Today’s links The disenshittified internet starts with loyal “user agents”: A tool should work for its user, not its manufacturer. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. The disenshittified internet starts with loyal “user agents” (permalink) There’s one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world. In other words, they class enshittification as an ideological phenomenon, rather than as a material phenomenon. Corporate leaders have always felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts. Those years were the result of constraints on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to act better than they do today, even if the were not any better: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan Corporate leaders’ moments of good leadership didn’t come from morals, they came from fear. Fear that a competitor would take away a disgruntled customer or worker. Fear that a regulator would punish the…Pluralistic: The disenshittified internet starts with loyal "user agents" (07 May 2024)