Cory Doctorow wrote a new book called "Enshitification". I have not read it yet, but I have heard Cory talk on so many podcasts (the CBC one was awesome) that I feel like I do not really need to read the book.
It is indeed happening all around me in tech. Things that I was taking for granted a decade ago are a premium feature or are just not available anymore.
Consider video content. "The Guild" (a YouTube TV Series) launched in 2007 and looked like the future of entertainment. It was available to everyone around the planet, free of charge, free of ads. It had fresh ideas, it was creative, it was fun and witty. All of that is gone now. All of the video content on modern YouTube can be placed in two categories: "Talking heads" and "Refab old video". Sure there is "Midnight Burger" doing an animated video of itself now. But it does not really add anything to the original (brilliant) content. And even what is there, is hidden behind account creation (I still watch YouTube without it and half of the time the videos just do not play asking me to login), swamped by Ads and integrations.
As a result, I find myself going back to the original tech that is still around. I am back on IRC. Talking to real people from all over the world on a #philosophy channel. I started to listen to an AM radio and it is insane how good that radio is. They talk about local issues that actually affect me. They talk about rules changing in my province, they put on recordings of a debate in my local city council. People call the radio and talk about what plagues their thought. And the radio people engage with the listeners on an even footing. It was hilarious listening to a caller blame the unions for everything on Earth (we have a few strikes ongoing) working himself up to blaming the unions for the fall of the ancient Roman Empire. And the radio person engaged with the argument while staying perfectly sane and fair, commenting that the Rome probably did not fall due to the unionization of workers.
I listen to an FM radio ran by students at the local university. It is great. The kind of music they put on, the kind of thoughts they express in between the sets. It is all authentic and so much more real.
Those are available via apps and sites, of course. But there is something extra I am getting from listening to them on a radio.
I am at the cutting edge of the tech as an Engineer. I know and use all the latest tech there is and I actually make it work for real use cases and for the real users. But as a consumer... I am subscribed to
just one paid internet service - the domain name, email handling and hosting of this very site. Oddly enough, nothing out there looks compelling to subscribe to. I got a couple of years of Disney+ subscription
for free as a promotion. I cancelled it even before the years were up - because I watched all the good content that was there and there was nothing good left. There was a lot of soulless crap, but no substance.
I am back to reading paper books as well. The paperbacks of old had annoyingly tiny fonts that are harder on my eyes this days, but I still like them better. I am re-reading Larry Niven's "Integral Trees" again. It is brilliant. It is very well thought through. It does not asks the reader to forgive its glaring mistakes (hello Harry Potter fans) because "it is just fiction" or "the author is only a human".
For a long while the "Cloud" was a good place for me to be. I did not need a powerful PC, I could use the features of someone else's server. The modern AI killed the "Cloud". I can do so much better running models locally - having full control of the system prompt, the temperature and a thousand other parameters I can tune. I tried to use OpenAI's offering - it was very limited and after a few answers sent me into a wait queue to "come back to me tomorrow". I never had this on my local PC.
I am writing this blog post in vim, over an ssh session. I am going to run a Python script to update the HTML files that are going to be served by Nginx running on Ubuntu GNU/Linux. The irony is that I could've wrote the same line 5 years ago, 10 years ago, even 20 years ago - and it would've been true. Where is the new tech? Where are those young thugs that are to wipe us out from the face of Earth? They are none. Yes, this is a quote. A quote from a very-very old song.