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DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow (youtu.be)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Personal review:

A good recap of his previous writings and talks on the subject for the first third, but a bit long. Having paid attention to them for the past year or two, my attention started drifting a few times. I ended up being more impressed with how much he's managed to condense explaining "enshittification" from 45+ minutes down to around 15.

As soon as he starts building off of that to work towards the core of his message for this talk, I was more-or-less glued to the screen. At first because it's not exactly clear where he's going, and there are (what felt like) many specific court rulings to keep up with. Thankfully, once he has laid enough groundwork he gets straight his point. I don't want to spoil or otherwise lessen the performance he gives, so I won't directly comment on what his point is in the body of this post - I think the comments are better suited for that anyways.

I found the rest to be pretty compelling. He rides the fine line between directionless discontent and overenthusiastic activist-with-a-plan as he doubles down on his narrative by calling back to the various bits of groundwork he laid before - now that we're "in" on the idea, what felt like stumbling around in the dark turns into an illuminating path through some of the specifics of the last twenty to forty years of the dynamics of power between tech bosses and their employees. The rousing call to action was also great way to end and wrap it all up.

I've become very biased towards Cory Doctorow's ideas, in part because they line up with a lot of the impressions I have from my few years working as a dev in a big-ish multinational tech company. This talk has done nothing to diminish that bias - on the contrary.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think who you mean by tech community here is important too. CEOs? Their pay depends in part on them not listening.

Enthusiasts? Engineers? People who use technology more than incidentally? Left-leaning tech circles? Some have heard him, the idea of enshittification has spread well.

Sometimes ideas don't spread very much until they do in a big way. This feels to me like one where that point exists, and people will take notice when it's hit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

The problem is that if you're working in any of the big tech companies we're talking about, at basically any level, a substantial portion of your compensation is stock.

The dude writing the code and the CEO are sharing the same set of incentives, if not the same value ($) of incentive.

It's shockingly good at taking otherwise decent people and flipping the moral center off because now you're deeply deeply invested in value extraction via stock prices, regardless of what you have to do to get there.

I've had more than a few friends turn utterly unrecognizable and defensive over shit they absolutely would have thought was gross as fuck in the past, except now they look to make six or even seven figures from it, so whatever, it's fine. If not them, then someone else, and they might as well be the ones to cash in.

So you're not wrong, but stock options are shockingly good at getting everyone's goals and desires aligned and while I don't have enough of a supply of tinfoil to think that might actually be the point of giving everyone options, eh, I'd be shocked if it wasn't at least an understood outcome.