The logic of Cory Doctorow's enshittification model applies to government too. #
Both parties view the electorate as sources of money or people who are manipulated by ads and PR bought with the money. #
The wants and needs of people, in both government and social media, have absolutely nothing to do with anything. #
In both cases they work for the benefit of the funders, only. #
It's just a business. And users and voters realize that, but they feel powerless to do anything about it. #
Voters attach to any company or person who sounds like they get it and agree and want to fix it. In politics as in tech there are people who actually do want to fix it. We thought that the web would do that for politics, but the users gravitated to the enshittified spaces. And the developers all acted selfishly and wouldn't work with each other. Now the hope is that with AI tools, individual developers can maintain codebases as big and complicated as the ones maintained by the VC-backed companies. No one talks about this. We should. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)