- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
That’s cool. Good thing I have a black light, and can modify the seeds the same way they do. Therefore, not the same seeds.
Edit: didn’t make this clear enough, the idea is to lightly modify their seeds just enough to make it legal. If they want to be shitty, we can be shitty right back. Any rule they make for us they make exceptions for the rich. Therefore, with enough cleverness and a stubborn refusal to accept others bullshit(and a bit of spite) you can exploit their rules and bend them to your will.
I have no experience agriculture patents, but couldn’t Monsanto make it illegal for someone to modify “their product” without their explicit permission?
I left it in the sun too long, oops. Well, now that this is no longer one of your seeds as it contains distinct genetic differences which differentiate it from the genes listed in your patents, I guess there’s no issue with me running experiments on it?