Things that made me think: Enshittification, apathy, and discrimination

By Tom Renner

- 3 minutes read - 517 words

This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked.

The rise of Whatever - eevee

This is probably the best post about LLMs I’ve read, which is probably why I’m the millionth person to share it. It really sums up my emotional reaction to their meteoric rise: “ew”, basically.

The power of the argument is that it identifies a theme that runs through recent tech changes, of which LLMs are just the latest and greatest example: the lack of care for quality, and the realisation from Big Tech that consumers mostly are fine with mediocre output.

From this realisation flows AI slop, product enshittification, clickbait, and so on, until eventually all the joy is sucked out of the beautiful, wonderful, thing that used to be the internet.

So, please, fight against the rising tide. Take control of your consumption: subscribe to RSS feeds, pay creators whose work you appreciate, build your own site. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Social Inequality in High Tech: How Gender, Race, and Ethnicity Structure the World’s Most Powerful Industry - Megan Tobias Neely, Patrick Sheehan and Christine L. Williams

This review article lays out very clearly how the tech industry maintains structural barriers to diversity, even in the face of high-profile DEI initiatives and targets. By grouping asian and white men together, it really highlighted to me how poorly people from other backgrounds are represented. And when I think about my own company’s software team diversity, taking into consideration that asian men are also a privileged group in this sphere, it makes me realise that we have a lot more work to do.

I also had never previously joined the dots to understand that the high turnover that is characteristic of our industry (two-year tenures being normal here) has a counter-diversity effect – people from more insecure backgrounds do not have the cushion to deal with layoffs, VC startups crashing, etc., and are disproportionately affected by this instability.

But probably the biggest eye-opener for me was the regressive effect of referral schemes, which are ubiquitous in my experience. I suppose it should be obvious that white men recommend other white men, but somehow I’d not made that connection myself. Now I wonder how my HR team will take it if I try to get them to reconsider this programme…

Understood: Who broke the internet? - CBC, Cory Doctorow

A four-part podcast series naming and shaming the specific people Doctorow blames for the enshittification of the internet. Apart from being an excellent potted history of bad policy, negative effects of unregulated market forces, and greed, I find Doctorow’s approach of holding individuals accountable, rather than corporations, a powerful framing.

It’s a reminder that we are responsible for what we build and the structures we enable, and shouldn’t just shrug off our moral obligations in return for salary. And it made me think: that’s something Google used to emphasize - “Don’t be evil” was basically saying this directly. Shame they dropped that motto I guess.