this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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493
‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’ (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 day ago by FoxtrotDeltaTango@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
40 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/56890254

The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”

The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.

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[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 21 points 19 hours ago (9 children)

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

We're at a point where tech companies have given away easy solutions to all of our problems to the point that nobody actually knows how to use the technology that they rely on.

How do people listen to music? Spotify

How do people watch videos? Netflix

How do people talk to your friends? Meta/X/Whatever

All of those services seem like a great deal, they give you things for free/cheap and you never have to take the effort to figure out what a codec is or how to manage your own media. People pay for these services with their privacy, freedom and permanent reliance on tech companies to give them access to technology (and ~~$10/mo~~, ~~$12/mo~~, ~~$13.99/mo~~, ~~$15/mo~~, $20/mo)

These services have created a dependency that they're now exploiting. What does someone do when Netflix raises their prices? Their technological skillset limits them to operating the Play/App Store so all of their other options are similarly bad options offering the same Faustian bargain.

The solution is simple and also difficult: learn to use the technology that you depend on and stop using the services that require you give up your privacy and freedom.

There are entire communities of people who've already made this leap. Look into the Privacy/Self-Hosted/Homelab communities, they are full of people who've rejected the idea that technological services are only available as a product where you have to give up control over your digital life to purchase. The Free and Open Source community is made up of a huge amount of people who volunteer their time to create software that is available for you to use or modify as you'd like.

It isn't easy. Most people have spent the majority of their lives learning to use software created by Microsoft, Google and Apple. They've spent hundreds of hours learning how to use Facebook or iOS and this creates a strong incentive to stay on these services. Learning these things was a waste of time and have become the hook that keeps you stuck in enshittification land.

I know that people don't want to hear 'Well, you just need to learn Linux/Docker/FOSS software', but that's the solution that we have collectively arrived at in this alternate world where we're rejecting commercial software/service providers.

Nobody is coming to save you from this problem, there's isn't going to be a not-enshittified Norwegian Netflix opening up next year for you to subscribe to. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world.

Come and join us.

[–] FiberJungle@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago

As a newbie where do I start? I’m new to Linux but have been playing w a distribution for about a month. I’m having fun but feel in over my head. I’m looking to build a NAS and a separate Jellyfin server. Where should I look for resources? It’s been a long time since over learned anything really new and not having context for a lot of this is hard. I’m excited and having fun but not doing anything well yet.

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