New Crow Time 🐦‍⬛🦊🌟

Things that work in fiction but not real life

This post breaching containment has taught me that a lot of people seem to think they can accurately profile complete strangers. For the record, no the fuck you can't.

Jeff Bezos's Amazon and Elon Musk's SpaceX are both fighting in court to have the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional. Starbuck's and Trader Joe's joined them in separate lawsuits. All of these companies have a disgraceful history of worker abuse and union busting. All of them have been charged by the NLRB with hundreds of violations of workers’ organizing rights The NLRB is standing up to their union busting. That’s why they’re trying to destroy the NLRB. I'm going to do my best to keep you all informed about this case as it snakes its way through the courts. The future of unions may depend on the final verdict. http://dlvr.it/T49LM1

'Means test' is conservative cruelty. Cutting funds, programs, and assistance for the most deserving of care/stability is the religion of the Right. Punch down. Think small. Act small.

“Ghost of the mountain 🏔”

(via)

Chicago the center of everything

Water lilies know the secrets of the swamp By amu.kumo

Don’t Be Evil

Tonight (November 22), I'll be joined by Vass Bednar at the Toronto Metro Reference Library for a talk about my new novel, The Lost Cause, a preapocalyptic tale of hope in the climate emergency.

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Don't Be Evil," a consideration of the forces that led to the Great Enshittening, the dizzying, rapid transformation of formerly useful services went from indispensable to unusable to actively harmful:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

While some services have fallen harder and/or faster, they're all falling. When a whole cohort of services all turn sour in the same way, at the same time, it's obvious that something is happening systemically.

After all, these companies are still being led by the same people. The leaders who presided over a period in which these companies made good and useful services are also presiding over these services' decay. What factors are leading to a pandemic of rapid-onset enshittification?

Recall that enshittification is a three-stage process: first surpluses are allocated to users until they are locked in. Then they are withdrawn and given to business-customers until they are locked in. Then all the value is harvested for the company's shareholders, leaving just enough residual value in the service to keep both end-users and business-customers glued to the platform.

We can think of each step in that enshittification process as the outcome of an argument. At some product planning meeting, one person will propose doing something to materially worsen the service to the company's advantage, and at the expense of end-users or business-customers.

Think of Youtube's decay. Over the past year, Google has:

Then, this week, Google started adding a five-second blanking interval for non-Chrome users who have adblockers installed:

https://www.404media.co/youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/

These all smack of Jenga blocks that different product managers are removing in pursuit of their "key performance indicators" (KPIs):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/