the coming de-enshittification boom
25 May 2025
the coming de-enshittification boom
I was going to call this how to prosper in the<br>coming de-enshittification boom but I’m still trying to figure that<br>out.
David Gerard has a pretty good summary of today’s Internet business<br>situation, in In<br>2025, venture capital can’t pretend everything is fine any more.<br>This year, the investors are all-in on AI. Crypto’s still dead,<br>quantum isn’t taking off—AI’s the last game in the casino. And the<br>Big AI companies are having trouble making anything useful even<br>for stuff like customer support where corporate decision-makers are<br>already willing to tolerate low quality. So far, generative AI does<br>have two winning use cases: slop and scams. Widely available generative<br>AI tools are able to generate content that’s similar enough to real<br>content to be plausible, but different enough that it can beat the<br>algorithms used for detecting infringement and fraud. The AI/crime mess<br>is most obvious at the Big Tech companies.
Meta<br>Battles an ‘Epidemic of Scams’ as Criminals Flood Instagram and<br>Facebook by Jeff Horwitz and Angel Au-Yeung at The Wall Street<br>Journal
Google Ads<br>Shitshow Report 2024 (You can almost stop reading this report at the<br>release date. A report on the crime level of Google ads that got<br>released on the same day as huge antitrust news isn’t going to be<br>good.)
And it’s not just those companies. Sometimes it looks like we’re in a<br>doom spiral of fake<br>research, bogus<br>articles and legal briefs, auto-generated<br>accessibility problems, AI<br>slop in educational apps and<br>even classrooms, and, worst of all, as Asma Derja covers in The<br>Weakest Link in AI, an enforcement of Big Tech points of view.<br>Before AI can understand the world, someone has to tell it<br>what the world means….Labelers in Kenya, the Philippines, and Venezuela<br>are handed instruction sets written in California, reviewed in Dublin,<br>and told to mark what counts as toxic, hateful, threatening, or real.<br>They don’t decide. They execute. Rands<br>writes, I am deeply suspicious of AI, especially after watching<br>decades of social networks monetize our attention while teaching us to<br>ignore facts and truth, minimizing our desire to understand….AI does an<br>incredible job of confidently sounding like it knows what it’s talking<br>about, so it’s easy to imagine what it will do in the hands of those who<br>want to manipulate you.
Soatok writes, in Tech<br>Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI. What<br>concerns me about AI has very little to do with the technology in and of<br>itself. I’m concerned about the kind of antisocial behaviors that AI<br>will enable. The tech oligopoly is even more out of touch now than<br>IBM or Microsoft ever got during their peak days. Big Tech companies<br>have enough power to get away with being mean and dishonest and<br>half-assing things. Most people don’t. The result is that the<br>technologies that Big Tech builds, with the assumption that a certain<br>level of meanness, dishonesty, and half-assing are acceptable, are less<br>and less relevant to more and more people.
Maybe we’re not in a doom spiral after all? What if we’re back to<br>something more like the dismal Microsoft monopoly from which came the<br>Internet and free software boom of the 1990s? The green shoots of<br>de-enshittification are popping up in lots of places once you start to<br>look for them. Here’s a de-enshittification sighting in a toot from<br>Hugo-award-winning author Charles Stross explaining his switch from<br>Microsoft Office 356 to LibreOffice:
CoPilot in Office would open me up to accusations of breach of<br>contract—my book contracts warrant that they’re all my own work: CoPilot<br>brings that into question.
Generative AI slop has real consequences for authors<br>because of reputation risks and contract terms. A Big Tech company’s AI<br>service can output copyright-infringing slop for a user—what are they<br>going to do about it? An individual author can’t turn in<br>copyright-infringing slop to a big publishing company.
More sightings…
12 years of Ghost by John<br>O’Nolan. As ever, we’re competing with prominent, VC-funded platforms<br>with tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of employees, playing<br>zero-sum games to try and control the entire media industry. Now,<br>though, it feels like there’s more appetite than ever for something<br>different.
What<br>makes a tech gadget calm? This certification firm has an 81-point<br>checklist by Scharon Harding. Currently, six products are Calm<br>Tech-certified
How to<br>Improve Your Site’s Typography by Scott Knight. (More people are<br>making personal web sites again.)
Just a QR<br>Code by Gabriel M. Schuyler You type something, it makes a QR<br>code. You can also set the size, error correction, and colors. And<br>that’s it. Just a QR code.
Slop, surveillance, and extreme right politics are all part of the<br>same big movement, so...