#enshittification of socials or whatever

[what-even-is-sleep]

DAMMIT what’s the line between:

‘bad publicity is still publicity’ and posting screenshots abt the tumblr shop tab moving to our blog spots

VS

I don’t want to stay silent on this topic and I know that just one formal complaint won’t do much if we aren’t all angry at the Instagram/Tik-Tok-ification that’s happening rn

[emeryleewho]

If you're worried about the enshittification of the internet completely killing your access to work by your favorite creatives (I've already seen a lot of artists I love state they'll be leaving Tumblr thanks to all the AI training), I want to introduce you to a handful of ways to circumvent the social media hellscape to stay connected to your favorite creators.

RSS Feeds

I'd argue that this is the best option. It essentially allows you to create your own social media "dashboard" by saving websites and getting updates when they post new content. Most websites already have these, and if social media goes down (or just continues to degrade), the best way you can access your favorite creators will be with direct connection to their personal websites. I'm still learning how to use these, but if you want to learn more, this article does a great job.

2. Newsletters

I know newsletters are a pain and it's annoying to have your inbox cluttered, but if there are creators you know you'd be remiss to lose access to, I recommend subscribing to their newsletters. I'd honestly skip the ones that share frequent content you don't need, but for example, my newsletter is updates only so I only send it out maybe every few months when something big happens. It's an easy way to stay up to date on info that social media buries. Of course, if your faves are writing up blog posts & insights that you want to read in newsletter form, consider subscribing to those as well, and don't feel like you have to subscribe to *every* newsletter to make it worthwhile. You just want to make sure you can still be reached by the creators whose work you really don't want to miss.

3. Ko-Fi/Patreon

I don't think a lot of people realize you can follow people on these platforms for free, but because they have paid options, they offer more direct access than social media sites whose algorithms will just erase people you love from your feed altogether. This one isn't the best alternate since a lot of content may be behind a paywall, but if you just want an easy way to be sure you'll still have access to updates from people you want to support, this is a usable way to compile creators in one place and most creators will post updates for free so you should still get those.

So yeah, these are my suggestions. If you're just on social media casually and you just like the easy access to content but don't particularly care about individual creators or specific projects or anything like that then you probably don't need any of this and that's fine. If social media is continuing to work for you then feel free to continue enjoying it without worrying about alternatives. I just want people to have a fail safe if you, like me, are realizing that this shit is getting completely out of hand and everything you once wanted social media for is quickly becoming inaccessible.

Anyway, I highly recommend tuning in to people's personal websites, but I doubt most people have the energy to check each individual website so RSS Feeds are great alternative. Whatever you choose to do, just try to diversify enough that no one company can completely kill your access to your faves on a whim and remember that the closer to direct communication you can get to with creatives the better.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

You’re a psychology professor, right? Do you mind if I ask what exactly your research expertise/discipline is? Whatever it is always seems so fascinating to me whenever bits of it come up here. At the risk of doxxing yourself, would you be willing to talk about your research?

So if you don't mind, I'm going to answer this a little to the left of the ask. Less because I'm worried about Tumblrers doxxing, more because I'm terrified of my students or coworkers stumbling upon this blog.

My top six essays and articles that explain what I research, none of which are authored by me:

Empathy or Division? On the Science and Politics of Storytelling by Claire Corbett opens up with the lines "Writers can’t always be trusted when they talk about the power and importance of story. We have a vested interest and can get sentimental, promoting the immense power of story, of narrative, as inherently benign" — and it only gets better from there. Storytelling is a tool, one that can harm as much as help; anyone who says differently is selling something.

The Enshittification of TikTok by Cory Doctorow (yes, that Cory Doctorow) does an excellent job of explaining how the forces of individual psychology interacting with the forces of economics and society lead to the enshittification (exactly what it sounds like) of mass resources like social media platforms.

Superhero Comics as Moral Pornography by David Pizarro and Roy Baumeister. Although undeniably negative toward aspects of Western superhero stories, this essay also has a pretty forgiving definition of pornography. Like Corbett's, it takes a refreshingly cynical view of the power of storytelling.

The Mythology of Karen by Helen Lewis explains how a meme (in the sense of a sticky, culturally specific idea) can be sexist and antiracist, empowering and ageist, and trying to force it into molds of "good" or "bad" will never work.

What Do We Know When We Know a Person? by Dan McAdams. I've seen this article on many lists of best-written psychological theory reviews, and I fully agree. The science has come a long way since 1995, but this remains one of the best introductions to the psychology of personal narrative.

