The article is very long; that part is fascinating and a fantastic suggestion:
> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
> That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems.
No it isn't.
Like literally, the US and it's tariff madness has literally nothing to do with it. The EU and Canada are both signatories to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and signatories of the WTO provisions that include continued operation to it. They are international treaties with a wide degree of international support, not US inventions. Christ, Europe had a lot more to do with the wording of the anticircumvention provisions in the WIPO treaty than the US did.
People should stop taking Doctorow seriously. He has a long track record of making shit up that is what his audience wants to hear.
I agree with him that the retaliatory tariffs don't make much sense but equally basically throwing out copyright law would be crazy, as the US would likely respond in kind and it'd probably hurt Europe more in the long run.
They should stop the anti-competitive practices that prevent third-party app stores and so on though.
> In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. "Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying."
I think this should be made illegal.
But I also think judging from how bad people are at making laws, what we will get is something that will make it worse for everyone.
It's really funny to me that with both the AI act and GDPR, you will see swathes of threads of people on HN bashing the law only to then later discover the purpose of this legislation from first principles.
Seems to me that the illegal part would be the cartel of the 3 apps that cornered the whole market.
An app that doesn’t do this could eat their lunch.
Nurses work at hospitals, the supply of which is constrained artificially by the state, so once you sell all of the ones in a region on your app, you have a monopoly. It is a type of regulatory capture.
Cory Doctorow is one of the best contemporary authors that I know, nearly everything he writes is concise, poignant and relevant and he writes new articles nearly every day. You can find his writing here [1]. One of his most memorable articles for me is about remote attestation and the context in lives in [2], absolutely worth a read.
The thing I don't understand is how unethical stuff like this comes to be built. Take the example where nurses with debt get lower wages because they are desperate. Some manager had to come up with this idea and then get various people to agree and then get a team of engineers to implement it. Thats a lot of people agreeing to do something so clearly evil (to me at least). Are there that many people who just don't care? Whenever I read stories similar to this I always wonder how many people went along without objecting.
If you read the article, he talks about this in this fourth constraint, labor:
> The final constraint, which did hold back platform decay for quite some time, is labor. Tech workers have historically been respected and well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on, perhaps missing various important social and family events to ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street ""and have a new job by the end of the day"" if the boss persisted.
> So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job.
For further listening, Cory has produced a podcast for CBC that might be a good accompaniment to this article called "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?".
For the “Uber of Nursing” example, if employers want to play games like this, the best way to combat it is with symmetrical information. Employees should share their salary offers on a website, which would empower them to get a better sense of whether they are being paid fairly.
> There once was an ""old good internet"", Doctorow said, but it was too difficult for non-technical people to connect up to; web 2.0 changed that, making it easy for everyone to get online, but that led directly into hard-to-escape walled gardens.
Maybe we should not 'democratize' some technologies and keep a bit of difficulty as a gatekeeper.
(Yes, I know this is not really a moral position to hold)
Agreee. Also money. Once we go from making things because they are cool / helpful / useful / amusing to making things to personally get rich, is enshitofication inevitable?
I think it stems from there not being enough engineers. In aggregate, companies have been able to take over the market for engineering labor and ensure that the only good-paying jobs on the job market at any given time are working for companies that want to use engineers to corner some consumer market so that they can enshittify it.
The cure is to make so much new engineering talent that this is simply impossible
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. Let companies jailbreak Teslas and deliver all of the features that ship in the cars, but are disabled by software, for one price; that is a much better way to hurt Elon Musk, rather than by expressing outrage at his Nazi salutes, since he loves the attention. "Kick him in the dongle."
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it.
> making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services
It's amazing that merely learning about how items that we own work (so-called "reverse-engineering") and exercising control over them (jailbreaking - this time the term is apt) has been made illegal. A heinous overreach by corporations into the lives of people that own their products, and a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough, they want to treat as trade secrets products with mass-market availability.
It’s unfortunate that he is continuing to use the term enshittification, because that pretty much guarantees that no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly. Which is a shame, as many of the solutions here are explicitly legal ones. Words and names matter, especially when it comes to political actions.
I think that's a bit of projection on your part, not everyone is scared of naughty words. It was the Australian word of the year in 2024 and appears in our senate hearing transcripts.
I hate the name too, it has this distinct Toys R’ Us feel to it. It makes Doctorow seem like a petulant baby, even though his general message is sound. And every time I see Doctorow mentioned there’s at least one comment saying it’s a bad name. People criticized RMS for years for using terms like “iCrap”, etc. but for some reason Doctorow is allowed to do this
Value engineering. When you can't grow by selling more widgets, your only real choice is to make (almost) the same thing, but cheaper.
