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.
For anyone who is interested in returning to simple mp3 players, check out the Snowsky range by Fiio.
The Echo Mini and soon to be released Echo Nano are pretty great little pieces that inhabit the offline music (and not your phone) space.
Edit - and Bandcamp or Soulseek to fill the drives up :)
I have some cowon player around here but cannot find it anymore. That old thing supports 128gb via SD card.
What I would like is something modern, small player with a clip and Bluetooth for the buds.
Running could be so awesome but here we are running around with heavy phones. I guess some people use watches like that.