In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.
It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.
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.
Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.
This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today I’m going to explain why. It’s going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem.
It doesn’t have to be just the listed examples. It’s just anything that ceases to listen to the community and starts making changes on a whim. I’m sure you’ve had some experience with any service changing just for the sake of changing.
Sure, that’s why I self-host or use trusted services from people I actually know for EVERYTHING I can, not just the stuff that’s too awful to accept. I can’t be bothered with being disappointed and jump ships yet again.
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It doesn’t have to be just the listed examples. It’s just anything that ceases to listen to the community and starts making changes on a whim. I’m sure you’ve had some experience with any service changing just for the sake of changing.
Sure, that’s why I self-host or use trusted services from people I actually know for EVERYTHING I can, not just the stuff that’s too awful to accept. I can’t be bothered with being disappointed and jump ships yet again.