- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
The problem is that pretty much everything economic still moves on a left/right axis. Capital market reform/redistribution is a left-wing concept, and polarization of wealth, or lack of market regulation, is a right-wing one.
Then at present time there’s a lot of other concepts that have been stapled onto the simple economic axis to further divide the population, such as culture war, religion, discrimination and whatnot, but even if you remove all of that, there’s the fact that a lot of people simply don’t want wealth redistribution. The infamous “temporarily embarrassed billionaires”, as they’re often called. You can’t convince them to “stop fighting” if the very thing you want to achieve is the same one they’re fighting against.
The only way to convince them is to straight-up depropagandize them, to make them realize that the “American Dream” is bullshit, that they’re never going to magically become a billionaire and benefit from all the stuff they’re fighting for, and that wealth redistribution would benefit pretty much everyone on the planet. But there’s people that have tried and failed to do so with their own family, how possible is that to successfully do for the whole country? Especially when every form of information, whether it’s mass media or social networks, work to convince them of the opposite?