Replying to Avatar Cory Doctorow

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms - and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers - are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

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Cory Doctorow 1y ago

And *that's* why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because *they can get away with it*.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product.

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Cory Doctorow 1y ago

The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification - access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams.

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