There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer). But the Trump tariffs change all that. The old bargain – put your own tech sector in chains, expose your people to our plunder of their data and cash, and in return, the US won’t tariff your exports – is dead.
This means digital rights activists who’ve been trying to get rid of the “anti-circumvention” laws have a new potential ally: investors and technologists who’d like to make a hell of a lot of money raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable companies the world has seen.
There are many reasons, but I disagree on this one. Most of the existing tech in cloud infrastructure, protocols, social media apps etc. is built on the shoulders of open source software components and operating systems along with interfaces and APIs the US conglomerates themselves have opened to speed up adoption. This of course does not include the surveillance and ad network components, but we don’t want those anyway.
Some more valid reasons in my opinion:
Lock-In effect in general: If your friends, neighbors, even governments all use product x (i.e. Whatsapp) and expect you to use those too in order to communicate with them It is very difficult to switch to something else because the people you want to talk to have to be convinced one by one to give it a try. (it’s possible, just very hard to do)
Lock-in effect in business: High costs of switching to other products, sunk cost fallacy etc.
US Tech for decades gave away their products “for free” misleading customers into thinking that this should be the norm. People understand when something doesn’t cost money but they still don’t understand that they are paying with their data and ultimately with their freedom and well-being. Alternative products and infrastructures cost money. People need to eat. If you don’t take the dirty road of advertising and selling surveillance data there is no way around that fact. At least when we’re talking about products at scale.
On the plus side of this: there is nothing that stops enthusiasts like us from setting up self-hosted projects and providing services to a community. And just like the home computing enthusiasts in the 1980s paved the way for tech we use today, every new movement starts small with a bunch of nerds, aka “early adopters”.
There are plenty more reasons why this is hard and plenty more reasons why we should do it anyway. But I’m on my first coffee so I’ll stop here.
You raise some very interesting points. Not trying to argue, but I’d like to share some thoughts I had in response.
The surveillance and ad networks are products of the same ecosystem as any other digital technology. Short of regulating them out of existence, I don’t know how you can’t distinguish between the two with a disposition like ”we want one but not the other.” Telemetry is core to iterative development, and it only becomes “surveillance” when you use it a certain kind of way. Content delivery is no different in how a specialized use case, barely a specialized implementation, can produce an “advertising network.”
Lock-in at platform, ecosystem, and hardware levels is also the easiest path forward many times, from a development perspective. Short of having a bolstering engineer culture that spends time prioritizing quality over capital, how do you incentivize companies to wait for standards to be developed and adopted before they engineer their products? How do incentive them to redesign legacy code such that it uses open standards? How do you tell the difference between priority disparity and intentional ecosystem management for the purpose of lock-in?
“You are the product” is right on the money, and it’s astounding that culturally we know, but most of us don’t seem to care enough. To change that, I think people need to start making better arguments for why “being the product” is bad. Arguments that the average person can relate to. It might help if people understood that a platform that didn’t crowdsource engagement probably wouldn’t have a fraction of the success as the tech giants we see today. This is reminiscent of the feudalist era — they own the land where market + public discourse occurs; they draw influence and power from that relationship.
Well, I live in the EU and I still have hope that there will be sufficient regulation to prevent the worst when it comes to privacy issues. There already is a lot of protection in place compared to the US (I know, recent developments point in the opposite direction, but the EU at least has some vocal privacy advocates which do their job well) Also I think there are not so subtle differences between recording telemetry (e.g. with anonymized user stats) and spying on users and selling all the data to the highest bidder.
But you are absolutely right that a working business model that is fair to the user, affordable and open still needs to be found. What we can see is that the US model is not sustainable. My prediction is that the tech conglomerates will enshittify themselves out of business in the long run. Because the competition does not need to improve much when the big player’s products get significantly worse over time. The competition can just sit there and wait until those big tech products become so unattractive to users that there is a real incentive to switch to an alternative. This effect can be observed when looking at Windows vs. Linux for example. While Linux has been pretty stable and easy to use for years now, Microsoft makes the Windows experience worse on an almost weekly basis, and now you need to use command line scripting to fix the worst things. Which is ironic, because it used to be exactly the opposite, Linux was the OS where you had to tinker on the command line to make it work. But these days are long gone. And as Microsoft doubles down in shitting on their customers with restrictions, ads and forced AI everywhere, millions of people feel compelled to stay on Windows 10 and wait how the situation develops or try something else. Windows was always disliked or seen as a necessary evil, but this time they might have gone too far.
Oh and about your last paragraph… people in the US are now beginning to learn the hard way why being the product is bad. When big tech is in bed with a fascist government and provides all the surveillance data which is suddenly being used against “ordinary people who have nothing to hide” it becomes pretty clear why being the product is a very very bad idea. Just takes a while to make the connection I suppose.
One way to combat this is with bridging / interoperability that allow for partial transitioning. This obviously isn’t applicable to many, many things. But a chat program (e.g. Whatsapp) is actually an example where it is applicable.
Good point… I found that apart from technical interoperability it often works pretty well if you explain to your friends that your alternative (signal,Matrix, whatever…) is just that. An alternative which is always good to have just in case. Don’t try to force them to uninstall WhatsApp, even if this would obviously be the best choice. Instead encourage them to try the alternative and keep WhatsApp in case they don’t like it. Test it with them. In practice this often means they find out that it works just as well and does not hurt to have on the device. Even if they don’t use it actively yet, the next time someone asks them if they have Signal (or whatever) they will be happy to say that they already have it. Patience is key.