Absurdist video urges policymakers and users to resist deliberate deterioration of platforms and devices

The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”

The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.

  • Arctic_monkey@leminal.spaceEnglish
    21·
    1 day ago

    Oh my sweet summer child. How have the jailors convinced you that half of them are on your side and it’s just the other jailors that are keeping you here?

    • Syrc@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      12 hours ago

      The more a party wins, the more the Overton window shifts in its favor.

      If Democrats win enough times, Republicans will have to push less radical ideas to get a chance at being elected.

      And if Republicans aren’t as much of a threat, Democrats will have to come up with an actual platform that isn’t just “we’re not Republicans”.

      You can see the difference in Democrat Presidents from before and after the three consecutive R terms of 80-92, and how Middle-of-the-road the following ones have been. Which allowed Republicans to get more extreme.

      We just need to make that happen in reverse.

      • Arctic_monkey@leminal.spaceEnglish
        1·
        7 hours ago

        By the same logic, the more either party wins, the more the Overton window stays fixed on the current systemic status quo being the only viable, or even imaginable system.

        Both parties are unambiguously serving the interests of their respective elites. They’re just using different tactics to distract their respective audiences. In both cases the core strategy is to evoke the strong emotional intuition that sacred values are being violated. For conservatives, those values are tradition, and especially sexual norms. For liberals, it’s the protection of vivid victims.

        The only actual solution is to stop fighting your enemies and start working together to actually redistribute power and reform the whole system.

        Oh, worth putting out there, the other tactic I see often is to create the impression that the only alternatives are 19th century political philosophies: capitalism vs communism, etc. In reality, there is a massive space of potential global political and economic systems we could adopt, and we’re in a much better position to work together as a single species to scientifically explore that space and design a stable global system than we were 150 years ago. But we can’t get started while everyone is convinced that all they can do is vote for their team in the next election.

        • Syrc@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          6 hours ago

          By the same logic, the more either party wins, the more the Overton window stays fixed on the current systemic status quo being the only viable, or even imaginable system.

          Then by that logic, how do you explain Republicans going more and more off the deep end after they kept on winning? The system isn’t “fixed on the status quo”, it’s actively getting worse.

          Both parties serve elites, that’s true. But they can only afford to do that because one party promotes Christofascism and half the country joyfully votes for them, so the other can basically do nothing and still be the better choice for a sane person.

          There’s a lot that we could theoretically do to change the system, but is that possible when the majority of people in voting age are forced to have a stable job to survive and mass media does everything they can to push narratives in the few spare time they might have to get informed? I’d love if everyone could afford to organize general strikes to, for example, put in place an actually functional voting system instead of FPTP, but that’s just not a likely outcome and probably won’t be in our lifetimes.

          Let me be clear, I’m not saying all we can do is vote for “our team”. But we NEED to keep doing that, at minimum. Then, if you can afford it, you can also organize to push for reforms, protest, strikes and everything else. But if we keep on letting fascists take office because “the other side was better, but still bad so I didn’t vote them”, soon it’ll even be illegal to do anything else.