this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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This is kinda a bad take imo. I don’t think it’s chrome books that has ruined tech literacy. Maybe it’s younger exposure to even more addictive social media than previous generations?
I’m pretty young. My first mobile device was an iPod touch 4th gen. I figured out how to jailbreak it and I was like 12 at the time. If I ever felt one of these walled garden devices was holding me back, I enjoyed finding a creative solution around that. Since that iPod touch, I jailbroke my Wii and recently a kindle. I also modded a gameboy, but that was different than jailbreaking.
Yeah it's a fucking abysmal take. More kids had access to the internet and computers because of Chromebooks, without them they'd have had nothing - maybe once an hour in the computer lab each week, assuming they even had one.
Prior to Chromebooks, the most a school could do was "a computer in every classroom". That was it, that was the ambition in the early 2000's and even then most schools failed.
What happened was tech companies made computers easier to use by hiding a lot of that complexity. And average humans were fine with that because shit should just work.
The arguments being raised here about a loss of skills are the same arguments boomers used against millennials because they didn't know how to do DIY and shit like that.
The blame is always squarely on the education system. That system is supposed to set kids up with the skills they need to make it in the wold and tech literacy is one of many, many areas that is hugely underserved.
This was Apple's literal marketing campaign when they were trying to make Macs popular again
And say what you will about apple, it worked (the slogan, not the Macs)