Fiona’s Reviews > Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It > Status Update

I do love the occasional shot fired. "But the reason Apple’s board picked Cook to replace cofounder Steve Jobs after he juice-cleansed his way into an early cancer death wasn’t Cook’s sunny disposition."

Either we make the platforms more powerful in hopes that they’ll use that power to fix the problems they’ve created, or we make the platforms less powerful so that the people they’ve failed can escape from them. We can’t do both. [...] The problem with the platforms isn’t that they abuse their immense power. It’s that they have that immense power.

"This is why every company is so sweatily insistent that you use its app rather than its website. An app is a website wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to install an ad blocker or any other modification that makes the product work better for you at the expense of the company’s shareholders."

Sometimes his writing confuses me. "Criti-hype is still hype. By credulously amplifying Meta’s and Google’s cod-psychology claims to have finally perfected mind control by computerizing warmed-over Skinnerian behavior modification techniques (many of which are caught up in the replication crisis that has rocked psychology), we help them sell ads to dopey executives."

"(The more you search, the more ads Google can show you and the more money it makes.) That plan is shrouded in a lot of business-speak, but it cashes out to this: by making search results worse, Google could force us to run multiple queries before we got the information we were seeking, and make more money by showing us more ads with every search-results page."