geno complaining it was too dark to see which chips were which
jason & rusty are confused how to play craps (lbr, all of us were)
kappy ruling at roulette
sid & jake helping everyone cheat big style on spin the wheel
kris ‘bitch you’re not really gonna twist on that hand are you?’ letang
But HP is still in business. Apple is still in business. Google is still in business. Microsoft is still in business. IBM is still in business. Facebook is still in business.
We don’t have those controlled burns anymore. Yesterday’s giants tower over all, forming a thick canopy. The internet is “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.”
These tech companies have produced a lot of fire-debt. Over and over, they erupt in flames—in this short decade alone, every one of our tech giants has experienced a privacy scandal that should have permanently disqualified it from continuing to enjoy our patronage (and I do mean every one of them, including the one that spends millions telling you that it’s the pro-privacy alternative to the others).
Privacy is just one way that these firms are enshittifying themselves. There are the ghastly moderation failures, the community betrayals, the frauds and the billions squandered on follies.
We hate these companies. We hate their products. They are always on fire. They can’t help it. It’s the curse of bigness.
Companies cannot unilaterally mediate the lives of hundreds of millions — or even billions — of people, speaking thousands of languages, living in hundreds of countries.
- Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires
Yes the fight is funny, yes my ideal outcome is Mark sends Elon into a coma and then loses all his money via lawsuits or prison or whatever, but listen. This is Not an excuse to make lizard, robot, etc jokes about Mark. He's Jewish. These jokes are anti-semetic and dehumanizing. They would be bad anyway, and they are bad, but especially because the other player in this is Elon Musk, noted antisemite, transphobe, didn't pay Twitter's bills for the whole time he was CEO, all around horrible human being. Joke about it all you want, but don't fall into the trap that Elon wants you to fall into.
Frank Wilhoit described conservativism as “exactly one proposition”:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.This is likewise the project of corporatism. Tech platforms are urgently committed to ensuring that they can do anything they want on their platforms — and they’re even more dedicated to the proposition that you must not do anything they don’t want on their platforms.
They can lock you in. You can’t unlock yourself. Facebook attained network-effects growth by giving its users bots that logged into Myspace on their behalf, scraped the contents of their inboxes for the messages from the friends they left behind, and plunked them in their Facebook inboxes.
Facebook then sued a company that did the same thing to Facebook, who wanted to make it as easy for Facebook users to leave Facebook as it had been to get started there.
Apple reverse-engineered Microsoft’s crown jewels — the Office file-formats that kept users locked to its operating systems — so it could clone them and let users change OSes.
Try to do that today — say, to make a runtime so you can use your iOS apps and media on an Android device or a non-Apple desktop — and Apple will reduce you to radioactive rubble.
- Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires