Index

The Great Downhill Slide

Things are getting worse. Will they ever get better?

Cory Doctorow has the perfect term for the swift slide to hell we are traveling: enshittification.

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

Having been in Microshaft hell since Bill Gates wrote code, I use terms like “permanent beta” to describe the ’shaft way while keeping it printable. They sell software for big dollars that no self-respecting programmer of the old school - the school of “make it work correctly” - would put their name on. The poor programmers have to hide behind the corporate label while they write and sell what is obviously shit. At least they are paid well there.

Gates’ little company was the first real example of enshittification I met. Every time they upgrade something to fix a problem, they break six other things, and the treadmill goes on. The real problem is that their captive customers - big corporations - don’t care. The corporations just beat the slaves in their so-called “IT” departments harder when the big Windoze screws something else up. Did I mention I got out of IT before Windoze came along? The trend was obvious even back in the DOS days.

Over the years, Windoze hasn’t improved. It has gotten fatter and harder to use without any benefit to the end users. Windoze does keep the high-paid idiots in upper management from getting killed by their mistakes, though - they just blame the computers. Windoze gives them plenty of room for plausible deniability of management failure. I consider using Windoze a management failure, and the number of virus and hack attacks that keep happening backs that judgement up.

Now I find that the trend has reached down to the level of my so-called smart watch. I like having a watch that keeps track of my (lack of) exercise and sleep, but the latest “upgrade” has really screwed it up. The watch wants continuous communication with my Android phone. It sucks the battery dry in a day or so when it loses that communication, an obvious bug. The last upgrade made it worse. The problem is that the phone software notices and complains and says to restart the phone’s bluetooth when it happens, but the only real solution I have found is to reboot the watch. The phone doesn’t have a problem.

The watch used to go most of a week without needing charging. Now it is every second or third day. More than once it has died completely, once after less that 24 hours off of the charger. That is broken. A fix from the manufacturer? I need a crystal ball to know when that might happen, but at the same time I am afraid to let it happen for fear I will have to pitch the watch completely and buy a new one. The trouble is that there is no good substitute. The choices are Chinese wannabes and Google-owned privacy invaders, plus Samsung and Apple for the rich. None of them let you control your own data, of course, so wearing one is as bad of a privacy invasion as Alexa or other voice bot in the house.

Speaking of voice bots, now the Amazon beast is talking about charging for Alexa. Apparently their customer base is smarter than they gave them credit for, and instead of the customers chanting “buy, buy, buy” we are doing things like listening to music, things that benefit us as users. Amazon can’t have that, of course, so they are going to screw it up by putting a completely dysfunctional AI behind the voice - one that hallucinates on a regular basis - and then charge us for the privilege of being lied to. This is the behavior of a typical corporate monstrosity, and I have an electronics recycle box for them if that happens. Nothing like a hallucinating AI to invade privacy even more, right?

If you want to listen to hallucinations, there is always the orangutan’s Nazis and their fake news media. I don’t let any of that in my house either. It isn’t just big corporations that are guilty of enshttification.