I finished reading Enshitification by Corey Doctorow the other day and it was great to see him mention the fediverse, especially when I’m already on it. He was mostly talking about Mastodon though, I much prefer here.
It’s nice to know a place like this has a lot fewer downward pressures to make it worse. No open source/FOSS project is going to be perfect but you can’t map the stages of enshitification to growth and funding cycles in the same way.
It was a good read. I read his last book Chokepoint Capitalism and I listen to a lot of the podcasts he appears on so I was already familiar with a lot of it, but there are some good points he highlights. It’s probably a good one if you haven’t ready any Doctorow before because it covers things more generally, whereas Chokepoint was more specifically about the outsized influence monopolies have thanks to mergers.
I’ve worked in the corporate world, am painfully aware of the unstoppable enshitification machine. I’m kinda tempted to read books like this, but also know it will just make me disappointed.
I finished reading Enshitification by Corey Doctorow the other day and it was great to see him mention the fediverse, especially when I’m already on it. He was mostly talking about Mastodon though, I much prefer here.
It’s nice to know a place like this has a lot fewer downward pressures to make it worse. No open source/FOSS project is going to be perfect but you can’t map the stages of enshitification to growth and funding cycles in the same way.
Did you enjoy it? It’s been on my list for years but I partly feel like I know a lot of that stuff already so it might just be vaguely depressing…
It was a good read. I read his last book Chokepoint Capitalism and I listen to a lot of the podcasts he appears on so I was already familiar with a lot of it, but there are some good points he highlights. It’s probably a good one if you haven’t ready any Doctorow before because it covers things more generally, whereas Chokepoint was more specifically about the outsized influence monopolies have thanks to mergers.
Cool. Thanks! I’ve vaguely followed his work for a while so I will bump both those up the reading list
sounds like an interesting book
It is, and a good one to recommend to normies who wonder why technology sucks so much these days
I’ve worked in the corporate world, am painfully aware of the unstoppable enshitification machine. I’m kinda tempted to read books like this, but also know it will just make me disappointed.
It is a sad read but it’s good to get a more formalised framework of how things get worse so you can identify it in other areas