Likewise, you can use privacy-preserving adblockers in your browser, but the instant you've got to do business with a monopoly that requires you to use their app, you will be totally helpless before them, because anti-circumvention law felonizes modifying an app so it preserves your privacy. An app is just a webpage skinned with the right kind of IP law to make it a jailable offense to install an ad-blocker
The monsters who benefit from the status quo don't want you to know this. They want to brainwash you with Margaret Thatcher's mantra, "There is no such thing as society." They want you to think that you are a pathetic, atomized individual. They want you to die in a heatwave while gasping out your profound regret for not recycling more diligently and taking more care with your "carbon footprint." They want you to drive around for hours looking for an independent cardboard seller to make your protest sign with, convinced that it's more important to avoid shopping on Amazon than it is to actually show up at the protest outside the Amazon warehouse. They want you to curse yourself for failing to cycle and take the bus in your city where there are no bike lanes and the buses run every 45 minutes and stop at 8PM. If you wanted a livable city, you should have made better consumption choices! Perhaps you could dig your own subway, ever think of that, hmmm?
Quel texte ! Difficile d'en extraire un morceau en particulier, mais, sans pour autant que ce soit spécifique au sujet, j'aime celui-là :
Like I said at the start of this talk, I have been doing this work for 24 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, throwing myself at a door that was double-locked and deadbolted, and now that door is open a crack and goddammit, I am hopeful.
Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed.
La capacité de cet homme a parler aussi vite de façon aussi claire et sans perdre l'auditeur est incroyable.
- First: Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
- Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value.
- Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
Shit.
Comme les gens accèdent à ce genre de contenus, leurs créateurs gagnent de l’argent et donc abreuvent la bête de toujours plus de contenus du genre. Plus les gens vont en lire, plus les réseaux sociaux vont en pousser à l’utilisateur pour le garder captif le plus longtemps possible. Regardez une vidéo Gen IA avec des animaux sur TikTok une fois ou deux et votre flux en devient rapidement inondé. C’est valable pour toutes les thématiques, y compris la politique, les enjeux environnementaux, les sciences, etc.
Bitcoin’s energy use per dollar generated now exceeds that of mining copper or gold
Lu ailleurs : « Microsoft, pourquoi tu te conduis comme un ex toxique ? »
I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life.
Sundar Pichai gave $1m to Donald Trump and got a seat on the dais at the inaguration. Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over. Trump is a sadist, a facist, and a rapist – and he's also a remarkably cheap date.
Anyway, to summarize: a history in which firms start out offering great stuff at low prices but eventually offer worse stuff at high prices is the natural life cycle for any industry with strong network effects. It’s the story of Facebook and Amazon. It’s also, I’m pretty sure, the story of the rise and fall of Peak TV.
do such stories seem more widespread than in the past? Well, the internet isn’t the only source of network effects, but it does make them more likely. And the internet only really became pervasive during the 2000s:
Once almost everyone was using the internet, it became possible for businesses in a variety of areas to build up customer bases sustained by strong network effects. And one after another, these businesses have gone through the enshittification cycle.
That’s bad. Like everyone, I miss good service, good prices, and quality entertainment. But a further problem with enshittification is, as I said, that it messes with people’s heads.
For users, it’s all too natural to see the degradation of their experience as a morality play. Once upon a time, the fantasy goes, there were nice guys who ran their businesses in the public interest. Then, however, they became corrupt, or were forced to behave badly by venture capital, or something.
You know what: Microsoft became miserably incompetent in IT.
Pour reconnaître une image générée par IA, il suffirait de regarder si elle est jaune. Pour beaucoup d’internautes, la technique est infaillible depuis quelques mois, lorsqu’un déluge d’images jaunâtres semble s’être abattu en ligne. Memes en tous genres ou encore vidéos IA produites à la chaîne - même la photo de profil du PDG d’OpenAI Sam Altman a succombé à la teinte jaunâtre. Le problème est si répandu qu’il existe d’ailleurs des sites et des tutos pour « dé-jaunifier » les images générées par Sora ou ChatGPT.
Sur la merdification, une vidéo claire.
J’en viens à me dire que cette forme de socialisation numérique a vécu. L’idée était simple : que tout le monde puisse parler à tout le monde. Promesse intenable, parce que tout le monde ne peut écouter tout le monde, ce qui implique des gagnants et une immense majorité de perdants, qui finissent aigris, frustrés, vindicatifs, vengeurs, agressifs, extrémistes, complotistes…
Netflix accélère sur la merdification
When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage – when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile – that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service
There are few phrases in the modern lexicon more accursed than "software-based car," and yet, this is how the failed EV maker Fisker billed its products, which retailed for $40-70k in the few short years before the company collapsed, shut down its servers, and degraded all those "software-based cars".
That's the crux of enshittification. Companies don't enshittify – making their once-useful products monotonically worse – because it amuses them to erode the quality of their offerings. They enshittify them because their products are zero-sum: the things that make them valuable to you (watching videos without ads) make things less valuable to them (because they can't monetize your attention).