Call me optimistic, but I truly believe there's going to be such a tech boom once the market outside the US is insightful enough to look backwards and point their finger at the things that worked well and that people actually wanted and iterate off that instead of this failed path, dead end.

The European Commission claims to promote open source and freedom from foreign tech abuses, etc. It now seeks feedbacks from communities: "Towards European open digital ecosystems".

It seems to be perfect timing for getting rid of that article 6 which turns

If you didn't already hear it, Cory Doctorow recently gave a talk about this at 39C3, the Chaos Computer Club conference. Search "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" in your frontend of choice

If we can convince the ignorant masses to stop buying based on consumerism and purchase based on well informed decisions instead then we would see a shift in enshittification or at least have alternatives. But that's very unlikely since it's easier to conform and fall in line and accept your fate.

Anti circumventing pushed by an article that doesn't let me circumvent the cookie consent is really next level.

At first I thought the title said, "Let's end Anti-Circumcision". I was like, "why?".

Ironically I've just uninstalled the guardian app because it wouldn't let me circumvent the number of articles I could read per month.

I read that as

Let's end anti circumsicion!

And got confused fast

Bosch is coming out with modular devices that are DMCA locked. I think a a coffee machine from the recent ces

Government officials are really scared of changing the status quo. They're really afraid that if they get rid of anti-circumvention laws, that they'll become a pariah state. In the past that probably would have been true. The US would have thrown its weight around, and Europe would have fallen in line and boycotted whoever it was. Many countries also have a lot of Hollywood productions made there. The major Hollywood studios care about anti-circumvention because they think it guarantees their profits. So, if these countries scaled back anti-circumvention, Hollywood would probably throw a fit and cut them off too. Even if the economic impact of getting rid of anti-circumvention were a huge positive, Hollywood has a big cultural impact worldwide.

I'd like to see it happen, but I think the most likely scenario is that a country that already doesn't fully respect US copyright laws, like Switzerland or Singapore, might take an additional step and stop respecting anti-circumvention.

The total abolition of capitalism is the only thing that will end enshittification and fascism. Everything else is just cope and/or baby steps.

Interesting perspective.

It's a great point that if you're getting threatened anyway might as well go in for a pound instead of a penny.

HAHAH you mean the same investors who decided to ruin the internet for shareholder value? Yea let me just place the same source of evil and maybe this time it'll work

One of the shittiest humans on the planet is in charge and fucking things up, here’s a completely unlikely event that would fix nothing that could happen.

There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product

There are many reasons, but I disagree on this one. Most of the existing tech in cloud infrastructure, protocols, social media apps etc. is built on the shoulders of open source software components and operating systems along with interfaces and APIs the US conglomerates themselves have opened to speed up adoption. This of course does not include the surveillance and ad network components, but we don't want those anyway.

Some more valid reasons in my opinion:

1. Lock-In effect in general: If your friends, neighbors, even governments all use product x (i.e. Whatsapp) and expect you to use those too in order to communicate with them It is very difficult to switch to something else because the people you want to talk to have to be convinced one by one to give it a try. (it's possible, just very hard to do)

2. Lock-in effect in business: High costs of switching to other products, sunk cost fallacy etc.

3. US Tech for decades gave away their products "for free" misleading customers into thinking that this should be the norm. People understand when something doesn't cost money but they still don't understand that they are paying with their data and ultimately with their freedom and well-being. Alternative products and infrastructures cost money. People need to eat. If you don't take the dirty road of advertising and selling surveillance data there is no way around that fact. At least when we're talking about products at scale.

On the plus side of this: there is nothing that stops enthusiasts like us from setting up self-hosted projects and providing services to a community. And just like the home computing enthusiasts in the 1980s paved the way for tech we use today, every new movement starts small with a bunch of nerds, aka "early adopters".

There are plenty more reasons why this is hard and plenty more reasons why we should do it anyway. But I'm on my first coffee so I'll stop here.

One can only hope!

As much as I love Cory Doctorow's work, this is a stretch. The crack in the door only comes once everything supporting the consolidation and oligarchy of the tech industry comes crashing down. The broligarchs have their contingency planning in place already, so a crack in the door might exist one day, but it's going to take a lot more than EFF and a few niche rights groups to make any change there. The tech money is digging in, and doing so in ways that are edge cases for even digital rights groups.

The post-WWII order is gone, the post-Cold War model of economics is over, and the post-9/11 surveillance state is now wearing a mask with hoses that feed it super-strength drugs. It's that the costs of the old bargain are double for everyone that isn't a FANG, and now gone for them. Just like the Western economy, it's bifurcating towards different planes of existence that know of each other but barely interact IRL. Which is not sustainable, but for how long we'll wobble, it's hard to say.

Digital rights and privacy groups need to be proactive and demonstrate uses cases for both, and make use of them while expecting the non-sustainability of the current system to one day give way to something new.

So step 1 is, for now, strap the fuck in and get your house in order. Build skills, teach others. Step 2 one day is going to be on the heels of massive cultural and political change.

Getting pretty tired of the Guardian's copium tbh.

Make [noun] [adjective] Again is a tainted phrase for all time at this point. It's etched in innocent blood.

Narrator: They didn’t.

You could just add a period after "end" and stop the headline there.

I guess Cory didn't see the CES shit show this year.

AI fridges with voice command door opening that couldn't work unless there was total silence, then it plays you ads.

A fridge is, and should remain, a box that stays cold.

Everyone thinks they can leverage trump for their own agenda because he's a wildcard. But unless you're directly putting money toward his whatever you're very unlikely to get the result you want. And even if you do send money his way, there's a pretty good chance he'll turn on your at some point.

But is it really Trump's fault specifically or all the tech oligarchs that are inmune to regulation because Americans can't regulate shit? I mean Obama helped create Elon Musk. Elon Musk , didn't "turn bad" he was always shit.

This enshittification reminds me of how the dot-com bubble burst forced companies like google to get profitable quickly to stay afloat, most crashed...are we undergoing a slow-motion crash, like then, but the AI hype is holding the crunch back a little while more?

He is way overestimating govs ambition to change. European gov websites are littered with facebook, twitter, linked in, etc, and their email uses MS. None of that will change. Not because of tariffs but because most consumers are zombie pushovers not keen to change their habits.

Worth noting that under Obama, ISPs needed consent to sell customer data. Trump reverse that. Biden did not reverse it back. So ISPs will continue exploiting whatever data they can harvest from their own customers.

It’s been 25 years since I started working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an American nonprofit dedicated to preserving and promoting human rights on the internet.

I must say I just lost some respect for Doctorow. The EFF has turned a blind eye to the most insideous offender of our digital sovereignty since Cloudlfare began its oppressive existence over 10 years ago.