There’s a phrase that I learned recently that feels relevant to this. “Hermeneutical Injustice”. It means injustice that arises when we are literally unable to meaningfully discuss our experiences with others. For example, “sexual harassment” is a relatively recent phrase, coined in the 1970s, a period when more women were entering the workplace, and employers didn’t have policies for how to respond to workplace sexual harassment. It’s a useful phrase, both legally, and interpersonally, and having access to this phrase that describes something that was previously hard to articulate (“you quit your job because your boss was complimenting you?”) has helped us to reduce hermeneutic injustice by helping us to better understand and respond to the underlying phenomena (for instance, we now understand that people of all genders may experience workplace sexual harassment)
“Hermeneutic injustice” is why I think the ridiculous prevalence of the word “enshittification” is a good thing. People have latched into that because although it may be a new word, the phenomena it describes have been happening for a while now. I’ve even seen less techy people using it. The anger I’ve been seeing extends beyond people who know about “enshittification”, but its spread and usage is a useful snapshot of how many are feeling. It makes me feel hopeful.
I’m sleepy right now so I’ll not attempt to discuss more concrete things driving this hope (such as “small web”, Fediverse etc.), but the short of it is that I have a lot of faith in people. Leaning on our communities is how we survive and resist this bullshit, and there will always be people who want to build things for the love of it.
Well put, I think at first as well I felt like the term was a bit immature and used a bit too liberally when it first started picking up steam in 2023.
It really does describe a phenomenon that is becoming so widespread that I’ve softened on it and embraced it (as long as it’s used correctly)
I’m seeing an incredible turn towards the kind of organic platforms of the 1.0 web world. They may never hit the same level of popularity as the commercial platforms like Facebook and Twitter did, but these new platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, and others are letting us build a new space.
Probably the best part is that so much of it is built on FOSS meaning that the monetization and enshitification by investors will have a much harder time taking root.
Yeah but the beautiful thing about the fediverse is that instance admins can just be like “lol no, fuck you” and defederate, and moreover coordinate to blacklist anything affiliated with Meta et al.
And then there’s people like me who, as a result of the election, have started to think about how they could go work for tech in the context of some sort of fifth-column effort, because I fucking HATE the amount of societal damage these hypercapitalist megacorps are doing. But of course I would only do that in Minecraft.
No, the platforms are enshittifiying, but the underlying nuts and bolts of the internet are still there untouched and so far every attempt by big tech to enshittifiy/proprietarize those has thus far failed
The search engines don’t do what they used to do. New sites cannot gain traction without million dollar advertising budgets.
This ‘death of the Internet’ talk really irritates me. It’s not. Stop using the big websites and look for or make your own corner in the Internet.
I feel like smartphones have just made people “internet lazy” - myself included. The masses just want to get an app and let it accomplish whatever you need, without worrying about any kind of enshitification as long as it’s free.
