Forbrukerrådet – Norwegian Consumer Council
Published 27 Feb 2026Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide.
Read more on: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakin…
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March 2, 2026
A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator
January 25, 2026
Why does Microsoft treat its users so badly? Because it can
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR considers the situation most Microsoft users find themselves in these days:
Between the forced updates, the spyware, the adware, OneDrive constantly attempting to suck up all your data, and infinite dark-pattern subscription traps, I’m gathering that many Windows users are now nostalgic for the days when the shit only seemed to be up to their ankles rather than lapping at their nostrils.
The information asymmetry of closed-source software inevitably fucks the user over. I know, I know, I sound like a broken record. I’ve been banging on about this for going on 30 years now and even I get tired of my own rant sometimes.
That’s not why I’m posting today. Instead I want to publicly contemplate an unobvious question: just why is Microsoft treating its users so badly?
“Because it can” is not really a responsive answer. Corporations don’t do evil things because they like being evil, they only do evil things because they think they’re profit-maximizing.
So I understand about the dark-pattern subscription stuff and the adware. That’s slimy, but it’s revenue capture. There’s at least a cold-blooded trade-off you can imagine some product planner making between revenue line-go-up now and pissing off people who won’t be customers later.
But what is Microsoft maximizing by doing things that drive users away from it without any revenue capture? What model of reality, or failure of decision making, do you have to have to think it’s a good idea to push forced updates with work-interrupting reboots that can’t be blocked or delayed by the user?
It would have been trivial to have a pop-up that says: An update is available. Do it now, or defer it until
? The fact that that didn’t happen can’t be ascribed to revenue-line-go-up fever. These are two different kinds of ugly. And that second kind makes me think that there’s nobody left in product management at Microsoft with the ability and authority to veto bad ideas because they will anger the users.
It looks to me like nobody over there is thinking strategically about customer retention anymore. By the time you get to the point where nobody squashes forced-update reboots, nobody can seriously raise the question of whether adware is going to drive away so many users that Windows market share will tank and take all that lovely subscription revenue with it.
This is where I point out, with weary inevitability, that it’s going to get worse before it gets even worse. With nobody keeping an eye on the long game and user retention, the petty money grabs will only accelerate. Microsoft will keep flogging that donkey until it dies.
The irony here is that if Microsoft were an efficient maximizer of long-term profit they would be doing less of the shitty enraging crap that they are now.
How much less depends on how good their judgment is. You can be actively trying to keep a critical mass of your user base happy enough not to bail out and still fail. But at least Microsoft would be trying. Right now, there’s damn little evidence that they are.
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January 12, 2026
The rise of slop – “you get a clanker, and you get a clanker, everyone gets a clanker!”
The artificial intelligence wave continues, despite widespread resistance to AI being inserted into everything. It was bad when your toaster and refrigerator started needing access to the internet, but it’s bound to be so much worse when everything has to have an AI component bolted on to it as well. At The Libertarian Alliance, Neil Lock decries the rising tide of AI slop:
In recent days, there has been an eruption in the tech world. It is unlike anything I have seen in my more than half a century as a software developer, consultant and project manager. Microsoft, its Windows 11 operating system in particular, and artificial intelligence (AI), are in trouble. Big trouble.
The pressures leading to this eruption have been building for a year or so. Right now, the effects are confined mostly to tech blogs and tech people in the USA. But they are spreading. And fast.
Slop
In the last couple of years, AI-generated content has become ubiquitous on the Internet. It may consist of text, images or videos. Some of it is dangerous – for example, erroneous medical information. Most of it is of low to very low quality. And some of it is just bizarre. Such as the infamous “shrimp Jesus” I used as the featured image for this post.
In tech circles, the stuff has become known as “slop”. When you do a Google search, you may see more links to slop than to human-produced material. It looks as if “sloppers” have been using AI to generate large amounts of clickbait, not to mention content that may be misleading or downright dangerous.
In February 2025, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, pleaded in an interview for people to stop using the term “slop”. Saying “people are getting too precious about this”. The response could not have been further from what he asked for. The word “slop” went viral.
