Enshittification 101: More F-lockin-tech

I've used the word "flockintech" a few times now, most of you will have gathered it's a portmanteau word for "F'ing Lock-in Technology," but how many people are aware of just how much flockintech we are actually stuck with already? And this also goes ,for our techie/geeky focus in my blogs, particularly for technology products and software.

I've pointed out the matter of John Deere tractors (and yes they are "technology" because technology is inextricably tied up with almost every machinery technology) and a Polish railway that had to hack a piece of carriage-disabling malware that the carriage manufacturer introduced into the carriages to ensure they had to always be heavily used and regularly "serviced" by the manufacturer, which caused significant downtime for the railway and was eventually fixed by an anonymous hacker group removing the malware from the carriages. 

There's a video platform where people have paid to save videos and as the company founders, are unable to keep the videos they've saved on the platform. There have been several other online properties that sold a permanent product to their customers and then said products became unusable when the company went tits-up and the servers were switched off. 

Got A Fitbit? 

I'll start off, for now, among the first items on this week's "Download This Show" podcast is the Fitbit Update Bricking And upRoar incident I'm choosing to call FUBAR. (Yep. Look FUBAR up if you don't already know what it means and where it came from...) Marc mentions in the podcast that Google are being a bit coy about the update possibly/possibly not causing the fitbits to go from a battery life measurable in days, to a battery life measurable in around 60 minutes. 

I can tell you what I think. Enshittification. That's how you add or subtract features to an existing successful product, and (as the name suggests) turning said product into ka-ka. My newsletter software is a case in point, offered a free-forever low volume product,realised that meant a lot of small bloggers like myself, and at first began adding bloat features I'll never use, and finally, when they realised after a year that we who can't afford it, simply can't afford to go to the Pro version, so they've introduced a "we're turning this server to a Pro server and you'll have to follow this five thousand word guide to move your existing newsletter to another server just for Free tier users." 

I voted with my feet, I have few newsletter users, very little free time to be moving them to another platform or whatever, the newsletter will have to wait. If I had a few donations I could just Pro-ify the existing account again but as I have neither I'll get to it when convenient. 

Back to the Fitbit:- Google bought the company and began integrating it with their own ecosystem, which was fantastic for the fairly basic thing the Fitbit was in its infancy. (They mention this in the podcast.)

They also mention that Google now has a smart watch product of their own that does what the Fitbit does among a host of other features. I'd be enshittifying the hell out of the Fitbit if I was the person marketing the Google Watch which is purpose-designed to work in their ecosystem, and mayber that's what's just happened. Stay tuned to this - will a new update be able to reverse and fix the last update, or will it turn out that the software update overdrove some components that then shorted out and will now the affected Fitbits now be rendered unusable?

Got Windows? 

This has to be my favourite example of enshittification and flockintech ever. Windows 2 - almost no-one knew about. Windows 3 - much the same. But there wasn't an upgrade path. You bought each version. Windows 3.11 (the first one with networking and thus the first natively Internet-capable Windows operating system) I think was the same. 

And it's not like you could afford to keep using W3.11 to this very day. For a start, it's well-known and has well-known exploits. Microsoft started offering some security updates but of course support stopped because they wanted us to buy the next great OS from them. For a another, the hardware it ran on is hard to get. (Although I have to note that just recently, a job opening for a Windows 3.11 Administrator has become one of the most rarified jobs in IT, and probably the last workplace to use this version of Windows which would by now be over twenty years old, and replaced by Windows 95 in 1995.)

There have been 27 versions of Windows since W95, some upgrades, some for different tasks (server vs workstation etc) with 14 just being upgrades of W10. Until W10, you bought each new version of Windows as it cam out. W10 offered free installation to owners of approved older operating systems, so not quite as much money was made on W10, and some enshittification resulted, where things were added to W10 to allow exfiltration of the "owner's" usage data, and a whole lot more details. 

W11 has been described as a "Spy in a trenchcoat" it exfiltrates so much user data. Losing so much of my personal information constitutes enshittification to me. 

Also, even if you own one of the earlier Windows versions and are still happy with it, Microsoft tries to lock you into their upgrade cycle by ending update support for the old version. You may say "Big ****ing deal" to that but Internet security is one of the things that you'll no longer get updates for. And the older an operating system, the more vulnerabilities are found, even after Microsoft stops patching. Due to the fact that while you notionally "own" that version of Windows, you have no access to the code, so you can't fix new vulnerabilities yourself. So in that sense you're either locked-in to their versions cycle, or locked-in to being hacked within five minutes of putting your new re-installation of your OS online. 

