In other words, they class enshittification as an *ideological* phenomenon, rather than as a *material* phenomenon. Corporate leaders have *always* felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts.

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Those years were the result of *constraints* on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to *act* better than they do today, even if the were not any better:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from *fear*. Fear that a competitor would take away a disgruntled customer or worker.

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Fear that a regulator would punish the company so severely that all gains from cheating would be wiped out. Fear that a rival technology - alternative clients, tracker blockers, third-party mods and plugins - would emerge that permanently severed the company's relationship with their customers.

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Fears that workers in their impossible-to-replace workforce would take a job somewhere else rather than participate in the enshittification of services they worked so hard to build:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

When those constraints melted away - thanks to decades of official tolerance for monopolies, which led to regulatory capture and victory over the tech workforce - the same mediocre sociopaths found themselves able to pursue their most enshittificatory impulses without fear.

5/

The effects of this are all around us. In *This Is Your Phone On Feminism*, the great @mariafarrell describes how audiences at her lectures profess both love for their smartphones *and* mistrust for them. Farrell says, "We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship":

https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/

6/

I (re)discovered this Farrell quote in a paper by Robin Berjon, who recently co-authored a *magnificent* paper with Farrell entitled "We Need to Rewild the Internet":

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

7/

The new Berjon paper is narrower in scope, but still packed with material examples of the way the internet goes wrong and how it can be put right. It's called "The Fiduciary Duties of User Agents":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3827421

In "Fiduciary Duties," Berjon focuses on the technical term "user agent," which is how web browsers are described in formal standards documents.

8/

This notion of a "user agent" is a holdover from a more civilized age, when technologists tried to to build a new digital space where tech served users.

A browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.

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For example, the user agent might judge that you'd like it to block ads. More than half of web users have installed ad-blockers, the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Your user agent might judge that the colors on the page are outside your visual range. Maybe you're colorblind, so the user agent could shift the gamut of the colors away from the colors chosen by the page's creator and into a set that suits you better:

https://dankaminsky.com/dankam/

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Or maybe you (like me) have a low-vision disability that makes low-contrast type difficult to impossible to read, and maybe the page's creator is a thoughtless dolt who's chosen light grey-on-white type, or maybe they've fallen prey to the absurd urban legend that not-quite-black type is somehow more legible than actual black type:

https://uxplanet.org/basicdesign-never-use-pure-black-in-typography-36138a3327a6

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