The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
There’s always the in between “ipod-era” setup, which is what I’m trying to transition back to: ripping and collecting media locally, then listening to it on my phone without streaming.
Ha yeah the times of my creatives « something ». It was so easy to manage. Less convenient than Spotify but that was super nice. Though it’s bound that there a plex equivalent for audio that I could look into. Family sharing is one of the functions I would miss going back to the dedicated player.
I use Jellyfin for simplicity, which probably isn’t the most preferred service for music, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re accessing it from your choice of mobile app anyway. You can set it up to stream your music library to your phone anywhere if you want also. (Android Auto even has an app)
I’m not confident enough to open up my media server to the outside world yet because I’m still a noob at this stuff, so I just have my full library when I’m at home and anything I’ve downloaded to my phone while I’m out.
You can even set up family sharing - you just give them a login, and they have access to all the same music.
This is why I love plex. Plexamp makes it so worth it.
On the open to the outside world I bypassed the issue by only allowing vpn into the local network and the particular subnet allowed to vpn users is itself limited to specific resources on our internal network. Removes a lot of headaches but in general I don’t go for the hassle to setup the vpn accounts for rando / acquaintances.
I looked into jellyfin but my first attempt was not the success I hoped it would be hence why I use plex for videos.
Smart idea to use such a solution for audio but it likely comes with limited playlists features and no lyrics ?
Playlists are easy enough so far. It just depends on what app you use to access it, I think. I don’t know if there’s a limit. I’ve never looked into lyrics, but I would assume it doesn’t offer that unless it’s pulled with the metadata or something.