Thoughts at large

[Jimaz]

Since 1990, the American Dialect Society {ADS} has designated one or more words or terms to be the "Word of the Year" in the United States. This year the word is "Enshittification."

Brilliant. Thank you Cory Doctorow!

‘What many of us feel’: why ‘enshittification’ is Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year

...Doctorow himself is surprisingly optimistic about where this could all end up.

Action on competition to prevent market dominance, regulation on things such as digital privacy, more power for users to decide how they use platforms, and tackling the exploitation of workers could reverse the process, he wrote, because “everyone has a stake in disenshittification”.

Big tech can’t be fixed, he argues, but maybe it can be destroyed.

He adds a fourth stage to the tech platforms’ scatological journey from being good to users, to abusing them in favour of their customers, to abusing their customers to serve themselves.

“Then they die,” he wrote.