So much so, that last month Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publishers, declared “slop” to be their “word of the year”. Nadella responded huffily to this, saying: “we need to get beyond the arguments of slop versus sophistication”. The Internet tech community disagreed. And they took their revenge1 by re-naming the phenomenon “Microslop”.
Windows 10 and Windows 11
All tied up with this is Microsoft’s botched transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11.
Windows 11 was launched in October 2021. Due to higher hardware requirements, it would not run on around 60% of the PCs then running Windows 10. Including mine. That was already a time-bomb.
Support for Windows 10 was withdrawn for general customers on October 14th, 2025. Although Extended Security Updates (ESUs) remained available for corporate customers who wanted to keep Windows 10 running.
At no point has Windows 11 been popular with users. It had only about half the take-up Microsoft had expected. And by February 2025, many companies who had “upgraded” their staff’s PCs to Windows 11 had started returning them to Windows 10. It’s estimated that 400 million computers world-wide are still running Windows 10 without any Microsoft software support, simply because the users cannot, or do not wish to, “upgrade” to Windows 11.
Worse, some of Microsoft’s biggest corporate clients, with hundreds of thousands of users each, are switching to Apple Mac. And tech-savvy customers, including gamers and many smaller professional firms, are moving towards platforms like Linux.
If — when — Microsoft tries to force me to switch to a version of Windows with a built-in clanker, then I’ll be forced to switch to Linux. I do have a functional Linux laptop (a 14-year-old HP laptop that could barely boot under Windows by the end, but is now almost peppy running Linux). There’s only one piece of software I still run that doesn’t have a Linux version or competitor but if I accept the reduced functionality of running it in a web browser rather than natively, I could get by.
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November 23, 2025
John Cage’s 4’33” meets the anti-clanker protest song
Ted Gioia on Paul McCartney’s latest single — his first in several years — and what he’s protesting against … clankers in music and the arts:
Paul McCartney is releasing a new track. It’s his first new song in five years — so that’s a big deal. But there’s something even more significant about this 2 minute 45 second release.
The song is silent. It’s a totally blank track — except for a bit of hiss and background noise.
What’s going on? Has Paul McCartney run out of melodies at age 83? Is he nurturing his inner John Cage. Did he simply forget to turn on the mic?
No, none of the above.
Macca is releasing this track as a protest against AI.
His new “music” is part of an album entitled Is This What We Want? It’s already available on digital platforms, and is now coming out on vinyl. All proceeds will go to the non-profit organization Help Musicians.
“The album consists of recordings of empty studios and performance spaces,” according to the website. In addition to McCartney, more than a thousand musicians are participating, including:
Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, Ed O’Brien, Dan Smith, The Clash, Mystery Jets, Jamiroquai, Imogen Heap, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Riz Ahmed, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, James MacMillan, Max Richter, John Rutter, The Kanneh-Masons, The King’s Singers, The Sixteen, Roderick Williams, Sarah Connolly, Nicky Spence, Ian Bostridge, and many more.
I keep hearing that protest music is dead — and has been losing momentum since the Vietnam War. But there’s now a new war, and it’s stirring up creators in every artistic idiom.
They are fighting for their livelihoods and IP rights. And, so far, it’s been a losing battle.
You can see the new battle lines across the entire creative landscape.
Vince Gilligan, one of the most brilliant minds in TV, admits that he “hates AI”. He calls it the “world’s most expensive plagiarism machine”. For his new show Pluribus, he has added this disclaimer to the credits:
This show was made by humans.
AI represents the exact opposite of creativity, Gilligan warns. It steals the work of others. So any attempt to legitimize it as a creative tool is built on lies. A bank robber might just as well pretend to be a financier. Or an art forger claim to be Picasso.
[…]
This is the new culture war.
And it’s very different from the old culture war — which was a dim reflection of politics. This new battle is happening inside the culture world itself, and threatens to cut off artists from their own longstanding partners and support systems.
This new culture war will only escalate. The stakes are too high, and artists can’t afford to stay on the sidelines. But they face heavy odds, with the richest people on the planet opposed to their efforts.