EverNote

I've had an account on Evernote since before forever or even further back. The free account was fine for me, I didn't turn that much traffic or quantity on the servers, I used it well within the usage limits for a free account. I only used it to keep blogging notes current between my laptop, my PC, and my phone. Not long after I got it working for me the way I needed, They reduced the number of devices I could use it on. No longer useful. And the other day I wanted to download my notes for historic reasons, and I have to install the PC app just to make an archive. I will. But then Evernote will see one less user for their enshittification, lock-in, and general bait-and-switch tactics.

I'm just listening to another enshittified product:

TED Talks Daily

This one isn't flockintech but definitely enshittified. I've been listening to the 'cast for ages, and ads. And I cast them to the TV when in the lounge because it feels more natural to me to listen to stuff on speakers while working. (As I'm doing right now, listening to a TED  Talk on climate technologiews that are worth supporting.)

Ads. TV and radio have long been legislated into keeping the audio and colour saturation levels down to normal levels. The audio level of a commercial must be the same as the program material, preventing those SHOUTY!!! ads on TV that used to shake the house in an effort to get your attention. 

Apparently, there's no such restraint placed on TED Talks Daily. While my wife's unwell, she needs bed rest. It's all the way at the other end of the house from the loungeroom, but in order to hear the program 3-4metres away from the screen, I need a certain volume level. 

That level is inaudible in the bedroom, but the ads on the podcast are loud enough to wake a person in the bedroom. So in a way TTD has locked me into earhpones or earbuds. 

Others?

I said earlier that I'll go back and find a few more of the thousands of great technologies that gradually enshittified and locked-in their users bit by bit to the point of killing their business, and I will. I suggest you bookmark this page and come back to it in a few weeks. Also maybe share it, and maybe make a small donation to help me keep things online, maybe afford a better newsletter provider, and pay for the subscriptions I keep so I can keep up with the news I post here. 

Supermarkets Are Overflowing - multiple updates!

- with profits! Profits! Glorious profits! Money! YOUR money! The only difference between supermarkets and Uncle Scrooge McDuck is that Scrooge has a pang of conscience at the end of each episode and stops some of his exploitative behaviours..
 .

Lookit these updates! These are only selected updates that come to me via newsletters I'm subscribed to, not that I've searched for. (BTW at Teds News Stand there's a link to subscribe to my newsletter, hint hint...)

8 April 2024 Update: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/2024/04/08/supermarket-review-recommendations Some of my ideas are being applied - significant fines based on the egregiousness of their thievery.

20 March 2024 Update: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2024/03/19/divestiture-greens-supermarkets Finally the Nuclear option unleashed. Break the b*st*rds up and break their grip. 

EVEN MORE UPDATE: Four Corners: these supermarkets are the gift that keeps on giving - if you wanted material to string them up by the privates, at any rate. The CEO of Wo - that one supermarket - walks out of his Four Corners interview because he heaped shit on a professional in the industry, and wasn't allowed to ask to have that bit edited out. Oh and then a few days later he conveniently resigns. 

(Probably to get his golden handshake before he was pushed, but. And even though he claims it was planned all along, Wo - that place - obviously were NOT expecting him to resign because they're now scrambling because they had no succession plan. Sucks to be an incompetent money-pilfering slug...)

And the CEO of Co - the other place - adjusts their lipstick to "incandescent" setting, and bald-faced declares that they're not actually on a rocket ride of profits. How can you tell a ColesWorths CEO is lying? They just are. Always.  

UPDATE 14/Mar/2024: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/03/13/supermarket-woolworths-coles-theft how the supermarkets are reacting to desperate people who resort to shoplifting to pay for supermakets' price gouging. I wonder how long this will last? 

AND ANOTHER UPDATE!: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2024/02/11/coles-woolworths-senate-inquiry

UPDATED AGAIN AGAIN: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/01/30/supermarkets-government-profits This is becoming the spectacle of the decade!

UPDATED AGAIN: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2024/02/06/price-gouging-report 

UPDATED: There may be some activity afoot. (https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/01/16/grocery-prices-inquiry) I asked in this older article whether the probe will have teeth, i.e. will it be able to actually compel the corporations that own the thieving supermarkets to act with humanity, and this update seems to suggest that the probe will get teeth. Unfortunately, legal action in a year is still a little bit too late for people already doing it hard...

