Friday Funnies: It's a Slippery Slope
All the world's a stage, and Enshittification continues to progress
Enshittification is a pattern where online services and products experience a decline in quality over time. It is observed as platforms transition through several stages: initially offering high-quality services to attract users, then shifting to favor business customers to increase profitability, and finally focusing on maximizing profits for shareholders at the expense of both users and business customers. This process results in a significant deterioration of the user experience. A variety of platforms have been described as examples of this, including Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Netflix, Bandcamp, YouTube, Reddit, Uber, and Unity.
The neologism "enshittification" was coined by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022 to describe this phenomenon. The American Dialect Society recognized the term's relevance and impact by selecting it as its 2023 Word of the Year. Doctorow has also referred to this concept as platform decay, emphasizing the inevitable decline in service quality due to these profit-driven changes.
https://www.malone.news/p/friday-funnies-its-a-slippery-slope
Ottawa Funded the China Ferry Deal—Then Pretended to Oppose It
While Beijing-backed hackers infiltrated Canadian telecoms, federal and B.C. leaders quietly financed a billion-dollar shipbuilding deal with a Chinese state firm—then tried to pass the buck.
https://theoppositionnewsnetwork.substack.com/p/ottawa-funded-the-china-ferry-dealthen
Some of these things I still miss
I grew up without safe spaces.
I grew up without trigger warnings.
I drank water from the hose.
I ate peanuts in class.
None of us wore a helmet.
Kids got hurt. We fell down. And we signed a lot of casts.
We couldn’t pause TV. We’d call out “It’s on!” as soon as the commercials started to end (for those who had left the room). And we watched our favourite shows as a family.
There was no next day delivery.
There was no bundle this with that.
There was no internet. Skip the Dishes didn’t exist.
Fast food was not the norm. It was easier to eat healthy. There were home phones. There was VH.........