How will this battle get decided? It really comes down to the audience. If they prefer AI slop, we will witness the total degradation of arts and entertainment.
I’d like to think that people are too smart to fall for this crude simulation of human creative expression. Who wants to hear a bot sing of love it has never experienced? Who wants a nature poem from a digital construct that exists outside of nature? Who wants a painting made by something with no eyes to see?
Will the public find this charming. Or even plausible? Maybe a few twelve year olds and fools, but not serious people. That’s my hunch.
In any event, we will soon find out.
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November 10, 2025
Enshittification, the book
Cory Doctorow originally coined the all-too-useful name for the steady deterioration of pretty much everything in the online world and now it’s the title of his latest book:
Author and activist Cory Doctorow wants you to understand why online digital platforms are failing users, and he’s fighting for a better internet. “Enshittification” — a word he coined to describe the degradation of online platforms and services — is the slightly profane albeit funny title of his latest book.
[…]
First question from me: “What does enshittification look like in Canada?” (Try saying that word without chuckling). The country had several opportunities to lead as a global digital force to be reckoned with, Cory agrees, and in his view, “we dropped the ball on market concentration”.
“The Competition Bureau has, through almost all of its history, until last year when we got a new bill out of Parliament, been, I think, the weakest competition bureau in the world,” Cory declares, emphatically. It’s hard to refute his assessment: The merger of Shaw and Rogers, two very large telecoms in Canada, was made official in 2023, the year before Canada’s competition law was modernized.
“Wouldn’t you think, at the very least, Canada would have a robust domestic network platform available by now?” I ask. Gander Social, a made-in-Canada social media platform, designed as an alternative to large U.S.-based companies, is only now being beta tested.
“There are any number of people who would like very, very much to host a few thousand of their friends on a little Mastodon or Blue Sky server that can talk to all the other ones, and everyone can be in a conversation,” Cory counters.
“We don’t all have to be on the same server,” Cory continues. “If there’s one thing we learned from the Amazon outage, it’s that putting everyone on the same server is an incredibly bad idea, right? So we can all be on different servers in the same way we’re all on different email servers, drive on different roads. We have to live in different cities; we don’t all have to be in the same place to all talk to each other and be part of a single digital network. That’s what networks are, right?
“You know, what we don’t have, the lacuna in this plan, the thing that we need public investment in, is not the bicycles on the road, it’s the bike lanes, it’s the infrastructure, and it’s the kind of thing the private sector can’t do well,” he asserts. The pain points for small businesses, communities, large businesses, cooperatives or any entity wanting to host a social media platform, Cory suggests, include things like security audits and content moderation tools.
He also recommends “some mechanism to ease people’s passage off (existing) social media and onto a new platform”. Right now, Cory explains, “you have people building these new platforms and wondering how the people on the old platforms are going to get there. This is like West Germans building housing for East Germans in West Germany, without thinking about how they’re going to get over the wall. Except that, we built the wall. We are the ones maintaining the wall. The wall is made entirely of law. The wall could be torn down with an act of Parliament at the stroke of a pen.”
And on the related topic of artificial intelligence being crowbarred into everything we use online:
Cory’s also saying very provocative things about AI. His most-memorable quip: “AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations”. While he sees the merits of AI to support the work of radiologists or lawyers or software engineers — or nearly anyone — he doesn’t believe AI can do the job. “But,” he warns, “an AI salesman can 100 per cent convince your boss to fire you and replace you with AI”.
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October 31, 2025
The “internet of shit” is somehow managing to get even shittier
At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia enumerates just a few of the ways that advertisers have abandoned attempts to persuade you and instead now run online extortion rackets to get you to pay to avoid having to see their ads:
Advertising is no longer about creativity and storytelling. Ads are now a matter of annoyance, plain and simple (as I recently described in this article).
It’s a simple concept. Web platforms force people to pay money to avoid the ads — so the more annoying they are, the more money they make.