But Cory's a polemicist. He'd absolutely prefer the memorable word he coined himself to the acceptable, drab one that already exists.
(Plus value engineering is only one way to enshittify a product. There's also subscription models, selling data, jamming ads in everywhere... the advantage of Cory's word is that it captures everything).
I agree with this - beyond the sound of the term, it is also not very obious in what it refers to. In the beginning, it was used with a very specific meaning, of platforms squeezing market participants on both sides. Now, it seems to have come to refer to all instances of online services getting worse and more user-hostile over time. Dare I say, enshittification of the term enshittification?
I totally agree. The term is a puerile way of "owning the cons" following Haidt's idea that conservatives have a strong sense of disgust and liberals do not. The problem is that a) many conservatives are also a potential constituency for increasing integrity in the private sector, and b) many people on the political left also have a strong sense of disgust.
Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot of his writing, and the site he used to run (boingboing) serve the market of people for whom disgusting things are entertaining or funny, so I think he has a blind spot here.
bambax|9 months ago
> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
tgv|9 months ago
Mindwipe|9 months ago
No it isn't.
Like literally, the US and it's tariff madness has literally nothing to do with it. The EU and Canada are both signatories to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and signatories of the WTO provisions that include continued operation to it. They are international treaties with a wide degree of international support, not US inventions. Christ, Europe had a lot more to do with the wording of the anticircumvention provisions in the WIPO treaty than the US did.
People should stop taking Doctorow seriously. He has a long track record of making shit up that is what his audience wants to hear.
hoseja|9 months ago
aaron695|9 months ago
[deleted]
schnitzelstoat|9 months ago
They should stop the anti-competitive practices that prevent third-party app stores and so on though.
whinvik|9 months ago
I think this should be made illegal.
But I also think judging from how bad people are at making laws, what we will get is something that will make it worse for everyone.
bootsmann|9 months ago
aredox|9 months ago
...Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist?
sneak|9 months ago
Seems to me that the illegal part would be the cartel of the 3 apps that cornered the whole market.
An app that doesn’t do this could eat their lunch.
Nurses work at hospitals, the supply of which is constrained artificially by the state, so once you sell all of the ones in a region on your app, you have a monopoly. It is a type of regulatory capture.
Voultapher|9 months ago
[1] https://pluralistic.net
[2] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
offsky|9 months ago
er0k|9 months ago
> The final constraint, which did hold back platform decay for quite some time, is labor. Tech workers have historically been respected and well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on, perhaps missing various important social and family events to ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street ""and have a new job by the end of the day"" if the boss persisted.
> So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job.
spacemadness|9 months ago
tmjwid|9 months ago
mrpotato|9 months ago
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
cebert|9 months ago
kubb|9 months ago
Because the employer has power and the employee doesn’t.
Of course they should, but they have much more influence on the law so they don’t.
usrme|9 months ago
isodev|9 months ago
ragebol|9 months ago
Maybe we should not 'democratize' some technologies and keep a bit of difficulty as a gatekeeper.
(Yes, I know this is not really a moral position to hold)
ethersteeds|8 months ago
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for"
eimrine|9 months ago
blueflow|9 months ago
https://social.kernel.org/notice/AqJkUigsjad3gQc664
croisillon|9 months ago
pabs3|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
jocoda|9 months ago
This is the root cause, and as it looks, there is no cure.
AvAn12|9 months ago
conartist6|9 months ago
The cure is to make so much new engineering talent that this is simply impossible
palata|9 months ago
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it.
like_any_other|9 months ago
It's amazing that merely learning about how items that we own work (so-called "reverse-engineering") and exercising control over them (jailbreaking - this time the term is apt) has been made illegal. A heinous overreach by corporations into the lives of people that own their products, and a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough, they want to treat as trade secrets products with mass-market availability.
krzyk|9 months ago
Is anywhere in EU reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, and modifying any products illegal?
Amandadawson1|9 months ago
[deleted]
aaron695|9 months ago
[deleted]
keiferski|9 months ago
ikr678|9 months ago
subjectsigma|9 months ago
bregma|9 months ago
pjc50|9 months ago
Eh. Either they weren't going to do so anyway, because doing so goes against the money, or they can come up with a more public-friendly term.
flir|9 months ago
But Cory's a polemicist. He'd absolutely prefer the memorable word he coined himself to the acceptable, drab one that already exists.
(Plus value engineering is only one way to enshittify a product. There's also subscription models, selling data, jamming ads in everywhere... the advantage of Cory's word is that it captures everything).
phrotoma|9 months ago
patapong|9 months ago
smitty1e|9 months ago
ajb|9 months ago
Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot of his writing, and the site he used to run (boingboing) serve the market of people for whom disgusting things are entertaining or funny, so I think he has a blind spot here.