Comment on DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Great talk, but I’m getting a little tired of Doctorow’s calls to action that result in nothing but crickets from the community at large. He’s written/spoken numerous calls to action since the early 2000’s.
I think it’s rather that the majority of the community isn’t listening.
His ideas aren’t monetizable. They’re a throwback to the golden age when tools and utilities were built for passion or need.
Now, tooling is built by for-profit corporations. It satisfies users enough that there isn’t enough room for passion projects. For-profit tooling tends to get usability right.
Look at the fediverse: it’s a workable system that users would be fine with, if more usable for-profit alternatives didn’t exist.
For-profit tooling tends to get usability right
Until enshittification happens and the photo-editer that’s turned into the shorthand slang for editing a picture is suddenly an unaffordable subscription.
If we crowdsource such tools, or otherwise make them FOSS then they dont fall into that trap. Even one that sells out can be split off back into a FOSS project.
This feels like a First Follower problem.
He’s clearly on the right track, but the first steps have a lot of inertia holding them back. Also, is hard to act as a community when we’re looking for those first few leaders to do something on their own that we as individuals can get behind.
We need some frameworks for action. I don’t think we know what that looks like yet.
Aside from echoing @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone and Doctorow’s statements about unionizing, I am aware of a few others who are trying things that I’d describe as complimentary to unions.
“framework wherein a programmer would have more decision over how their code is used” <> “governing tech democratically”
That’s a bit of a contradiction, no?
Well for one, change will never come from waiting for “leadership” to take control.
Change will only ever come from the workers organizing together from the ground up, waiting for someone else to give you the framework will always result in a framework that binds you.
Change will only ever come from the workers organizing together from the ground up,
Amen, brother.
It’s like with people who are stuck in traffic. They are frustrated and so they wish for for change. The wish for more roads (and bigger cars, faster cars, more cars). The natural human reaction when something doesn’t work is: Try the same thing harder! It’s not to try something else.
I think we have all been in situations where we failed to push a door open, and so we angrily pushed again harder before easily pulling the door open.
I see lots of people agreeing that there is a problem, as evidenced by the popularity of the term “enshittification”. But the reaction is to double down on the policies that got us here.
You can see that in AI threads here. People call for more intellectual property, more silo-ing of data. Of course, that won’t work and Doctorow has explained that on several occasions. pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullie… …medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-13-spoo…
Other institutions that are apparently considered trustworthy also “side with AI companies”, in that they understand that fair use is in the interest of society. For example, libraries including the Internet Archive. librarycopyrightalliance.org/…/AI-principles.pdf blog.archive.org/…/internet-archive-submits-comme…
That’s activism for you… 95% of people don’t listen, but if 5% do, you already made a mark.
There’s Upton Sinclair’s famous remark that it’s “difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. There’s a part of them that does hear, but holds it in abeyance, saving it for use when circumstances change and it no longer threatens their self-interest.
It’s hard to convince tech people to be activists. There’s this other term, in between bougie and proletariat that classifies the people in between. Something like, the people who have it just good enough to not give a shit.
And that’s like all of tech.
confuser@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
i for one have never heard of thos guy, i had read this talk but didnt even know the name of the person until just now
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
That’s fair, but he has indeed been around a long time, and is even portrayed as wearing goggles and a hero-cape in tech-comic XKCD.
He was the main editor at zine-turned-blog BoingBoing in the early 2000’s.
gramie@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
A lot of his science fiction writing is available with a Creative Commons license, meaning that you can download and read it for free. I really enjoy his quirky, sardonic style.
craphound.com/tag/creative-commons/
Gets you to a page where you can download.