You may know the back-story to this - over a year ago, meat producers (farmers, basically) got bent over and shafted, as the prices of meat were wound back by large amounts. I imagine this reduced their ability to purchase things, and because some fairly large communities' fortunes rise and fall in time with the primary producers, that starts to be a bit of a large number of people who suddenly have fewer dollars, while simultaneously their costs went up as supermarkets raised prices. 

It's all very well to say "but they live in a farming district, they can get their meat / vegetables locally at farm prices" but you lose sight of a few factors there.

• The farmers will need to make a profit on their unsold meat animals. 
• Most people in farming communities lack the skills to butcher and dress meat
• The butchers in those communities need to make money too.
• If the community is centered on meat, then vegetables and cereal products are still at the mercy of the supermarkets.
• Vice-a-versa in the case of growing districts. In their case, they need someone to process the grain and produce goods from it. The supermarkets again.And they're at the mercy for anything related to meat.
• Vegetable (market garden) regions are probably best off in one sense, but also their market gardeners need to make money so prices will go up when the prices they get from supermarket buyers goes down.
• On top of that many farmers/growers have draconian contracts with the supermarkets that prohibit them from sell surplus to third parties, many many many penalty clauses, and so there are a lot of things they can't do even if they wanted to... It sucks.

There's unfortunately not much that many people can do about that - "food deserts" are engineered into local planning by design, making it hard to get anything but fast food or some supermarket foods. It means the fast food places and the supermarkets have a huge customer base that doesn't have any alternatives.

It's also down to some selectivity by sellers, of course. You'll find upmarket grocers and butchers and bakeries in upmarket suburbs, because there, they will get the prices they need in order to stay profitable. Same with farmer's markets etc - if they're set up in a suburb that has two McDonalds, two KFCs, a Hungry Jacks, and four chicken fast food places, they don't do well.

Jaks Sisko in Star Trek focuses this problem perfectly - he cooks his own meals because he considers them superior to the replicator-generated meals - but where does he get his ingredients? Wouldn't that also be from the replicator? 

So people shop at supermarkets where the growers and suppliers have been stretched to the limit to supply nutritious food but - under that kind of financial stress, they can't afford to do all the things that would be needed to make the food truly nutritious. That kind of farming requires far more land, land that can be regeneratively and ecologically soundly managed, and even then the soil will lack some of the nutritional components needed to make the produce truly nutrition-packed.

Even if you go to farm gate stores, they're still in the same situation, so whether they sell it to the supermarkets or to you direct, it's still no longer what it was. The world population is showing the effects of slow nutrition deprivement. 

But the story I'm showing revolves more about the sheer extortion supermarkets are engaging in at the moment. They've always found ways to extract more dollars from a given kilo of produce, but now they're just going "fuck it," and charging extortionate prices. 

I can think of one way to end that, but it's not pretty. We could also end it by boycotting those supermarkets for a month or two, but as mentioned, that isn't an option for anyone wanting to feed a family unless they have their own homestead or farm, or access to farmer's markets and farm gate stores. 

The other way is for farmers to void their contracts with the supermarkets and only sell direct to the public or to independent grocers and stores. And they can't afford to do that because of the logistics involved. 

Also, automated local vertical farms can produce many of the vegetables and fruits within their local suburbs, but this is a) unlikely to be profitable for the first five years or so until it starts hurting the big supermarkets and people get used to them and b) - come on! This would be like living in a colony ship or a colony on another planet with carefully-maintained agriculture and a limited range of produce, and this is supposed to be our home. 

But there's also the other way - write to your local Members, to the ministers responsible for finance and food security and anti-competitive practices by corporations and let them all know that you'd like them to use their powers to fix this piracy. Start petitions or sign them, have meetings with others in your suburb, decide on some action before food becomes unaffordable to you, too. And trust me, it can easily happen. 

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Okay, we're "down here." What's going on? My wife is facing a life/death medical issue and I'm spending as much time as possible with her, caring, being there. 

That does mean that I'm not doing as much writing, which means fewer posts, fewer announcements on social media, fewer people's eyes being directed to the blog suite. You can help me out though - share this article, follow the (newspaper icon) link to the News Stand and share that on your social media too. This should bring a few more readers, and with luck, a snowballing effect.

You can also help immensely by making a donation, either one-off or periodically, as that will allow me to pay online / running costs rather than taking away what little income we have.