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abuddyforeveryseason · 16 days

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Don't look, Marion! It's the Buddy for April 12th! It's a gif! It's beautiful...

Today's Buddy was based on that famous scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the bane of VCR rewind buttons everywhere, where the bad guy's face melts off.

That must've been a fun special effect to pull off. And I know I say a lot of movies are the best movie of all times, but, seriously, Raiders is the best movie of all times, right?

Spielberg and Lucas wanted to make a James Bond movie, but they were chased off into the sunset, so they decided to make their own version - a much cooler adventurer, not tied to those british spy novels and silly penguin suits.

A lot of people say a movie like the Indiana Jones series couldn't be made today. I mean, not another Indiana Jones movie, there's probably another sequel on the way. But giving a guy the equivalent of 1981's 20 million bucks to make an original movie, not based on IP, just an idea the dude had.

I don't know about that - after all, Rebel Moon just came out, and that movie shares a similar background to Raiders - famous director wanting to make a movie that's part of a famous franchise, gets rejected, makes his own edgier and pulpier version.

Sure, it sucked, but, still, it got done.

I don't really agree with a lot of the public discourse about modern movies. Probably because I'm very optimistic about popular movies. People complain about franchises and IP, but, I don't think it's a bad thing. Or at least, not necessarily a bad thing.

A good example is the best movie of all times, Eternals. It's a Marvel movie, yeah. But it's about obscure characters, and it allowed a auteur director to make an actual big-budget movie for a chance, something she'd never have a chance to do without Marvel's help. And it's an interesting story - the original comics were an interesting story too, despite their clumsy flaws.

Yet, everybody hated it. Especially people who never heard about those nobodies before - they were the ones complaining about the lack of new ideas in Hollywood. So that was the beginning of the end for Marvel.

I still think a lot of the criticism wasn't about the movie itself, but about Zhao choosing to "sell out" and make a sci fi movie, and a Marvel one at that.

Thankfully, it'll never happen again.

But, I don't know if we'll get a movie as good as Raiders again. It's a different world. And, I don't know, in a way, we don't need it. Kids can just watch Raiders instead of some director having to reinvent the wheel for a new generation. I don't get why every era needs to have its Star Wars, anyway. I mean, I do get it, it's because there's money in making new movies, even if they're just rehashes.

I read something online about the dangers of nostalgia, of people being obsessed with their youth. It ends up making their bitter towards the present day, it turns toxic. And it's easy to exploit - just keep shoveling out remakes, reboots, adaptations of the crap they loved when they were kids, and they'll keep buying. Suckers.

There are people like that (and a lot of them), yeah, but there are different issues to consider, too. One idea that a lot of people agree with is, a person's never too old to enjoy kids' stuff. We keep getting angry about adults enjoying cartoons, but, what's the harm, really? And yet, that can turn toxic too - a lot of douchebag complaining about "wokeness" in cartoons is the dark reflection of a refusal to grow up. As is the creepy obsession with sexualizing kids' cartoons.

Sometimes, it's better to accept that you're too old to enjoy something that wasn't made for you. It's better than to force it into that slot. Let the kids have their thing.

Despite all that, though, I still like some kiddy stuff, although I appreciate it in different levels. And I did like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Old Indiana Jones was fun, it felt almost like a movie version of Mr. Mustachio from Osamu Tezuka stories.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months

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Enshitternet

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

This week on my podcast, I read "Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet," my recent Medium column about building a better internet:

https://doctorow.medium.com/enshitternet-c1d4252e5c6b

As John @hodgman is fond of reminding us, "nostalgia is a toxic impulse." It is easy for an old net.hand like me to fall into the trap of shaking his fist at the cloud. Having been on the other side of that dynamic, I can tell you it's no fun.

When I got on BBSes in the early 1980s, there was an omnipresent chorus of grumps insisting that the move from honest acoustic couplers to decadent modems was the end of the Golden Age of telecommunications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

When I got on Usenet shortly thereafter, the Unix Greybeard set never passed up an opportunity to tell us newcomers that the Fidonet-Usenet bridge allowed the barbarian hordes to overwhelm their Athenian marketplace of ideas:

https://technicshistory.com/2020/06/25/the-era-of-fragmentation-part-4-the-anarchists/

When I joined The WELL in the late 1980s, I was repeatedly assured that the good times were over, and that we would never see their like again:

https://www.well.com/

Now that I'm 52, I've learned to recognize this dynamic, from the Eternal September:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

to the moral panic over menuing systems replacing CLIs:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses

to the culture wars over what would happen when the net got a normie-friendly GUI:

https://www.dejavu.org/1993win.htm

And yeah, I've done it too, explaining "Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)":

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

But there's a key difference between my own warnings about the enshittification that new "user friendly" technologies would engender and all those other AARP members' complaints: they were wrong, and I was right.

