I was temporarily blocked from my blogger account due to some bizarre technical problems. Google does not provide any customer service -- there is no way to contact them, no way to talk to a human, and the FAQs they offered did not solve my problem. I finally figured it out with the help of IT support from my university, but it took the better part of three days.
This whole thing was ultimately the result of the enshittification of everything. I'm not going to bother you with the whole back story but the basic point is, it's getting harder and harder to do anything, more and more costly, and you're getting less for your trouble and your money as Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft hoover up the planet. I'm not quite feeling helpless yet but I'll bet a lot of people are. What is to be done?
2 comments:
I don't know what is to be done. As someone born in the 1960s, more and more it feels like it just isn't our world anymore. But I don't know if I would feel this way if I were living in a sane country, such as Denmark.
Two things could be contributing to this:
As industries inch towards monopolies (or few enough corporations that the principals can get together in the Augusta locker room and decide how to slice up the pie - a business version of a gerrymander) the need to compete for customers diminishes, and they no longer have to make them happy. They can just concentrate on extracting the maximum revenue from them.
As the systems we use get larger and more complex it gets harder to understand exactly how they work and how to keep them running. The innovations in the ways to make the financials of an enterprise a profit center doesn't help. You can now get ahead in the race up the management pyramid by knowing how to manage money rather than the core business. (I suspect this isn't as much of an issue in the ecosystem of the PRC.)
I think history has repeatedly shown that the Icarus myth isn't one. This should be obvious to any true conservative.
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