Enshittification
Years ago I worked in printshops. I could do everything from running presses to cutting paper - but my specialty was pre-press. I made the printing plates that went onto a press. At the start of my career pre-press was based entirely on photographic technology with big sheets of film and huge cameras. By the end of my career the photographic tech had been replaced by scanners and Photoshop.
Photoshop is a wonderful program if you are working with images a lot. Mastering it is a bit like learning a language. It is rich and deep. I happened to get engaged with the very first version when I was in art school and watched it evolve over the years. In a way, I watched it rise and fall.
At first Photoshop was free for me - I got to learn to use it as a part of my coursework. Later I used it at work - free for me but the employer paid over $500 for the copy I used. Cheap considering how useful it was. Everyone in the graphics industry used it. Then Photoshop started issuing upgrades every six months or so. The upgrades were pretty trivial by then for such a well working program but they generally involved a file format change. The whole pre-press industry was forced to upgrade to be able to read each other's files. The upgrades weren't cheap. The latest iteration is that Photoshop is now only available by subscription.
I stopped using Photoshop.
It turns out that this process is very common in the tech world. Krugman tells me that there's even a technical term for it - enshittification - coined by Cory Doctorow.
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
Sadly that process of dying can take a very long time.
Computer tech combines enshittification with planned obsolescence. Second Life provides an example. I like the virtual reality as a social medium. I use it for discussions and conversation. I don't really need super graphics. But now I need a fairly high end computer to run it at all even though I don't use those capabilities. And I've seen usage of SL decline steadily.
In a way enshittification is an update of the old drug dealers pitch - the first one is free kid.
I'm old enough to have enjoyed DOS before Microsoft gucked it up with Windows. I once went to a big event in a theatre that launched Windows 95 to replace Windows. Somebody called from the audience "does this mean that we'll be seeing yearly replacements for Win 95. No no the person on the stage said - we wouldn't do anything like that. The thing is that DOS with just a keyboard interface (no mouse) wasn't hard to learn and was quick to use. Back in the day I wanted more memory and speed and we got that only to see the benefit soaked up with graphic goop that made the machine slower to use. And for what? Remember that annoying paperclip thingy that would pop up all the time to "help"?
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.