414?s=20

All those things you want your shiny new technologies to fix won't shift even a little bit unless the humans involved fix their fucking hearts, first.

You can't technofix your way out of a values problem.

The power the CIO is given is taken from elsewhere in the organization.

One of the subtle harms of the resulting central IT model is that it strips the rest of the org of its digital capacity.

Teams with some digital literacy are vaguely aware that the time and attention of end users must be respected and the that adopting digital tools could/should alter/simplify their business process.

In a central IT environment, often teams have no digital literacy at all. They come with super prescriptive requests for ill-considered digital add-ons to their manual process. It takes some sophistication to build a digital service that doesn't impose on users and the sophistication is low.

Centralized teams are incentivized for project throughput and totally overwhelmed and never have time to do the exploration and education needed to make a sane digital service and end up building something ridiculous.

We're trapped in a cycle that can only be broken by getting digital skills into the business/program areas.

#gcdigital #freeTheITs

Just published: Part II

Overproduction really bites when products reach maturity, and the software industry is very bad at managing this transition.

I think we can be better.

https://medium.com/@ElizAyer/enshittification-as-overproduction-in-software-part-2-overproduction-in-the-product-lifecycle-99584e8da458

New blog post!

Part 1 of 2 on software enshittification and the dynamics of overproduction in software.

From some first-hand experience, I have a relatively optimistic take on this. Barring the few biggest platform companies, I think that most of what we see is incompetence, not malice.

https://medium.com/@ElizAyer/enshittification-as-overproduction-in-software-part-1-seeing-overproduction-7f175bca7724

"Federal government IT teams spend more time on compliance and oversight paperwork than they spend building quality online services."

Can confirm.

The more of this compliance work we can replace with actual security engineering the safer our systems will be.

#gcdigital

https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/february-2024/arrivecan-deeper-reforms/