In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17602033

You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.

It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.

These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.

Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.

This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today I’m going to explain why. It’s going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem.

  • The Hobbyist@lemmy.zip
    10·
    9 days ago

    I haven’t read the article so I can’t comment on it, but thinking that the solution is simply avoiding the services in question is not enough. It assumes that people know what the consequences to sign up are (most people probably don’t understand DRM) and it also assumes that there are better alternatives. Unfortunately, for the latter, I feel like there are fewer and fewer alternatives and the ones remaining are becoming increasingly niche. One may not be able to get a car which is self-repair friendly, independent on internet connectivity. So what does one do if one needs a car? Build one?

    • smee@sosial.link
      42·
      9 days ago

      There’s always going to be cars that are repairable, they’re just never going to be the flashiest, newest, cheapest or most media and socially hyped up vehicles. And that’s what people want.

      Folk complain about a simple thing like non-replaceable batteries in phones. But there’s always been phones with replaceable batteries. They’re just not Samsung phones or packed with the latest AI.

      And honestly, if people cannot understand what they’re signing up for… Perhaps they shouldn’t sign away their first born child to begin with?

      science.org/content/article/gi…