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.

[Jimaz]

Advertisers make money off of your eyes and ears. Should they owe you a percentage of that revenue? Spam: how much is too much?

Indian man awarded damages over length of commercials before movie screening

An Indian man has been awarded damages in a legal case against the country’s biggest movie theater chain after he complained that it showed too many commercials before a movie.

Abhishek M R, a 31-year-old lawyer from the southern city of Bangalore, decided to take action against the PVR INOX chain after he was forced to cancel work calls because the movie overran the scheduled finish time.

In a case brought before Bangalore’s District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission,....

The late finish time was caused by “trailers, advertisements and other fillers which wasted nearly 30 mins of the time of the complainant along with the other viewers,” Abhishek claimed,....

The consumer disputes commission found in Abhishek’s favor and ordered the chain to pay him 20,000 {$230} in damages and a further 8,000 {$92} in costs....

In its ruling, the commission said: “In the new era, time is considered as money, each one’s time is very precious.” It went on to say that 25 to 30 minutes is “a considerable amount of time to sit idle in the theatre and watch unnecessary ads...."