They used to call it extortion — pay now to avoid pain later. And it always works like a charm. Needless to say you don’t need an English major to run an extortion business. (However, they do make good victims.)
This business strategy started out in media — where it made some sense. People are familiar with the idea of advertising during screen entertainment.
And here is how it played out:
- YouTube started this with the launch of an ad-free tier in 2014.
- Paramount announced an ad-supported subscription plan in June 2021.
- Disney + launched a low-price subscription option with advertising in March 2024.
- Netflix introduced a similar program in October 2022.
- Amazon Prime did the same thing in early 2024.
But in the last few months, it’s gone crazy. The ads are spreading beyond movies and videos — and into almost anything with a digital interface. So we’ve seen the following in recent days:
- Jeep drivers started complaining about ads on their vehicle touchscreen in early 2025. An ad for an extended warranty allegedly appears every time they stop their car (at a red light, etc.).
- Meta announced an ad-free subscription option for Facebook and Instagram in September 2025. (initially in the UK).
- Microsoft announced an ad-supported subscription plan for Xbox cloud gaming in October 2025.
- A rumor about Apple inserting ads into its map app started spreading in October 2025. This will allegedly launch in 2026.
This is more than annoying — it’s also abusive. A new Jeep can cost $50,000 or more. When you hand over that much cash, you should get an exemption from spam ads on your screen.
But the most annoying move of all is coming from Samsung. They are putting ads on $3,499 smart fridges. They’re rolling out this “software upgrade” right now.
According to Samsung, your smart (or maybe smart-ass) refrigerator will soon share “useful day-to-day information such as news, calendar and weather forecasts, along with curated advertisements”. The display will change every ten seconds.
I definitely rely on my fridge for some things — milk, eggs, orange juice, and an occasional cold beer. But you don’t see curated advertisements on that list.
Ads will never be on the list.
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October 2, 2025
UNshittifying the internet
In The Line, Matt Gurney asks if we can go back to when the internet (and by extension, all the other tech toys and gadgets we see everywhere) was … good?
Have you heard about enshittification? It’s not just a potty word. It’s actually a pretty fascinating concept, and you read about it mostly in tech circles. Enshittification is the process by which something becomes worse over time, instead of better, normally as people try to squeeze more efficiency and revenue value out of it. Through that process of squeezing, the thing becomes enshittified.
If you want a proper definition …
Enshittification: The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
There are lots of examples. My favourite example? My video doorbell has an annual service fee. Another great example? Cars that now require payments to access certain features, like heated seats. You own the device. But you need to pay a recurring fee to use it. That’s enshittification.
It’s everywhere. And it’s getting worse, especially online. And, perversely, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it’s going to force us to stop, rethink how we use the digital realm, and, basically, try again. Start over. And get it right this time.
Noah Smith is an American economics writer whose work I enjoy. Smith noted on Twitter recently that we are rapidly getting to the point where we should declare social media a failure. It’s passé to criticize social media on social media, but Smith wasn’t making the usual warmed-over moral argument. He wasn’t saying that it was bad because people are mean there or that they fall down dark rabbit holes and end up believing insane things. Those are problems! But Smith’s concern was the extent to which AI-generated content and bots have simply flooded all the social media channels. Even a responsible user trying to use these platforms for the good is going to find it increasingly difficult to derive any value from them. They’re being rapidly enshittified.
I share his view of the trajectory. I don’t really know anyone who doesn’t. But Smith’s comment led me to ponder what value I actually derive from them — what I would miss if they were gone. I came up with four broad use cases.
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September 20, 2025
QotD: Why modern dishwashers suck
The current standards for dishwashers took effect in 2013. The standards, which were based on a consensus agreement between manufacturers and efficiency advocates, specify minimum energy and water efficiency levels. The standards require that standard-size dishwashers use no more than 307 kWh per year and 5.0 gallons of water per cycle.
