💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2024 › 06 › 08 › domestication.gmi captured on 2024-06-20 at 11:51:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-06-16)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
gemini://seirdy.one/posts/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication-of-users/index.gmi
That companies can become neither beneficial nor commensual got the label enshittification, though "user domestication" is an alternative if less known term. Not all companies will go down this route, as there may not be pressure for embiggened profits or whatever it is that darkens the patterns. Money, more often than not. The sequence "dependence, inability to change, capture" of user domestication seems similar to the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy found at Microsoft. Certainly not all companies engage in such shenanigans, nor do the bad ones do so all the time: The Corporation is perhaps overused as a punching-bag. Other domestications, if we may extend the term, involve things that may have been beneficial, and maybe still are, such as external digestion—more commonly known as cooking—boiled water, sitting in cars, the SmartPhone, AI. Some of these have or may become, for better or worse, obligatory or near obligatory, but there may not be much if any top-down conscious decision from, say, Zorg Industries to make it so. Where is the corporation to hate on if there was not one involved?
Granted, too often these days some corporation or the other is seemingly enshittifying something (lesser efforts at rent seeking may well fly under the radar, and as such may not get the "clicks" that a news site needs?) hence why one may want to express antibodies to the practice, lacking regulatory levers that a well-run government might apply on behalf of the people, and especially where too-corporate computing (all that DRM, ads, tracking, etc) is problematic for various reasons. Corporations have become punching bags not for lack of trying.