Tech is a petri dish for monopolies. If a platform become popular, it dominates. Think Windows in the 90's when Microsoft was king of the world with the only thing saving us rubes from remaining forever trapped by a crappy operating system was the fact Gates didn't understand the ramifications of the web. Now it's the web and tech behemoths like Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, along with good old Microsoft, ruling the roost thanks to open source and the ubiquity of the net but something's amiss as ethics, truth and competency are becoming increasingly scarce as we move further into the 21st century.
Each tool that the internet gives us seems to provide us with more information and fewer reasons to trust that information.
Take two of the backbones of the modern internet, Google and Amazon. I use Google so many times a day that I’m afraid to quantify it. It helps me find the weather, sports standings, pictures to post on my social media accounts, and a million other things. Amazon is similarly miraculous. It can deliver pretty much anything from vitamins to a dining room table to my house in 48 hours.
But these services have also gotten worse in ways that make it difficult to trust the seemingly miraculous things I get from them. Most people seem to think that Google is getting worse — it’s gone from seeming like “magic” to being cluttered with ads and SEO-optimized garbage. The company that is supposed to make it easier for us to find information is now profiting from making it harder for us to find good information. And Amazon, once a wondrous, straightforward shopping experience, is so cluttered with counterfeit crap, fake reviews, and shady sellers that I’m once again tempted to jump in the car and head out to Target.
Cory Doctorow has unforgettably coined this process “enshittification.” He argues that tech platforms are useful to users — at first. But once they’ve captured a user base and crushed their competition, they begin squeezing every last cent out of their users, which makes the platform gradually worse.
Remember, it's all about the money, always has been, always will be.
10 days & counting ...
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