- 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.
I think whenever stocks exist, regardless if private or public, the goal of the company becomes focused on increasingly profits instead of sustainability.
Not that non-traded companies don’t want profits too. But the goal of “forever-increases” in profits will ultimately be destructive to a company as it will lead to lower quality, more exploitation, and intense focus on monopolizing their industry as that will be the only way to retain customers.
I think investing in companies is not really a bad thing. But it should be more like a set contract with an end date and/or amount.
More like a loan with interest. From a bank. Or how some contracts are made with movie actors and such.
A percentage of profits over a 10 year period or something.
Idk. There has to be a better way to do this.
The stock market has too much influence on the economy without bringing a benefit that surpasses the damage it does.
The nature of non-traded and private stocks can be debated for days, especially when you get into the minutiae of stuff like mining stocks for example where it can represent the payout to workers, investors, and owners at the end of a season. But what has made itself evident is that the stock market should not be allowed to exist as it is. Maybe it can be devolved back into resource stocks but that’s just getting into your contract loan/payout idea.