This blog from Ed Zitron has been making the rounds of the Fedi for a little while, and it’s well worth a read. It’s a pretty long one - like, the estimate of read time is like 42 minutes - but I think it really sums up a lot of things that us techies have just sort of “learned to live with” like some form of tinnitus and maybe also what non-techies don’t even realize is happening to them.
As we head into this year’s holiday season, I thought that maybe those of us that have interactions with family members of varying technical skill levels might find this a little bit of a reminder of maybe what it’s like to be non-technical in a world where technology has become a requirement to function in society. And just maybe it will give us some perspective and give us pause when we internally rail at the inevitable holiday question: can you fix my computer?
And then as we head into 2025, maybe this becomes our manifesto for some personal activism to do what we can to dismantle this utterly broken and dysfunctional system that is such a big cause of the cyberpunk dystopia in which we now find ourselves.
For your consideration (and for posterity, because I think it’s really that good).
I agree, Ed’s writing has been stridently critical of the ongoing enshittification of tech, AI hype mongering, and all their associated phenomena. I have to shout out Cory Doctorow who’s excellent blog turned me on to Zitron’s work. Plus Ed’s righteous anger is enjoyable to read and has elicited more than a few “hell yeahs” from me this past year.
yup, same here. The thing about this article that sort of clicked for me is just the realization of how long this has actually been going on and how attenuated I’ve become, even as a tech person. I see it, and I know what a lot of the workarounds are, but I also realize just how much of that stuff I ignore on the daily.
And then I think about all the less technical people out there that have just been putting up with this (or not) because they don’t know the workarounds, and it just reminds me more and more of my responsibility to be patient with them instead of getting angry with them for not seeing “the bigger picture”.
We’re all just frogs in Big Tech’s boiling pot, and while it’s tempting to pat myself on the back due to my awareness of such things, I’m still stuck in the pot just like everyone else. This kind of talk mobilizes me to redouble my efforts to try to find a way OUT of the pot in everything I do, and take as many people with me as I can.
Indeed, I see the people around me using F**ebook and YT without ad blockers, and it’s all I can do to not shout “How do you LIVE like this!?” at them. Because like you and many other more technically-inclined people I do not and refuse to, and will go out of my way *not to.
It’s a YT link, sadly, but if you haven’t seen Ed’s talk at WebSummit, it is very enjoyable, not least because it’s pretty R-rated.
