It’s possible that we have built an economical and technical environment that is too complex and treacherous for almost all humans to live in.
Perhaps the Neanderthals had similar feelings about the warmer buggier more diseased environment that came with the Skinnies (their name for us).
I wonder who will inherit our world.
Yes, I'm Old. But the young are distressed and anxious, so perhaps they feel it too. To me many things feel frayed, fragile, buggy, and poorly maintained. As though there wasn't enough time to do it right before the next urgent thing.
Apple is supposedly off trying to build Apple Intelligence -- and in the meantime Photos.mac is the shittiest software I've been obliged to consistently use [1]. For a small fraction of what Apple vaporized on autonomous vehicles and the Vision Pro thing they could have slowed the growth rate of their technical debt and maybe even implemented fucking Folder search in Photos.mac [3].
Which brings me to the Deshittification Corps. If I were a Tyrant, which is more than you deserve, I would create a Deshittification Corps (DC) to fight enshittification [2]. My Deshittification Corps would be a force of about 10,000 people who evaluated the services we rely on and gave them shittification ratings. Which they would be obliged to public post, a bit like cigarette carton notices. For example:
This service has a Shittification Rating of D. This is a really shitty service. We recommend everyone who works for this company seek new employment.
Companies that didn't improve their Shittification rating would be subject to a special tax that would start at 0.01% of gross revenue and double every day ...
- fn -
[1] Ok, SharePoint is shittier. But now you're triggering me. Besides, one of the best things about retirement is no more SharePoint.
[2] Yes, Doctorow was talking about software and online services, but I'm bending the meaning more broadly to encompass government and other services.
[3] It would still be shitty software, but that would be the biggest improvement since iPhoto stabilized.
No comments:
Post a Comment