This terrible long read by Ed Zitron on the enshittification of the internet, apps, and everything we deal with all day, got my day off to a depressing start.
Calling it a terrible read is unfair. It's certainly carefully researched and well written. But Zitron examines how our digital worlds are broken, getting ever worse, and how there's really no escape, nothing we can do but expect much of our daily existence to get worse and worse, thanks to big tech:
These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.
I’ve written a lot about how the growth-at-all-costs mindset of The Rot Economy is what directly leads big tech companies to make their products worse, but what I’ve never really quantified is the scale of its damage.
We as a society need to reckon with how this twists us up, makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer and suffer in manifold ways.
Our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile, riddled with subtle and overt cons.
It’s digital tinnitus. It’s the pop-up from a shopping app that you downloaded to make one purchase, or the deceptive notification from Instagram that you have “new views” that doesn’t actually lead anywhere. It is the autoplaying video advertisement on your film review website. It is the repeated request for you to log back into a newspaper website that you logged into yesterday because everyone must pay and nothing must get through. It is the hundredth Black Friday sale you got from a company that you swear you unsubscribed from eight times, and perhaps even did, but there’s no real way to keep track. It’s the third time this year you’ve had to make a new password because another data breach happened and the company didn’t bother to encrypt it.
The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma.
Even though it takes a while to get through and you'll need a drink, or counselling, or a week alone in the wilderness when you're done, I recommend reading it nevertheless, just to see the full extent of what we're up against.
In 1935, Babe secured an entry-level job at Glamour magazine, because she wanted to be with Minnie and Betsey in Manhattan. With their clean, aristocratic features, broad smiles, long-limbed figures, and dark wavy hair parted identically on the left, "the fabulous Cushing sisters" were soon seen everywhere together.
It was best for Babe that she remain a goddess in the public eye, aloof and mysterious. She knew that her looks were of paramount importance to Paley.
More than her beauty, Babe's style elevated her above her peers. Women followed her slavishly in everything she wore. On her way to lunch at La Grenouille one day, she removed her scarf because it was too warm and tied it casually to the side of her handbag. Within a month, this "look" was copied everywhere. After fourteen years on the best-dressed list—thirteen of them at the top—she was named in 1958 to fashion's Hall of Fame, since she was "above annual comparison."
She ran Kiluna with extraordinary precision and organization, supervising a staff of twelve. Babe pampered visitors royally. No one had to unpack or pack. Baths were drawn by servants, and any item of soiled clothing was whisked away, washed, ironed, and folded neatly in the guest's dresser. The bedrooms offered every comfort and convenience: fruit and flowers, piles of new books and magazines, and three newspapers each morning. "They lived on a level of luxury I never met in England before the war, and I had been to quite a few grand houses, like Blenheim," said Lady Mary Dunn, an English friend who visited several times. "They ran it in a way that money didn't seem to count. You could hardly get into the bedroom for the flowers."
Nico cultivated an effortless air of discomfort. She did not put people at their ease. 'We were always like, is she serious? Either she thinks horrible hypothetical deaths are funny or she's a homicidal maniac' said a friend years later over ceviche.
Her style gave off an impeccable sense of having heard of clothes but not knowing how to wear them, and never quite getting it right. Her disdain for having her hair styled and wearing shoes only added to an unfortunate situation. When she walked onto a room she gave off a certain je ne sais quoi, as in no one ever realised she was there until she, inevitably, crashed into the furniture. 'She thought bella figura was a type of cheese' another acquaintance said icily, still smarting decades later from a furious disagreement over their interpretation of the history of anarcho-syndicalism.
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