The Folk Psychology of Souls by Jesse Bering. "When it comes to death, human cognition apparently is not well equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating the recent nonexistence of any one of them." It's a little outside my main research area, but I built an entire special-topics class around this one article because it's one of the truest I've ever read.

[msfbgraves]

Is it me or is the enshittification machine working very fast these days? You used to get years out of a service before they fucked it up too much to be of use to anyone but the shareholders. Now, they barely can build alternative services fast enough before big money comes in and renders any service or product functionally unusable. I'm feeling myself move further and further away from mainstream anything purely because I'm a snob that likes things to be, well, not utter crap. And increasingly, that means you have to make and own everything yourself again, or at least be part of the avant garde of whatever interests you, before the mainstream invariably fucks it up. I had not the slighest interest in learning how to program a computer but I'll have to know, now, to get all the crapware off my pc. I pirate because my smart tv will no longer update. I lament my non existent fine motor skills more and more each day because I cannot fix terribly made clothes. I ditch subscriptions because they only get more expensive and worse over time. I pay for upgrades on public transport because the economy version has become functionally unusable with my level of disability - and I have not declined as hard as their level of service.

I went to an amusement park I've been to since I was a toddler and got sensory overload, not because any of the rides - they were virtually unchanged - because on every corner, some stall was blaring at me to buy an overpriced trinket. Again, the things in there built to provide you with amusement had not increased. There were no more places to catch your breath.

I mean, I am "voting with my feet", I already am refusing to pay for bad quality but there are no socially approved alternatives.

And sure, that leads to some original experiences. But most of the time it has meant going backwards, using older things that were made to last, or simply refusing to opt in to new technology and I feel that this is the best way of going completely out of touch. The only thing that consoles me about that is that people who work in cybersecurity are completely offline in their own homes. So here I am using pirating and paywall hacks and cooking from scratch and making my own bath oil and taking my nieces to the beach without music because I can't stand the noise and thrift shopping and reviving ten year old machines and finding trials for Spotify to get out of the frickin price hikes and paying for organic food because that is the only way to get some actual nutrition out of supermarket food and somehow failing to see this all as progress.

And now we even have to keep the Republicans out of Ao3. All the while knowing I fed that AI beast.

I'm not even outraged, just annoyed. It's so much effort that somehow wasn't in 2012. I can't think of a single thing that we have now and didn't have then that I couldn't do without gladly - except some music and movies, and using your creditcard to get into the bus.

[stevensavage]

Technical Fads And Those Who Benefits

Guess which tech fad I’m talking about?  Doesn’t matter.  I’ve been in IT nearly 30 years as of this writing and not much has changed, it just goes faster while the ephemera of it all becomes more obvious.

Every industry, community, etc. has its fads. Thats normal, humans love new stuff, humans are social, and humans innovate.  A seemingly trite fad today could be the foundation of great future potential.  It could also vanish, but that’s just life.

In tech fads - hell, most fads - one of the issues is money.  Fads can make you money especially if you jump on them, create them, support them, or exploit them and tech lets you do it fast.  Tech has been wildly successful the last few decades and has lots of money, attracts money, and attracts people who want to make money.

Past a certain point, the money starts to matter so much the reason for the fad - sometimes good reasons - doesn’t matter.  At that point I find you end up with really two populations jumping on fads.

People with money:  You got money, you can make money - and when others are making money, you want to run up the score or have more power than them.  You can invest in many fads and hope one pays off.  Of course this distorts the actual value of whatever new ideas are out there as you can take over a market (leading to enshittification) or just keep it going long enough to cash out.

People looking for a quick score:  Jumping on fads in tech - and elsewhere - can be profitable or can seem to be.  Everyone’s ready to try and make a quick buck and fads promise a lot of opportunity.

So everyone jumps on a fad, someone gets rich, and the fad either fades, breaks, or actually becomes something solid.  Then the next fad starts and here we go again.

Thing is, two results tend to come out of this when there’s lots of money to be made.  First, some people make a lot of money, and some people get hosed and lose out.  That distorts the next fad when it’s involves a lot of money (like we see in tech, film, etc.)

First, the people who made a lot of money can jump on, take advantage of, or start the next fad easier.  They have money, they can now multiply it again!

