#1yrago The Right accuses their critics of the conspiracy they themselves engage in https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/10/teneo/#i-grasp
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Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies: Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112083916774747747
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/
#Pluralistic
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Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and *state* capture, which felonizes competition through IP law.
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A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can *take*. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure
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Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.
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A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can *take*. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure
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One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/
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What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can *seize* all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.
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One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/
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That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.
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Big Car figured out that VIN locking - DRM for engine components and subassemblies - can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/
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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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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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Or at least, it *did*. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/
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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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Or at least, it *did*. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/
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That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.
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This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/
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