In 2024, DOE finalized amended standards for dishwashers based on a joint recommendation from manufacturers and efficiency advocates. The new standards for dishwashers will cost-effectively reduce energy consumption by 15% relative to the current standards while also cutting water waste. Dishwashers
It is a general problem, but what started me thinking about it was being told by my dishwasher that it would take three and a half hours to wash the dishes. That seems, judging by a quick search online, to be longer than average but still within the normal range. I have not been able to find figures online for how long dishwashers took twenty or thirty years ago but, by what I remember, it was substantially less — and the dishes ended up dry, which ours don’t.
The explanation is in the final word of the quote above, “waste”. The owners of dishwashers pay for water and power, so if making them more efficient in those dimensions was costless, did not require giving up something else, there would be no need for the Department of Energy to make the manufacturers do it. I conclude that it was not costless, that it either made dishwashers cost more or do their job less well — take longer, not dry the dishes as well, not clean them as well. Using more power or water to do a better job is not waste.
David Friedman, “Optimizing On A Single Variable”, David Friedman’s Substack, 2025-06-02.
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August 30, 2025
QotD: SaaS – software as an “intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches”
Commercial desktop software is getting worse, not better. I’ve been generally aware of this for a while — the relentless pull away from “you pay for it once and own it” to monthly subscription models that extract money from you forever has been a leading indicator.
But my friend @DrInsensitive reports that the enshittification is accelerating. He says that in addition to a lot of tediously stupid UI changes, his most recent upgrade of CorelDraw now spams ads at him even when CorelDraw itself is not running! Furthermore the plague of microtransactions that has afflicted AA games for years is spreading — the set of free fill patterns for rectangles that his old version had is gone, instead when he tries to fill a rectangle he gets a pop-up invitation to buy an extra-cost feature pack of them.
When one asshole vendor thinks they’ve successfully numbed their user base into accepting this kind of crap, others immediately follow. We’ve seen this movie before, we know how it ends — with applications, like games, designed to be deliberately frustrating and low-level awful, intended to give you itches that you can only scratch by buying their endless parade of “enhancements”.
I’m sure a surcharge to suppress the spammy CorelDraw ads won’t be long in coming. And soon after that it will be everywhere.
If this goes on, open-source software will finally win the desktop not because it’s gotten enough better but because closed-source desktop applications have reached final form as an intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches.
This is not the way I was looking forward to winning.
ESR, Twitter, 2025-03-22.
July 22, 2025
The internet keeps getting worse. Let’s talk about why.
Jared Henderson
Published 16 Jul 2025Why do major online platforms keep getting worse? Cory Doctorow’s work helps us understand the pattern of growth, decline, and eventual demise.
→ Timestamps
00:00 Beginning
00:51 How Platforms Die
08:29 The Death of a Platform (From the Inside)
12:14 Ads, Everywhere
14:47 Yes, I Make Money from Ads
16:32 Bots
22:04 The Internet We Need
(more…)
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July 21, 2025
AI slop seems to have finally triggered significant pushback
Ted Gioia says that he’s seeing strong indicators that the AI slop superabundance has helped create a widespread rejection of it and all its works:
2025 has been the year of garbage culture.
Creators watch in horror as dismal AI slop threatens their livelihoods — and the integrity of their fields. It’s everywhere, spreading faster than a pharaoh’s plague.
In recent months, we’ve been bombarded with millions of lousy AI songs, idiotic AI videos, and clumsy AI images. Error-filled AI texts are everywhere — from your workplace memos to the books sold on Amazon.com.
Even my lowly vocation, music journalism, gets turned into a joke when it’s accompanied by slop images of fake events.
No, these things did not really happen.
But something has changed in the last few days.
The garbage hasn’t disappeared. It’s still everywhere, stinking up the joint.
But people are disgusted, and finally pushing back. And they are doing so with such fervor that even the biggest AI companies are now getting nervous and pulling back.
Just consider this surprising headline:
This was stunning news. YouTube is part of the biggest AI slop promoter of them all — namely the Google/Alphabet empire. How can they possibly abandon AI garbage? Their bosses are the biggest slopmasters of them all.
After this shocking news reverberated through the creative economy, YouTube started to backtrack. They said that they would not punish every AI video — some can still be monetized.
