Author Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe the gradual decline of services as they prioritize value extraction over value creation for users, a process he views as an inevitable consequence of platform capitalism.
In Lanier’s telling, this digital landscape shifted once the success of Google’s ad program revealed that you could make a lot of money on user-generated creative output, which led to the rise of social-media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Initially, these companies emphasized their simple, elegant-looking interfaces and their... See more
So what do we actually do about this? Because I’m not saying don’t use AI. That would be stupid. The genie is out of the bottle and there are genuinely transformative applications of this technology. I’m saying we need to be incredibly deliberate about how we integrate it. We need to slow down and think about what we’re optimising for.
The disappearance of third places—a social space separate from work and home—has exacerbated the problem. Youth culture has a rich history in cafes, clubs, libraries and parks. But many young people now feel priced out of physical experiences. The virtual world has become a vessel for creativity and self-expression, otherwise inaccessible in the... See more
ne side effect of the vibe shift is that the media establishment has started to accept that there is, in fact, such a thing as a Silicon Valley intellectual—not the glib, blustery dudes who post every thought that enters their brains but people who prefer to post at length and on the margins.
Yancey Strickler argues that the way we see our self influences what we perceive as valuable - a concept he further expands through Metalabel and his idea of post-individualism.