Ed Zitron is on fire here:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-future/
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"All I know is that I feel like I am at war, and we — if I can be considered part of the media — are at war with people that have changed the terms of innovation so that it’s synonymous with value extraction. Technology is how I became a person, how I met my closest friends and loved ones, and without it I would not be able to write, let alone be able to write this newsletter, and I feel poison flow through my veins as I see what these motherfuckers have done and what they will continue to do if they’re not consistently and vigorously interrogated."

Agreed. It all took a wrong turn somewhere and we need to figure out how to get back to empowering people rather than value extraction.

#enshittification #technology #journalism

Euch. Can't believe (well, I can) they've made a TV series ("a loose reimagining of the movie" - Guardian) of Cruel Intentions, which was itself a vague (homeopathic level) remake of Dangerous Liaisons.
FFS. Find some new material already 😡

#Life #TV #Enshittification

Sunday morning, doing 3 things at once, all of them unimportant & only commanding a small section of brain.

Once again notice in time to click the CANCEL button when Adobe asks me to agree to their terms for using their Generative AI after I accidentally select a tool that uses it.

I've managed to avoid all their cloud storage for years now as well, and they pester about that too.

Small victories.

#enshittification #generativeAI

Great piece on BlueSky and enshittification by @pluralistic. “I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.”

Read more: https://www.mollywhite.net/micro/entry/bluesky-enshittification

Cory’s piece: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/

#enshittification #bluesky

Ah more #enshittification.

My wife is on the phone with HP and looks exasperated. We had a working printer that, in my opinion, was surveiling us too much. It knew when our ink cartridges were almost empty and had our credit card number so it could send us new cartridges when we needed them. My wife loved that because ink cartridges always go dry right when you need them, and it was getting more difficult to find the proper cartridges. Yes, the printer knew if we installed third party cartridges.

But, the credit card on file just passed the expiration date, and the printer magically stopped working. That is why she is calling. And, of course, they are telling us it is obsolete and we should big a new one with even MORE surveillance! That, folks, is #enshittification

#HP
#printers
#SubscriptionHardware
#RentSeekers

Here's a brilliant article about the opaque and broken world of programmatic advertising.

These platforms truly are a cesspit.

They are causing billions of ad dollars from reputable brands to be pumped into disinformation sites.

Meanwhile, ads are systematically blocked from appearing on reputable news sites that have articles that include words like "Palestine", "black", or "gay".

And the biggest player in this industry? Google!

Just another way Google is enshittifying the internet for profit.

https://www.wired.com/story/death-of-truth-misinformation-advertising/

#tech #technology #marketing #adtech #Google #enshittification

"Enter monopolization. ... From Boeing to Facebook, Cigna to InBev, Warner to Microsoft, it has been a catastrophe. The American corporate landscape is dominated by vast, crumbling, ghastly companies whose bad products and worse corporate conduct are locked in a race to see who can attain the most depraved enshittification quickest."

But @pluralistic says the long-dormant watchdogs are finally waking up:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/26/noclar-war/#millionaire-on-billionaire-violence

#enshittification