Second, the people who didn’t make a quick score or didn’t get in on it get more desperate for the next fad.  Why miss out?  Why not try to make back what you lost?  Why can’t you be like the people who won last time?

So the next fad is more funded - and more desperate.

Where does this go?  Honestly I think this happens in many areas, not just tech, but it’s all so intertwined maybe that doesn’t matter much.  But one thing it’s not to judge by environmental pressures and economic issues is sustainable.  Winners win more, losers get more desperate, and more and more fads don’t make anything.

I suspect at some point you either see the fractures above rapidly shatter systems, and probably causing that or around that time, there’s one big fad everyone bets on.  For that one, few to no one wins and a lot of people lose.

Just staying that with our environmental problems, that could be geohacking (which I support to an extent).  Chew that one over.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com

[steadfast-unmoving]

the violent threat of erasing someone's existence because they said something you don't agree with is a big reason i care so much about educating and expanding the DIY web. i think it is a vital tool against censorship and wreckerism to own as much as possible of, understand as much as possible of, your own infrastructure to connect with the internet.

over the last few years i've watched as tumblr started to move from (this is a niche use case but bear with) something i could in good faith recommend as a free and easy-to-set-up basis for an art portfolio site to something which is (ugh god i'm going to say it) actively going through Enshittification™️ and employs more and more coercive tactics to remove and paywall any meaningful sense of ownership or expansive/extensible-ness over users' individual blogs

it used to be by default when you shared a link to a post it would go to username.tumblr.com/postid and now it goes to tumblr.com/username/postid which means if you don't manually edit the link to the original formation, it forces whoever clicks on the link to make an account to view what you've shared (user capture)

it used to be free to connect a custom domain to a tumblr blog (which is a vital defense against censorship which means you can migrate to a new service/host without losing "brand recognition" with no economic penalty) and now you have to pay monthly and they want you to buy domains directly from them (i'm not sure if it's actually possible to connect a domain tumblr doesn't own to a blog now – this is the Only reason that when i converted this from a project portfolio to a personal blog that i did not set up that project on a different tumblr account and instead now have a tumblr version and a portfolio site which i self-host – i can't use tumblr as the portfolio because i can't connect the URL for free/at all)

the popups and aggressive prompts to make an account when viewing someone's blog at username.tumblr.com have become so severe that where i can i implement custom CSS to suppress them

when you DO make an account the popups prompting you to pay for ad-free browsing are again, increasingly aggressive

this all points to a pattern where tumblr doesn't see itself as a service, it sees itself as a business which needs to make profit from its users (which makes sense, it's a private company and it's following the same pattern as every other site which is free to use – draw people in with a slick user experience and no downsides, run out of VC money or whatever, start to Need To Make A Profit, make the platform ever more extractive to the point where nobody likes using it but nobody sees anywhere else to go – literally the definition of enshittification)

this is a large selling point for federated social media for me. moving your account but retaining your 'social graph' is a Feature of federated social networking. you can migrate to a new server if your admin makes a decision you don't like without losing ~most of your social connections, you can also choose to set up on a server which has moderation policies in line with what you want to post. you can also set up your own dang server and literally be your own mod/admin if you have a bit of spare cash and technical knowledge (warning: this can get expensive). this is also why i advocate for everyone to own a domain and run their own site, as independently as possible from corporate infrastructure, as if someone has your website bookmarked and your host blacklists you, you can just upload your website somewhere else and point your domain there instead

i would suggest everyone who cares about their tumblr account* export a backup of that data as soon as they can – tumblr provides a feature to do this which retains your media and a record of your social connections. i think it also provides some of it in .html form which you could upload to any web server if you wanted to. i would also suggest everyone owns a domain for a personal homepage, and maybe makes a 'home' online somewhere that's not here – my domain registrar of choice is namecheap and i pay about $15/yr for my main domain. you can get free web hosting in a bunch of places – github pages springs to mind, codeberg also offer this if you don't want it to be owned by microsoft. i think netlify still has a free version. there are options! owning a domain means you're free to move between these options without anyone really noticing anything different. i highly, highly recommend it for anyone who likes blogging freely without living in fear of being censored.

*in the current context i am mostly talking to trans women here but i think this advice applies to anyone, nobody is not at risk of being banhammered for basically nothing, these things tend to escalate in severity over time

anyway i love trans women and i am so angry about the decisions unfolding here but it's also totally Precedented and Typical for corporate owned online infrastructure and there are things you can do to insulate your social connections and retain backups of the things you make here. ultimately posting here creates value for the corporate platform owners and there are ways to blog which don't do that!