But even the revised guidelines are still a major blow to AI slop purveyors. YouTube made clear that “creators are required to disclose when their realistic content is altered or synthetic”. That’s a huge win—we finally have a requirement for disclosure, and it came straight from the dark planet Alphabet.
YouTube also stressed that it opposes “content that is mass-produced or repetitive, which is content viewers often consider spam”. This is just a step away from blocking slop.
Update, 22 July: Ted posted a follow-up with a bit more evidence that the pushback is working:
In my latest article I criticized Spotify for allowing uploads of unauthorized AI tracks to the profiles of dead musicians.
But the company may finally be listening to criticisms of its AI policies. In this case, Spotify has now taken steps to stop the abuses, and a spokesperson reached out to me today with an update and expressing a clear and proper policy on AI fraud.
I share it below (and have also updated my article):
We’ve flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed. This violates Spotify’s deceptive content policies, which prohibit impersonation intended to mislead, such as replicating another creator’s name, image, or description, or posing as a person, brand, or organization in a deceptive manner. This is not allowed. We take action against licensors and distributors who fail to police for this kind of fraud and those who commit repeated or egregious violations can and have been permanently removed from Spotify.
They acted quickly, and I give them credit for that.
Update the second, 23 July: Ah, Spotify giveth and Spotify taketh away:
“Spotify is publishing new, AI-generated songs on the official pages of artists who died years ago without the permission of their estates or record labels,” reports 404 Media.
This scandal came to light because of an AI song attributed to Blaze Foley, who died in 1989. The bogus track is accompanied by an AI-generated image of a man who bears no resemblance to the singer.
What’s going on here? Is this just ignorance or carelessness at Spotify? Or does it represent something more sinister — another example of the company’s willingness to deceive users in the pursuit of profits?
These scams must stop. If Spotify doesn’t fix this mess immediately, courts should intervene.
But the dead musician scandal is just a start — because other bizarre things are happening at Spotify.
The whole situation is positively surreal.
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July 7, 2025
Consumers don’t want AI in everything, but you’ll be forced to take your AI, peasants!
Ted Gioia — like about 92% of consumers at last count — doesn’t want to have artificial intelligence “enhancing” the software he uses every day, but software companies don’t want him — or you — to have that choice:
A few months ago, I needed to send an email. But when I opened Microsoft Outlook, something had changed.
Microsoft asked me to use Copilot to write my email. Copilot is my AI companion. (That’s the cute word they use.)
Hey I don’t want a companion — especially not a fake AI buddy. I never asked for this.
And what about the people receiving my emails? They don’t want this either. They want to hear from me, not a bot.
How do I turn my companion off?
After some trial-and-error, I found a way to disable Copilot. Phew!
But a few days later, Microsoft surprised me again. It wouldn’t let me save an Excel file until I had agreed to new terms for my software account.
Guess what? AI is now bundled into all of my Microsoft software.
Even worse, Microsoft recently raised the price of its subscriptions by $3 per month to cover the additional AI benefits. I get to use my AI companion 60 times per month as part of the deal.
But I don’t want to use it. I want to kill it.
As you can see, I’ve never used this service. I still have all 60 credits unused. But I’m paying for it — because it’s now embedded into Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.
This is how AI gets introduced to the marketplace — by force-feeding the public. And they’re doing this for a very good reason.
Most people won’t pay for AI voluntarily — just 8% according to a recent survey. So they need to bundle it with some other essential product.
You never get to decide.
Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?
That’s never happened before in human history. Everybody wanted electricity in their homes. Everybody wanted a radio. Everybody wanted a phone. Everybody wanted a refrigerator. Everybody wanted a TV set. Everybody wanted the Internet.
They wanted it. They paid for it. They enjoyed it.
AI isn’t like that. People distrust it or even hate it — and more so with each passing month. So the purveyors must bundle it into current offerings, and force usage that way.
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February 21, 2025
Tech enshittification continues
Ted Gioia notes that even the world’s biggest search engine provider is doing almost everything it can to make your search experiences worse and worse:
Almost everything in the digital world is turning into its opposite.
