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“You are the victim of a con - one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact that it’s part of almost every part of your daily life… It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.”
Fucking preach. I know this is about tech enshittification but there is perhaps no more succinct summary of life under capitalism.
I didn’t read all of it because its very wrong but one thing he is right about is that the average technology enjoyer has no idea how much they are being abused, disrespected and taken advantage of every time they engage with technology. Mostly because they have no frame of reference. As a seasoned technology user I have experience wading through the sewage of proprietary mainstream technology but people like me make up almost 0% of the total consumer base.
i am no tech wizard but i am easily in the 5% percentile on my region and even i have no clue of how much i get abused.
That’s the thing that gets me as well. People just accept these horrible patterns in software as being completely normal.
Most don’t even have any memory of tech not trying to fuck them over at every chance it gets. Most have forgotten and the younger folks who grew up on Apple’s shit never got a chance to know what a file system is.
I feel this, both with computers and with video games. "Smart"phones are possibly one of the worst developments in tech, when taking into account what capitalism can and has done with them. What could be a device that is centered around helpful things like GPS, is instead focused around being addicting and keeping you glued to the digital world at all times. And even GPS has a dark side, in the location tracking that is tied up in it.
Indeed, I feel like technical illiteracy has paradoxically increased as computers have become more common place. Even among software developers, a lot of people don’t really understand how things work at a basic level, and just cargo cult solutions.
From a blog post that is popular at the moment:
I had a “woah” moment once when one programmer got genuinely baffled about the fact that a website somehow “erases” the history of requests from the Network tab of Chrome DevTools. He was wondering what magic method was used to hide the communication. He hadn’t realized the app was not a single-page JS application (SPA), and he actually wasn’t aware there is another way to make web apps. The idea that each click actually makes the browser fetch a completely new page, without any JS involved, was alien to him.
Persist logs? What on earth could that option be for? My logs never disappear.
And here I was, when AJAX first released, I struggled to wrap my head around making it work. I didn’t last long in webdev, it just wasn’t my forte. At best I can shell script some tasks these days but I’m way too out of practice at this point.
What is AJAX exactly?
It’s using Javascript to retrieve and update information on the page without refreshing or moving to a different one. Example usage, on a sign up page, it can tell you a username is taken before you try to submit the form. The name is an acronym for Asynchronous Javascript And XML.
🤣
I don’t know this guy so i couldn’t get a bead on whether he’s dancing around blaming capitalism because he doesn’t want to alienate the reader or because he hasn’t been exposed to theory to make the jump. If it’s the latter it feels like he’s almost there.
Good read. i love a good long rant. Juicy, chunky, palpable anger jumping and boiling right outta the page
I get the impression that he’s not quite at the point of realizing that capitalism is the fundamental problem here.
I won’t reiterate my entire comment from the other thread, but this is my perspective as well. The author’s usage of the term rot economy is a pretty big giveaway in my opinion.
yup
