this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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511
‘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
44 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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[–] ianonavy@lemmy.world 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

What you are describing is basically a worker co-op: workers decide collectively how to distribute or reinvest retained earnings and plan for down years, and there’s no rich guy who owns the company and needs it to keep growing their wealth, so there’s no one with the power and incentive to direct everyone to screw over the customers. These exist today but have a hard time scaling in capital-intensive industries like global streaming where you have to pay the thousands of laborers who work to produce the content.

The problem is that private capital is always going to want something back; equity means ceding control, and debt at commercial rates means the repayment pressure recreates the same growth imperative you were trying to escape. This is essentially the socialist critique of capitalism. One of the more interesting socialist answers to the scaling problem is public investment banks, which can capitalize co-ops at patient rates without taking equity.

[–] RblScmNerfHerder@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Someone else mentioned Public Benefit Corporations. Thoughts?

[–] ianonavy@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

A PBC still has outside equity owners who need returns and have voting power. The designation gives the board permission to weigh stakeholder interests to avoid lawsuit, but: 1) it doesn’t change what the investors who funded the company actually need from it, and 2) it doesn’t change the fact that those investors own the equity and can replace the board if they’re unhappy.

As the other person mentioned, the problem with our current system capitalism is they still need to know someone “with tens of millions of dollars to burn.” Someone who, once they own a controlling interest, can just replace the board with people who prioritize returns. If we lived under socialism, those tens of millions of dollars would just come from the state as a low-interest loan that doesn’t confer control.

[–] RblScmNerfHerder@lemmy.world 1 points 21 minutes ago

Thanks for the info!