The enshitification of all things is so frustrating. You witness perfectly useful technology being destroyed in the pursuit of like 5 dollars. I don't answer the phone unless I've told someone to call me because it's always a robot, my email inbox is full of garbage I didn't ask for so I don't check in much, now they've got robots texting me scams. I can't even pay for petrol in peace, because they make a nickel having a tiny television try to sell me an energy drink. And nothing is done because heaven forefend that anything should come in the way of an extra .02% increase in some asshole's quarterly report.
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Technology
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I was pumping gas a couple of weeks ago and that stupid TV came on and started playing ads at full blast. I stopped pumping, went inside, and pulled a Karen. I asked for the manager and then told him that I want someone to know that I'm never coming back to that station because it's forcing ads on me when I'm already paying for a product. Then I left and will never go back. I know they don't give a shit about one person, but if more people took these stands then we could stop having so much shit shoved down our throats.
I can't in good conscience make a worker's day worse because of something they don't control, but I understand the sentiment. I agree though that collective action is probably our best shot at seeing change.
In 2004 I was a radical young man protesting for bikes and against the Iraq War. At one of the meetups another kid who had been at the RNC protest in New York showed us this software someone had hacked together overnight to broadcast SMS messages. Basically you could send an SMS to a VOIP phone number and it would echo the SMS to everyone subscribed. They were using it to communicate in the crowd at the protest and avoid police kettles. It was pretty cool but I admit I didn't really see it as being more broadly useful.
Later that night the group went for drinks and I was talking with one of the older radicals and he was telling me that the internet was too good and too powerful and they were going to shut it down. I thought that was absurd. How could they get rid of the internet!? He said they would figure out a way to shut it down, there's just no way they could leave it out there, it's too dangerous for them to do so.
Now I look at the thing we call "the internet" in 2023 and it looks nothing like that internet. The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never "flipped the switch" on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.
The way I see it Steve Jobs marked a turning point with those Apple events. The corporate platitude bullshit with the "you told us and we listened" jargon. Before technology was mainly hobbyist nerds making stuff out of the love of technology. There was a two way relationship where the developers trusted the users and the users trusted the developers be acting in good faith. Now it's lifeless and jaded beneath a veneer of forced corporate smiles. Over the years everyone adopted the turtleneck speak in one way or another.
It's an insult to our intelligence to push anti-patterns. All while expecting us to engage like sheep in the mandatory capitalist pep rally. 'We made 20% efficiency to your oppressive experience. Now cheer! I said CHEER damn it'.
In the meanwhile, EU legislation has gone from being so boring you would prefer to watch the grass grow to making headlines that make you smile.
Funny I said the same thing in 1995.
The internet is what you make of it. Meaning, you don’t need the entire wide area network, you just need what you don’t want in your local area network.
In terms of an interconnected network, you need only what you need!
This is an amazing time. Lemmy, self hosting, docker, cloud hosting, $100 consumer devices that rival $10k servers from ten years ago, AI, LLM, global gaming, etc….
Yeah I’m with you. Just look at reddit. Enshitification has gone too far and it’s leading to decentralization. Here we are, after all.
I’m sure the streaming services are next. The nice thing about software tech is it is easy for folks to develop alternatives
We need an alternative to Email
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What the fuck is wrong with email now ?
It's one of the only things that hasn't been ruined those past few internet decades, only slightly improved, and is still decentralized and can still allow you to self host, don't you touch it
It's unencrypted
Is it encrypted while in transit between servers?
The answer is almost universally "no", if you didn't encrypt it yourself and are sending a cross-domain mail
I'm fairly sure connecting over TLS was the default last time I set up my server. But of course that only protects it from people snooping on the wires.
I remember getting really angry at Facebook for all their shit about eight years ago. It used to be that when I met someone and they learned my profession, they said it was "cool." I was angry that FB would turn the public against us. Fuck them. They started this downward trend.
Replying to myself:
Also, tech became a place to make money rather than a passion, like law and medicine. It's full of people who don't love it, but wanted to get rich. It took a friend's observations for me to figure that out.
Where there is gold, there will be diggers.
Internet was ruined with the rise of smartphones. Every dumb Karen and her friends started to post on the internet. With PC it was somewhat barrier for idiots. Pre social media times were the best. Nowadays idiots rule the internet.
I would argue it was ruined once social media companies found out how to monetize data. Facebook and MySpace were huuuuuge back before smartphones existed, and using a PC was actually not that huge of a hurdle for surfing the web. It was when companies went “oh shit, we can sell user data to market ads” that they all scrambled to make things easier to use and adopt.
Currently use the internet for Steam, Lemmy and streaming I cut down from Gigabit to 12mbps because I just don't use it any more.
You can thank capitalism for this, back at the dawn of the internet it was largely just regular people running sites and building organic networks. Then the internet started getting commercialized, and the tech started turning increasingly user hostile and exploitative.