In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More

You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.

It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.

These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.

Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.

This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today I’m going to explain why. It’s going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem.

  • rtc@beehaw.org
    1·
    14 days ago

    It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.

    This ‘death cult’ is just ordinary people who take the easy way of forcing others to provide what they cannot do themselves. The commercial system is little more than a convoluted mechanism to fulfill this need. While, of course, not being extremely cruel to the workers because that always has consequences. This rule goes against the very instinct and reason for those radically believing in this system though, and as a result is disregarded in time by people who believe their predecessors who bit more than they could chew were foolish for not merely suffocating the poorer classes even more, in the hope they will work for them out of desperation.

    These things have a simple root—it is people being unwilling to bear the burdens and pains for becoming capable of doing what they want to do, and seeing it preferable to push the pains on others instead. The most effective way to deal with it is to disobey and push the burden of pain right back to the cause of problems, rather than take up the pain for either pennies or the promise of easing the pressure, while the majority of the benefit coming from the work you put in goes to others. Push it back, reject it, and push it back again when these persons defiantly cause more problems. They’ll end up toothless and—the horror—with take up some form of technical skill learning to survive.

    An organisation without the technically skilled persons to suffer under work for them are just a bunch of persons with many desires but no way to fulfill them. All the while the structure of ‘legitimacy’, which forces people’s hand to work for practically achieving nothing, breaks down. People are forced to work hard again if they ever had the idea of simply making others do the work and benefiting from it. In this happening you do not destroy co-operation and business themselves, but only trim these perverted aspects off them.