- Social media platforms now prevent people from having a social life.
- ChatGPT makes you less likely to chat with anybody.
- Relationship apps make it harder for couples to form lasting relationships.
- Health and wellness websites make it almost impossible to find reliable health advice — instead peddling products of dubious efficacy.
- Product review sites now prevent people from reading impartial reviews by actual users of the product, instead operating as pay-for-play vehicles.
- Etc. etc. etc.
You can often tell by the name. PayPal will never pay you a penny, and it’s certainly not your pal. Microsoft Teams only works if you stay away from your team. If you keep using Safari, you will never go on an actual Safari.
But the worst reversal is happening with search engines. They now prevent you from searching.
I’ve known Google up close and personal from the start. I initially found the company quirky and endearing — but those days ended long ago. The company is now clueless and creepy.
Almost every day I read some ugly news story about Google. Here are a few headlines from a typical week:
- “Google ditches promise not to develop AI weapons” (February 12)
- “Millions of Google users alarmed after discovering new AI tool they can’t turn off” (February 14)
- “Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests” (February 15)
- “Google’s new fingerprinting policy sparks privacy backlash as ads become harder to avoid” (February 17)
- “Google data centers used nearly 6 billion gallons of water in 2024” (February 11)
This company goes out of its ways to do mischief. Messing with people is in its DNA.
Meanwhile, its base business is degrading at an alarming rate. The company doesn’t seem to care.
In a strange turnaround, search engines don’t want you to search for anything. That’s because searching leads you on a journey — and Google doesn’t want you to leave their platform.
The search engine was invented as your gateway to the web. The inventors of this technology tried to index every page on the Internet — so that you could find anything and everything.
That was an exciting era. Search engines were like train stations or airports. They took you all over the world.
At Google today, the goal is the exact opposite. You never leave the station.
Techies once described the Internet as a digital highway. But we need a different metaphor nowadays. Web platforms want to trap you on their app, and keep you there forever.
So, instead of a digital highway, we have a digital roach motel. They let the roaches check in — but not check out.
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January 14, 2025
The deliberate enshittification business plan of every “tech” company
It may be hard to believe, but once upon a time we actually used to look forward to new technology releases and updated software. I know, I know, that’s asking you to believe fairy tales in our current “enshittification-as-a-service” technology dystopia. The Bone Writer — who worked in the same tech field that I once did — clearly understands why the promise of new technology has turned so negative:
Dead technology. Not because they’re broken, but because they’re no longer supported and THEREFORE no longer work.
I was straightening some stuff/junk up and came upon a pile of my e-Waste. It’s a damn shame that electronics devices are a planned obsolesce when they shouldn’t be. Especially the tablets and e-readers that would still work if the mothership, the corpo HQ, the evil Tech Bros, actually cared about their customers at all.
Do we need legislation that offers up some sort of tax write off incentive to get companies to support their shit for at least 10 years? I know what you’re saying … “That’s not a free market economy.” Yeah … well … The tech sector broke the free market economy a long time ago and now they actively hurt everyone with their greed and drive to force people into what comes next, every month to 3 months to 1 year.
That’s another reason prices never come down on tech stuff. They put out something new monthly to yearly, with just a small addition to the software or the design. Then they push it on people as if it is the BEST thing there ever was, creating FOMO. Then, some people will upgrade with every new device or software version sold.
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Agile is the Devil’s Tool for Creating More Waste
Agile is the method that is used to push new software and updates out continuously. Get those updates out there and keep that device or software looking shiny but hold back the good stuff for the next big release. Even though the current iteration can likely support the next big release, we’re not going to do that. This way we can sell more shit to people and they will have FOMO so they will buy it up. Even though, the next big release isn’t all that great anyway… They consumer will eat it up.
Recycle It
The activist techies will just say, “Go ahead and recycle the old stuff.” As if it really gets recycled. More often than not (only 10% of recycled stuff actually gets recycled), it gets buried or sent to other countries to be disassembled and buried there, out of site. Both the tech sector and fashion industry are guilty of this. Meanwhile, YOU are told that if you recycle, you are doing your part to clean up the world, when you’re really just sending stuff elsewhere to pollute a third world country. Sleep easy though, it isn’t in YOUR backyard.
