This may not work out the way I want it to, but I’m actually a little excited about these tech companies making a bunch of anti-consumer decisions all at once. So many mainstream users will be looking for alternatives, and it’s going to provide a great opportunity for non-profit open source projects. It’s already happening with the fediverse suddenly becoming a viable place for discussion in the last 1.5 years. After Windows Recall was announced, I’ve seen more people talking about switching to Linux than ever before. Part of me can’t wait for unskippable Youtube ads.
People often decry accelerationism, but the reality is that the slow-boiled frog is the one that sits and dies. Chipping away at freedoms, consumer protections, product benefits, etc is all less likely to spark backlash than when they drop sharply in a short time.
That doesn’t mean you should help to make things worse, but it does mean that you may want to reconsider constantly mitigating every bad thing that others are doing, rather than letting them shoot themselves in the foot. When people are being hurt, help them. When people are being inconvenienced, let them get angry.
This looks like a very classical and well-known case of executives copying each other.
That other company is doing layoffs and seems fine? Reports the line going up? Let’s do it, too!
The guys across the street are already implementing AI? Investors love it? Let do it, too! We may have taken a risk with blockchain, but this one is just sure to work better for us!
The big name is going for the money, predator-style, and they’re still afloat? Finally, we can cash out, too!
We need Cory to coin a term for what comes after enshittification. Perhaps we can call it the Great Wipening, where we all stop paying to be treated like serfs and start taking back control of our content and data.
You missed an S in enShittification.
And I completely agree, Cory seems to be good at coining terms and making them stick 👍
No we don’t, we have 400+ years of capitalist history to tell us what comes next; Oligarchy, neo-feudalism…
People: Cory Doctorow didn’t invent this concept. Read a book.
The whole point of this particular comment thread here is that we’re already starting to see what’s happening: people are taking back control. You’re here on Lemmy, proving that exact point.
I never said we needed Cory to tell us what comes next. Just come up with another colourfully descriptive term like he did with enshittification.
You sound like that insufferable ponytail from Good Will Hunting.
After Windows Recall was announced, I’ve seen more people talking about switching to Linux than ever before.
I’ve been the Linux zealot in my friend group for years, and none of them have switched (they’ve dabbled on old laptops but never daily drove).
With Recall, a coworker I never would have expected reached out to me because he knows I’m a “Linux guy” and he was switching to Linux over it.
He’s still daily driving pop_OS a month later.
This is an underrepresented viewpoint. We are at the point of “find out,” which so many tech companies thought they could stay just to the other side of the line on. Thing is, you can only move the goalposts so often before they’re in someone’s yard, and they didn’t sign up for this shit.
It was OneDrive upgrade nagging that made me switch to Linux. Microsoft could have, you know, not done that and kept a user. They also could have not gone regressive with how the taskbar functions. Or any number of other things that were dismissive of users.
At a certain point, you’re sitting in ever warmer water in the pot, and it occurs that maybe you’re being turned into food. That’s when the Linux pots start looking appealing. This was a completely avoidable problem brought to you by greed.
Greed! Because we don’t think making a good product is what capitalism is about.