[uncloseted]

How can I live like before tiktok / influencers (like current-day ones), bizarre trends and oversharing on the internet was a thing like pre-2014. Social media was just starting out then and things were far less weird unless they were on, like, livejournal or tumblr. People openly OVERSHARE now online, film everything in public and strangers, make bizarre content for ads and their personal brands, and it's like there's no divide at all. People can act like weirdos online and no one bats an eye anymore. For the most part, social media was kind of just normal back before all this. You'd post a photo, see your friends' photos, maybe some funny tweets, and that's it (in typically NORMAL spaces at least). Is deleting my tiktok the answer? Deleting all social media and being on my phone less? I don't have FOMO, I just feel isolated because EVERYONE is always on their phones, ffs. Is there an answer to this? I just want to go back to a normal life again before all these micro-trends, bizarre content, and strange ads etc. before I get anymore immune to it. It's to the point where I watch movies now from like 2014 (I time I lived through) and go, "I miss those days." Like??? Do you also feel this way sometimes or know if it's common? I'd love any advice / help. Thank you bunches.

I do definitely feel this way, and I think a lot of other people share that feeling, as well. There's even a name for what's happened to the internet recently- it's called "enshittification".

As for what to do about it, I think instead of asking "how can I live like before social media" a better question might be "what do I wish I was doing instead?" In general, quitting things is really hard, and it's even harder to quit things when everyone around you is doing them. It's much easier to replace them with something else that's enjoyable and meaningful to you. Maybe that means joining more in-person activities, like an art class or cooking class, sports team, volunteer group, religious organization, or some other kind of club/group. For me, I joined a service that sends me on a surprise real-world activity once a month, and even that has done a lot for my feeling of being present in the real world. (If you follow my Instagram, you might have seen the one for this month- it was a pottery class I went to this morning!)

Maybe replacing social media means figuring out which hobbies you'd like to pursue on your own and putting more time into those- reading, making art or crafts, playing video games, whatever feels exciting to you. For me, writing this blog is one way that I replace mindless scrolling on social media, as is going to real-world meetups, doing interior decorating projects at my house, and doing craft projects.

Or maybe replacing social media just means installing a bunch of ad blockers and aggressively curating your social media experience so that you only see the types of content that feel like they're contributing to your life. You could even unfollow everyone except for people that you know personally. I've curated my social media this aggressively, especially on TikTok, and now most of the content I see there is academics talking about their work, people talking about interior decorating, people putting together outfits, and daily vlogs. This is hard, though, because you have to be super liberal with the "not interested" button, and you have to be able to realize when the algorithm is trying to push you down a rabbit hole of outrage.

In general, I think the more time we spend offline and the more we interact with people who aren't chronically online, the less chaotic the world feels and the easier it becomes to realize that social media isn't real life. A lot of the phenomena that seem so common when you spend a lot of time online are totally foreign to people who don't spend a lot of time online, and I think having that perspective can be really helpful.

[furbyfubar]

You know how everyone agrees that the Internet has turned to shit?

Well, at least almost everyone who was around when the web was young agrees on it. This isn't a post to just bitch about the enshittification of everything online. No, this is a post to tell you what you can do to fight it!

But first let me just quickly sum up what the problem is:

The issue is mainly that the Internet and the World Wide Web went from being this cool thing where you could find almost everything to being the place people to use the same dozen or so apps, and to use those apps increasingly shitty desktop versions if they're on their computer. And any other sites you find with Google are more and more likely to be AI-generated bullshit listicles with well-made SEO that only exist to show ads.

Don't get me wrong, there are content creators on those dozen apps/sites who are still putting out amazing things! But since they don't control the platforms they're posting to they don't really fully own their own content. This is especially true since those platforms will of course make it as difficult as they legally can to move the content off of their services. Services that can and will change their terms of service to be increasingly shittier for their users the more of a hold on the market they get.

Then when the apps get shitty enough to not gain new users and thus eventually die, all those amazing things their users have created there either dies a slow death of obscurity, or the servers shut down and the content is gone for good.

