😈 #236 - Hostility Toward the User
When your frustration is a feature, not a bug.
To exist in modern society requires you to use these devices, or otherwise sacrifice large parts of how you’d interact with other people. You need a laptop or a smartphone for work, for school, for anything really. You need messaging apps otherwise you don’t exist. As a result, there is a societal monopoly of sorts — or perhaps it’s more of a cartel, in the sense that, for the most part, every tech company has accepted these extremely aggressive, anti-user positions, all in pursuit of growth.
This comes from Ed Zitron1, writing on the “rot” economy and the multiplier effect of nearly every company you engage with making their product worse to serve their needs over your own.2
The Rot Economy isn’t simply growth-at-all-costs thinking — it’s a kind-of secular religion, something to believe in, that everything and anything can be more, should be more, must be more, that we are defined only by our pursuit of more growth, and that something that isn’t growing isn’t alive, and is in turn inferior.
Liz Pelly uncovers how Spotify used fake artists and carefully engineered playlists to funnel money away from musicians and back to itself. Drew Gooden points to the rewards for YouTube and Netflix to prioritize longer content invite excessive padding and audience manipulation. Cory Doctorow outlines the tricks played on users of tax filing apps to get them to spend more money, and how a free filing option that finally made it past years of lobbying efforts may have just been deleted by Elon Musk. Joseph Cox tips us off to how apps with advertising may be secretly funneling user location data to third-parties.
While individual actions aren’t going to dramatically reverse these policies and trends, there are some small acts of resistance to limit the way rot impacts your daily life.
Patrick Rhone suggests reframing your relationship to your phone by thinking of it as a tool with a distinct purpose. Joan Westenberg reminds us that pre-digital sharing took much more effort, and that journaling for yourself is an act of curation and thinking out loud (without the advertising and dopamine games). Cal Newport contrasts the experience of two YouTubers to suggest that constant, unsustainable growth isn’t the only path to success on the platform.
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Previously on Inneresting…
In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link, Anna North looked back on Children of Men and her changing relationship to dystopian fiction.
What else is inneresting?
Angela Saini shows a connection between lower birth rates and national governments restricting women’s autonomy in response.
Julien Djoubri on the crumbling American Dream of upward economic mobility, and how we see this move toward isolation and exploitation playing out in the work of David Lynch, innovative video games, and the show Severance.
The average number of shots per point in the 2024 US Open was 3.8. Dan Cullum suggests what we can learn from that.
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
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Post-Credits Scene
Via friend of the newsletter Jessica Quiroga.
See also Cory Doctorow’s writing on Enshittification, which Citron addresses in his blog.