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November 26, 2024
“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other”
I don’t mean to make poking fun at Twit/X alternative sites like Bluesky a regular thing, but the performative flouncing as progressives announce they’re leaving Twit/X for a more congenial — for which read “censorious” — site continues to amuse.
Bluesky welcomes former Twitter/X luminaries
I’m going to take a pop at a sub-group of flouncers, though, the ones moaning about being called hurty words. This includes a number of individuals who genuinely seem to think it’s their role in life to go looking for nasty bigoted shite, then report it to Twitter’s overlords (and now Bluesky’s overlords as well, if things like [the image on the right] are anything to go by).
“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other” seems a fair assessment.
And yes, I have to engage in a little ritual genuflection here, because I have genuinely been called a large number of nasty names in my life. And despite that, dibber-dobbers still give me hives.
If I had a quid for every use of “dyke” (and related) sent my way, I would be matching millions with sundry oil sheiks, and that’s before we get to the ire directed at any columnist with whom ordinary members of the public disagree. I am old enough to have received thousands of abusive letters (about both novels and columns), some of them written in green ink. People are allowed to dislike me and my kind, or to argue that I’ve written a load of cobblers. They’re also allowed to dislike you and your kind. It would be astonishingly easy for me to wander over to Arabic Twitter and report lots of sincere Muslims for saying bigoted things about homosexuals. I don’t engage in this behaviour because I don’t expect the world to be my friend.
Relatedly (and this is directed at ethnic minorities as well as fellow gayers), a lot of folks from “historically disadvantaged groups” have become dab hands at dishing it out over the last twenty or so years. A necessary corollary of this behaviour is “learn to take it”. Yes, that means you. People are not going to stop saying hurty words to each other. People are also going to judge you based on the behaviour of your worst activists and vote accordingly (see recent US election results).
What of the core claims being made? Is Twitter genuinely worse now, a victim of what goes by the name “social media enshittification“?
Well, yes and no. I know many people dislike what Musk has done to Twitter, but when he made “likes” private, he stopped his site being used as a vector for HR vindictiveness (something about which HR mavens have complained, by the way, at least privately). It’s also now substantially more difficult to generate a pile-on using a quote-tweet, as well as possible to read tweets (but without interaction) from people who are hot on the block button.
The latter change has allowed me to establish why Baroness Nicholson had me blocked. I’d always wondered, because she’s had me blocked for as long as I can remember, yet like me, she can legitimately be described as “sex realist” or “gender-critical”. Musk’s change meant I was able for the first time to see an entire thread underneath one of her tweets, so learned that she blocks anyone — friend and foe alike — for swearing. Women who know her socially and get on with her well “IRL” have been blocked for saying “bugger” and “shite” on Twitter.
Well, glad that’s cleared up. Good to know.
The worst change Musk has made involves deboosting external links. This first emerged in April last year, in response to Substack releasing Notes (which Musk considered so derivative of Twitter’s code as to be a “clone”). At first only direct links to Substack were affected. If you had your own domain — as I do — you were fine. However, external link deboosting is now being applied uniformly. Everyone from a local tradesman selling new driveways and conservatories to the BBC and the Spectator now has to make use of some tedious version of “link in following tweet” or “link in bio”.
If Musk doesn’t fix this, he will legitimately lose the journalists and commentators currently on the site. Those people came, originally, to share stuff from their mastheads, and this applies regardless of politics. I first gained a following thanks to professional experience — yes, it was once fine for commercial solicitors to natter on the socials about the Enterprise Investment Scheme and how it related to start-ups and spin-outs etc — and later through Speccie columns along with a couple of books. A tweet from Tim Harford praising my second novel (with a link, bless him) went “viral” and led to thousands of sales. Pieces for the magazine proved popular. Just as I enjoyed Twitter for other people’s links, other people paid me the same courtesy.
Spotted on Instapundit:
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