So what can you do to fight this? You can be the change you want to see! So what should you do? Two things:

1. Set up a linktree and/or mailing list

The easiest way is to set up a Linktree account to link all your social media together (without taking up too much space in your bio). That way someone who wants to stop using a specific app/site at least know where else they can find you. But this doesn't help you all that much should your main social media suddenly shut down or bad your account. The best protection then is to use some free service to set up a newsletter/mailing list that you can plug to your followers. Then the people who want to sign up for it won't have to rely on noticing that you've stopped posting to find out your account has been banned. You don't have to use this mailing list to start sending out a periodical newsletter. It's OK to say "This is a backup mailing list that will send updates should I no longer be able to post where you usually follow me."

Bonus advice to protect yourself from losing touch with content creators you like following: Make a new bookmark folder called "Linktrees" and make a habit of bookmarking the Linktree (or equivalent) pages of people you follow. If you realize that someone has stopped posting you now have a place where you can check to see if they are still posting in other places (or under other usernames).

2. Set up your own website

This is typically not entirely free, and I'm not saying it's low effort. But if enough people do it, it will make a change to how the Internet works!

How? I promise you it's still easier than you probably think! Especially if you remember that the issue you're trying to solve here is that the web is lacking personal sites where people like you post things they burn for. That means that your site doesn't have to look good. Content is still king!

Learn some basic HTML and make a web page where you can post whatever content you want. That web page can then link to the other web pages you make. Do that and, congratulations, you've now made a website!

OK, so you've made a website that can only be loaded from your own hard drive, so maybe don't celebrate just yet. The next step is to sign up for a some web hosting service that lets you post anything that's legal for them to host. There are still free web hosts that survive by adding ads to your site, but if you can afford it I would advice you to find a cheap service that doesn't do this. If you only intend to host HTML and images so you don't need database support this still isn't all that expensive given that you're not likely to hit even the lowest bandwidth limit.

Next register a domain name. Make sure you have auto-payment set up for its renewal, and set a yearly alarm in your phone to make sure you don't lose the domain name due to forgetting about checking you e-mail at the wrong time. (Domain squatting trolls who register the domains that expire to either show phishing scams OR sell back the domain name to the original owner at an obscene markup are still sadly a thing.)

What should you use you website for?

Whatever the hell you want! If you're already a content creator I'm not even saying that you should stop posting to the apps you have followers on, but this gives you a way to post the same content to a platform that you control should something happen to your app of choice. Keep posting your photos, fanfiction or whatever content you make to the services you usually do, but now also upload them you your own website!

If you're making video you can still host if from YouTube (or Vimeo or whatever) so that you don't run into bandwidth issues. YouTube isn't likely to shut down out of nowhere, but they might start showing so many unblockable ads that you no longer want to have that be the main place your videos are hosted. But if you embed those videos on your own site and (vitally) make sure that you keep the raw video files backed up, you now have a way to change where your videos are hosted!

[ailurinae]

It's a long, slow process but I swear tumblr is trying to drive me fully back to FB. Twitter is dead, reddit was always trash for social stuff (I previously maintained a minimal presence there because of certain technical communities and personal reviews), g+ is long gone, multiply is too.

Now Automattic, having first lured us into a false sense of security by actually improving some things, is ramping up the enshittification process.

Meanwhile, FB still sells all your data, but it's been a good while since they changed up the UI, and the UI was so bad in most of its recent iterations that it doesn't matter much. Bad to different bad is pretty whatever, unlike good to bad. And FB while annoying with it's algo content, is less annoying than twitter ever was on that front. You can train FB pretty well to show you pretty bland stuff, instead of something you certain to get steamed about like on twitter.

Really with everything in my life and in the world unraveling and collapsing, I just want some stability. And FB has a baseline of stable shittiness. I don't really see it getting massively worse or even just massively different anytime soon, so it starts looking better and better.

[justinsentertainmentcorner]

Sean Rameswaram at Vox:

At the end of January, when Universal Music Group (UMG) failed to negotiate a new licensing deal with TikTok, it removed its entire music catalog from the app. Just like that, thousands of videos featuring music by artists like Drake, Taylor Swift, and Bad Bunny were suddenly silent.

UMG said it made the decision because TikTok offered to pay only a fraction of the rate that other social platforms offer. For its part, TikTok said that Universal was putting “their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.” Some of those artists and songwriters have spoken out about the situation. “I think it’s ass-backward, and at the very least we should have known,” said Jack Antonoff to reporters in the press room after winning Producer of the Year at the Grammys earlier this month. “You got a whole industry being like, ‘You’ve got to do everything; you’ve got to do everything, and here’s where you’ve got to do it,’ and then one day it’s like, ‘Poof!’” Musicians aren’t the only ones upset about this disruption. Content creators like Jarred Jermaine, who breaks down music samples on TikTok, posted a video of himself in tears claiming that videos he created that contained UMG music were taken down. And dancer and content creator Lars Gummer told the Daily Beast that he went from “shocked” to “disappointed.”

