There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/2
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/3
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from *fear*. Fear that a competitor would take away a disgruntled customer or worker.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/4
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/5
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it
When those constraints melted away - thanks to decades of official tolerance for monopolies, which led to regulatory capture and victory over the tech workforce - the same mediocre sociopaths found themselves able to pursue their most enshittificatory impulses without fear.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/6
https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/
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This is your phone on feminism - The Conversationalist
Anna Lind-Guzik (The Conversationalist)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/7
https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/
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We Need To Rewild The Internet
NOEMACory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/8
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3827421
In "Fiduciary Duties," Berjon focuses on the technical term "user agent," which is how web browsers are described in formal standards documents.
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The Fiduciary Duties of User Agents
papers.ssrn.comCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/9
A browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/10
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
Your user agent might judge that the colors on the page are outside your visual range. Maybe you're colorblind, so the user agent could shift the gamut of the colors away from the colors chosen by the page's creator and into a set that suits you better:
https://dankaminsky.com/dankam/
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How is the world’s biggest boycott doing?
Doc Searls WeblogCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/11
https://uxplanet.org/basicdesign-never-use-pure-black-in-typography-36138a3327a6
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Never use pure black in typography - UX Planet
Jufry Heryanta (UX Planet)Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/13
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/14
But of course, the person who designed your user agent/browser can't anticipate all the ways this contradiction might arise.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/15
That's your user agent serving you, too.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/16
However - this is the key - if a user agent thwarts your desire due to a fault, that's *fundamentally different* from a user agent that thwarts you because it is *designed to serve someone else's interests*, even when that is detrimental to your own interests.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/17
A smart speaker or voice assistant routes all your requests through its manufacturer's servers and uses this to build a nonconsensual surveillance dossier on you.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/18
https://www.sciencealert.com/creepy-new-amazon-patent-would-mean-alexa-records-everything-you-say-from-now-on
By design, apps and in-app browsers seek to thwart your preferences regarding surveillance and tracking. An app will even try to figure out if you're using a VPN to obscure your location from its maker, and snitch you out with its guess about your true location.
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Newly Released Amazon Patent Shows Just How Much Creepier Alexa Can Get : ScienceAlert
Peter Dockrill (ScienceAlert)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/19
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/20
https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/
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Google data collection research - Digital Content Next
DCN (Digital Content Next)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/21
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
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Cory Doctorow: IP
Locus OnlineCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/27
> Defining the user agent role in standards also creates a virtuous cycle; it allows multiple implementations, allowing end users to switch between them with relatively low costs (...).
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/28
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890
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RFC 8890: The Internet is for End Users
IETF DatatrackerCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/29
> User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.
https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/30
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/32
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership
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An open letter to the W3C Director, CEO, team and membership
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/35
https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/
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The End of Indie Web Browsers: You Can (Not) Compete
blog.samuelmaddock.comCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/36
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/37
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/40
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3354129
He describes a fiduciary duty as a remedy for the enforcement failures of EU's GDPR, a solidly written, and dismally enforced, privacy law. A legally backstopped duty for agents to be fiduciaries would also help us distinguish good and bad forms of "innovation" - innovation in ways of thwarting a user's will are always bad.
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Confiding in Con Men: U.S. Privacy Law, the GDPR, and Information Fiduciaries
papers.ssrn.comCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/41
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html
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Facebook Banned Me for Life Because I Help People Use It Less
Louis Barclay (Slate)Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/43
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/02/kaiju-v-kaiju/
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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This is obvious nonsense, so its proponents need an equally obviously intellectually dishonest way to defend it.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/50
Not coincidentally, this is also literally the same argument the NSA makes in support of mass surveillance, and there's a very useful name for it: *scalesplaining*.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/51
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/52
This is a contentious statement in information security circles. Users can be "socially engineered" (tricked), and even the most sophisticated users are vulnerable to this:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/53
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/54
https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/58
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/60
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained
This is neatly predicted by enshittification's theory of constraints: when a company *can* override your choices, it will be irresistibly tempted to do so for its own benefit, and to your detriment.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/63
This *could* be beneficial to the user - you could send a "remote attestation" to a third party you trusted and ask, "Hey, do you think my computer is infected with malicious software?"
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/64
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/65
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/66
https://web.archive.org/web/20021004125515/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/2002-07-05.html
Seth wasn't naive. He knew that such a system could be exploited by scammers and used to harm users.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/67
Tech executives never stopped questing after a way to turn your user agent from a fiduciary into a traitor.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/68
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai
The reasoning for this was incredible: by adding remote attestation to browsers, they'd be creating "feature parity" with apps.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/69
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/70
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1
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Your Computer Should Say What You Tell It To Say
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/71
The only way to get a tech boss to consistently treat you well is to ensure that if they stop, you can quit. Anything less is a one-way ticket to enshittification.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/72
TOMORROW (May 8), 6PM: Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, "Overcoming the Enshittocene,"
University of Tartu Library (Struwe 1)
May 10: 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, "AI, copyright and creative workers’ labor rights"
Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building (Lossi 3, lobby)
May 10, 3PM: A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation
(University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037)
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/eof
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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File:HAL9000.svg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orgCassandraVert
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/52
Kevin Marks
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/11
Cory Doctorowudostępnił to.
Kraftwerk-Das Model Collapse
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Kevin Marks
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/11
Cory Doctorow
•https://cambrian.social/users/lori
•Little Trans Punk
•Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/32
The only reason they wanted to standardize this was because it was *hard to do* without standardization.
Making it easier to create a system in which Firefox has to license (not "copy" - license, with permission and payment) a component from Google in order to have a HTML5 compliant browser is not good for competition, or for users.
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/32