I am a bit wary of Cory Doctorow‘s abruptly downward curve of “enshittification” since, as Richard Barbrook has been mentioning (at least since 1995), the shit was there since the beginning, altough there is always room for more. By beef is with this “Suddenly” in the title, I am a bood ol’ catastrophist (in paleontological terms) but a gradualist when it is about good or bad or worsening tech. Like the Gilded Age barons, today’s broligarchs are hardened capitalists, fed by public money and always ready to deny that. Claiming newness, “suddenness”, “acceleration,” and urgency has some merit in today’s distraction-addled world, but then we miss the continuities, the relevant dialectics, and historical tensions that coexist and exacerbate all the time. What is not is that much of the techno-optimism is gone, and what is left risks inflating into some huge economic bubble ready to burst.
But as always, who can actually argue against his well-documented examples of why it has been very hard not to see all the current spaces of platform capitalism as a benchmark case for what is wrong with Bit Tech. Not to say he is the only one to look toward or read under such shitty circumstances, but at least he does not peddle the techno-feudalism line everywhere, mentioning that capitalism is over or that. Degrading the user experience, maximizing profits, and treating users as prisoners on their platforms isn’t anything new; it is just that now it is being experienced at all levels and much more acutely because the tech monopolies are well-established. What is bitterly funny is that suddenly, the trouble with deregulation and the need for disciplining is again on the table. Nobody ever tried to discipline the Tech behemoths that are so eager to ass kiss Trump, and in a way, disciplining such uber-rich crazy rich spoiled brats becomes impossible nowadays using democratic institutions. Instead of a Big Green State, in fact, countries have been handing more and more to the private sector with disastrous outcomes. As digital theorist Alexander R. Galloway wrote in an excellent review of David Gollumbia’s cyberlibertarianism, all the signs were there when deregulatory measures, the embrace of non-hierarchical disorder (0ut of Control), and the rhetoric of computer liberation instituted a new order, as robust as the old and maybe even more difficult to budge since it now arrives driverless in the form of uberization.
TimeSpace Warps 