4 HN users recommended this talk3 months2023–2024score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Recommended in threads on big tech, monopolies and adversarial interoperability as the clearest statement of his argument.
Cory Doctorow's DEF CON 31 talk describes how platforms decay in a pattern he calls enshittification. He lays out a plan to stop it through antitrust, interoperability and fixing the law.
“I really recommend Cory's talk at DEF CON” (HN, 2023)
I really recommend Cory's talk at DEF CON and he was a guest on the Srsly Wrong podcast. DEF CON: [this video] Srsly Wrong: [link] It's a great podcast. I recommend the episodes on degrowth and half earth socialism in particular.
Finally. This is the kind of thing that needs to happen to all of these giant corporations and utilities fighting for monopolies. Incidentally I heard today how many laws against anti-competitive behavior were stripped with Carter and Reagan onward, and it's become a trend in our hyper-corporatist world now that's hurting workers and income classes below the highest. Watch "DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow" on YouTube [this video]
Doctorow on halting enshittification and antitrust
What is needed is what Cory Doctorow is saying. [this video] We need to push politicians to fix the antitrust law. It isn't just Google that is benefiting from this now toothless law.
It strikes me that this Penny Arcade cartoon is more prescient that I originally gave it credit for: [link] On the surface the cartoon is silly and extreme but speaks a deeper truth. Consider that SilverLake is the entity that has proven itself to care only about extracting profit and nothing about games as cultural expression of the community and welfare of those who make them. Riccitiello was incompetent in how he made the exploitation of game developers obvious but given Unity's funding structure they will keep doing the same. Maybe now they're scared that they are losing a valuable resource of developer trust, but they consider it only as far as it is a resource for profit extraction. This is another example enshittification that Doctorow is popularizing ( [this video] ) and is so well illustrated in the cartoon above.
Doctorow popularizing enshittification, applied to Unity
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