“Most of my friends in LA are content creators, especially dance creators,” he said. “So immediately we all were angry about the decision made between UMG and TikTok.” In a recent episode of Today, Explained, digital activist and writer Cory Doctorow told host Sean Rameswaram that companies like TikTok “don’t have to care” about the disruption they cause their users. Doctorow coined the phrase “enshittification,” which he uses to describe a process that digital platforms use to lure customers in, giving them goods or an experience they can’t find elsewhere, only to make it worse for them down the line in order to better serve their business partners. “I think that the calculus that TikTok is making is that they would rather inflict pain on their customers than on their shareholders,” said Doctorow. “So whatever it is that Universal was asking, [TikTok’s] customers could live with that pain, with having the videos that they worked on for hours or days or weeks and put maybe thousands of dollars into suddenly rendered silent because TikTok decided not to step up for their interests.”

Totally disgraceful that UMG decided to pull off their songs from TikTok.

From the 02.09.2024 edition of Vox's Today, Explained:

[clouds-of-wings]

Tried to stay away from the drama all day. Still obsessed over it in my head. My impulse is to write a text about it, because that is usually my impulse, but I did that last time and people didn't give a fuck. No reason why they should, of course. And now that Midjourney crap on top of it, which I hope is somehow not true.

Today I actually thought, for the first time, that social media is such a clusterfuck lately that I don't even have to force myself to stay away because going there is so unpleasant. For different reasons on different sites, but all the same. Will the ongoing enshittification and pointless tribal wars eventually be stronger than whatever addictive dopamine loop has been installed in many of our brains? Maybe this will be the year I find out.

[stevensavage]

No Sympathy For Tech

So as you may have just seen, some insiders at big companies (Zuckerberg, etc.) sold off stock. That tells me the sign that things are slowing down in tech. Well, one of many signs:

Everyone’s all in on AI, which means that there is going to be some shakeout when it doesn’t all work out.

Plenty of sites that are a little unstable, like ol’ Kotaku’s pivot (ha!) to guides.

Whatever embarassments crypto still holds for us.

Venture Capital looking for quick profits (See Ed Zitron’s latest).

This tells me that at some point we’ve got a shakeout in tech. As in something bad - and something earlier than I expected. This isn’t a surprise - for the last six months I’ve seen people make predictions that boil down to some combination of:

A big name takes a hit.

A lot of not-as-big-names fail because of a mix of bad ideas, low ad rates, and so on.

AI doesn’t pan out like people hope.

General enshittification.

VC money moves away fast.

I’ve been trying to puzzle out what’s going to happen myself. But there’s something else I want to address - how people react. See, I think there’s going to be little sympathy, and plenty of schadenfreude when the inevitable “big fall” happens.

People regard tech different than they did ten years ago or twenty years ago. Sure there’s some interesting stuff, but it’s often pricey, questionable, or not much more beyond interesting. Beloved sites are enshittified. Nothing seems new, often because it’s not.

Gone are the days of breathless waiting that felt like there was something worth waiting for. Ads are everywhere, websites are overclogged, products might be fourth-rate knockoffs with AI generated images. New gizmos ape SF concepts while planned obsolescence takes the fun out of the new. Annoying bad features are a joke among social media users.

A friend of mine of well over two decades has noted they feel things were better back when we first met.

So when the “big fall” happens, in whatever forms (I expect a kind of cascade collapse), I think people won’t care and many will enjoy watching things burn. When they do care it’ll be more how they’re personally impacted for obvious reasons - but there’s so much less “loving tech together” these days.

That’s also going to make everything from economic recovery to new products to potential government regulations harder to predict. Watching people fall out of love with tech (and tech has done plenty to shoot itself in the foot) isn’t quite like anything I’ve seen in my life except one thing.

Watching how the reputation of smoking collapsed in my lifetime. No, it’s not exact - tech has benefits smoking’s benefits were mostly social, but still the “feel” is there.

Perhaps that’s something for me to explore later. Just writing the above was exhausting, because so much has changed over the nearly three decades I’ve been in tech. Looking back over half my lifetime feels like several.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com