Cory Doctorow on Search Engine Enshittification
Cory Doctorow on Search Engine Enshittification
32 comments
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I'll be fucked if I have my search history associated with my payment information. Not that I have any weird shit in there, just that I know at some point what I look for and buy will get cross-correlated and sold to the highest bidder. Plus, data breaches. And bittorrent searches.
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I completely agree with his points but enshittification is such a cringey word
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Yeah. Not really ideal to giving a serious talk or something. Though there really isn't a single other word describing the growth-phase-to-monetization-phase shift that I'm aware of.
"Growth phase to monetization phase shift" is kind of awkwardly long.
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Its not just growth to monetization, its next stage of 20% profit growth year after year, in this case in the end, sooner or later, one way or another, companies end up having to do bad things. So most companies end up doing bad things and society has to live with largely bad companies.
I wish there was a better way.
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The welfare harms from monopolies are hardly a new discovery. The "growth phase" is called - in some contexts, at least - the "predation stage" followed by the "recoupment phase".
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I disagree. My parents, big Roku users, wondering why Roku was becoming hostile to its customers with policy updates that require a remote to agree to, ads coming through cables (HDMI patent), were able to understand the nature of the company at the moment through the explanation of enshittification.
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Oh look, the guy who likes to enshitify people's timelines on mastodon.
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He does what, now? Can you post some links/examples? Is it because he posts long threads?
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Pretty much, yeah.
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He always strikes me as the kind of person that confuses his moderately deep knowledge of a limited topic set with the type of thinking that makes him an over-confident expert on a much larger variety of topics. Like when economists start making declarations about climate change science.
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You’re getting downvoted pretty hard, but for what it’s worth that’s broadly the impression I got when I started reading some of his books. I first read Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free and really enjoyed it. As I checked out some other stuff written by him I gradually lost interest. It reminded me of Dave Eggers stuff, starts off strong then gets really preachy and collapses under its own weight.
Doctorow seems like a pretty good sci-fi writer, and extremely knowledgeable on copyright/IP issues. He seems to be a little bit extra though, I mean he pulled a Musk and named his kid “Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow”. Like do you bro, but that’s a lot to saddle a kid with. They might grow up to like it, but naming a kid is by its nature something they can’t consent to, so going that eccentric with it kind of indicates a sense of hubris to me, plus it kind of reads like someone screaming “look at me and what I chose to name my child”. I get that a parent/child relationship is inherently hierarchal to an extent, especially with an infant, but like bro. There’s even and xkcd poking fun at him ffs.
Anyway I kind of read a lot of his more hot take blog posts the same way. It’s like the guy has a solidly grounded world view and personal ethics, but chooses to create intentionally polarizing content and winds up semi-alienating some people who are otherwise ideologically aligned with him. I mean I guess that’s how you hustle as a blogger though?
All that being said, it does seem like his stuff raises awareness of real societal issues for people who otherwise wouldn’t realize they existed, and are usually explained clearly and succinctly enough to make non-technical people understand the technical issues at hand, like with (ugh) “enshittification”. I can’t really hate on the guy if he’s leaving a net positive impact on the world.
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You are right.
Imho he is and always was a pretty insufferable guy who makes some good points.
This has been the case since at least Boingboing times
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32 comments