As Tom Eastman reminded us, the internet really was better, back before it became "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text of the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

The underlying pathology of that enshittification wasn't the UI, or whether it involved an app store. As the Luddites knew, the important thing about a technology isn't what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The problem wasn't which technology we used. There is nothing inherent about touchscreens that makes them into prisons that trap users, rather than walled gardens that protect them.

Likewise, the problem wasn't who made that technology. We didn't swap wise UUCP Monks for venal tech bros. The early tech world was full of public-spirited sysops, but it was also full of would-be monopolists who tried – and failed – to get us to "stop talking to each other and start buying things":

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

If it wasn't the technology that killed the old, good internet, and if it wasn't the people who killed the old, good internet, where did the enshitternet come from?

It wasn't the wrong tech, it wasn't the wrong people: it was the wrong rules. After all, the Apple ][+ went on sale the year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail. Consumer tech was the first industry born after antitrust was dismantled, and it created the modern monopoly playbook: buying and merging with competitors. The resulting unity of purpose and anticompetitive profit margins allowed tech to capture its regulators and secure favorable court and legislative outcomes.

The simultaneous drawdown of antitrust enforcement and growth of tech meant that tech's long-standing cycle of renewal was ended. Tech companies that owed their existence to their ability to reverse-engineer incumbent companies' products and make interoperable replacements and add-ons were able to ban anyone else from doing unto them as they did unto the giants that came before them:

https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980

The pirates became admirals, and set about creating a "felony contempt of business model":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/painful-burning-dribble/#law-of-intended-consequences

They changed the rules to ensure that they could "disrupt" anyone they chose, but could themselves mobilize the full might of the US government to prevent anyone from disrupting them:

https://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

The old, good internet was the internet we we able to make while tech was still realizing the new anticompetitive powers it had at its disposal, and it disappeared because every administration, R and D, from Reagan to Trump, yanked more and more Jenga blocks out of the antitrust tower.

In other words: the old, good internet was always doomed, because it was being frantically built in an ever-contracting zone of freedom to tinker, where technologies could be operated by and for the people who used them.

Today, the Biden administration has ushered in a new era of antitrust renewal, planting the seeds of a disenshittification movement that will tame corporate power rather than nurturing it:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

In other words, we are living in the first days of a better nation.

In other words, rather than restoring the old, good internet, we should build a new, good internet.

What is a new, good internet? It's an internet where it's legal to:

reverse-engineer the products and services you use, to add interoperability to them so you can leave a social network without leaving your friends:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

jailbreak devices to remove antifeatures, like surveillance, ink-locking, or repair-blocking:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/17/have-you-tried-not-spying/#coppa

move your media files and apps from any platform to any device or service, even if the company that sold them to you objects:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

A new, good internet gives powers to users, and takes power away from corporations:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

On a new, good internet, companies can't practice algorithmic wage discrimination:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

They can't turn search into an auction between companies that match your query and companies that want to sell you fakes and knockoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

They can't charge rent to the people whose feeds you asked to read for the privilege of reaching you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In fact, a new, good internet is one where we euthanize rentiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

On the new good internet, your boss can't use bossware to turn "work from home" into "live at work":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

And on top of that, you have the right to hack that bossware to undetectably disable it (and hackers have the right to sell or give you that hack):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

On the new, good internet, we stop pretending that tech is stealing content from news companies, and focus on how tech steals money from the news, with app taxes, rigged ad markets, surveillance ads, and payola:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The new, good internet is an internet where we seize the means of computation. It's an internet operated by and for the people who use it.

Hodgman is right. Nostalgia is a toxic impulse. The point of making a new, good internet isn't to revive the old, good internet. There were plenty of problems with the old, good internet. The point is to make a new, good internet that is the worthy successor to the old, good internet – and to consign the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, an unfortunate transitional stage between one good internet and another.

Here's a link to the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/08/21/enshitternet-the-old-good-internet-deserves-a-new-good-internet/

and here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_448/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_448_-_Enshitternet.mp3

and here's a link to my podcast's RSS feed:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/22/the-new-good-internet/#the-old-good-internet

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#podcasts #mp3s #enshittification #nostalgia #nostalgia is a toxic impulse #spoken word #the old good internet #the new good internet

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