VOCABULARY: ‘Enshittification’ — the slow decay

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5

‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything

The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we’ve entered the ‘enshittocene’?
Cory Doctorow  — February 8 2024

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Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist.

The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. 

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AKA ENTROPY?

Just as things like uranium moves to lead, so to do all human systems.

Decay and death.

Sigh!

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TECHNOLOGY: Give a smartphone too young and you can hurt the youngster?

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

https://www.ft.com/content/da7bd5c6-1d29-4c40-8578-05966b84346b

FT Magazine Mental health

A decade on, I still wonder if I was wrong to give my daughters a smartphone

  • New research links young people’s worsening mental health to the age they received their first phone

Gillian Tett 

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Either way, Haidt thinks there is “a classic collective action problem” making it difficult for parents or schools to impose controls or limits on phone use without “centralised norms”. He thinks, say, that schools should ask kids to leave phones in lockers while in class, but knows that parents might object since they worry they cannot “reach their child if something happens, like a school shooting”.  There are small signs of hope. In Texas, a “Wait Until 8th” grade movement has emerged, with more than 45,000 families signing up. And norms do shift, though as the history of tobacco shows, it took decades even with hard evidence of the damage done by cigarettes.  If you have young children, brace yourself for the battle ahead. If only some genius entrepreneur would invent a dumb cell phone that would appeal to kids but without the addictive lure of the internet. That would be real tech innovation. 

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This reinforces some concerns that my significant other has for her grandson.  It is addictive.  And, she does limit “screen time”.   I wonder how this all works out in the end.  Seeing other children in restaurants locked into tablets, I can understand her concerns.  I used to think “what harm can it do”; I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid.  Maybe it warped me?

YMMV FWIW

Very provoking article.

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