I disagree with almost all of this. I'm 75 years old with a couple of EE degrees and first got paid to write software in 1967. I've spent a long and lucrative career at the border of hardware and software.
Even though I'm also a recent widower, having lost my wife (and CPA) of over 40 years in 2023, I'm amazingly upbeat. It helps that for almost 40 years I no longer drink alcohol or do drugs. Pro tip: do NOT watch any broadcast or cable TV "news." Read things instead, across a broad spectrum of views.
The performance to price ratio of computer technology has undergone something like a million to one transformation over the last 30-40 years. If you managed to get a slower computer for more money something is very wrong. Personally I'm enjoying dirt cheap off lease systems (mostly Dell) with extremely good performance - especially for the money.
And... I'm using a 43" 4K (UHD) TV that cost well under $250 as a monitor. That's mind blowing as is the price for 4K TVs in general.
I should probably mention that I use Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android after having used dozens of systems over my career (which predates the existence of UNIX!). What do I prefer? Windows hands down for desktop and iOS for mobile phones. [I've had cell phones since 1986.]
As for SpaceX - I am shocked if you don't understand how they are already at 1/100 the price to get mass to orbit and will be less than 1/1000 compared to most options when the BFR finally is flying. Good grief, it's only been TWO launch attempts and looking quite good for the third one. "Failure is not an option." is why SLS costs more per launch attempt than SpaceX has spent in its entire existence. Meanwhile it took SpaceX to get the US away from having to use Russian rockets to get to the space station. Not to mention over 200 successful landings of Falcon 9 boosters.
Starlink is nothing less than revolutionary.
As for Mr. bad boy's other main ventures, yeah, he is a seriously socially challenged person (as was Mr. Jobs) but to actually bring a new US based car company into functioning profitable existence is nothing short of astonishing. I have my engineering based suspicions as to how that's happened but I'll summarize it as realizing that designing the system to make the vehicles (or spacecraft) is at least as important as designing the thing you're making itself.
Meanwhile, even though journalists do, I don't give a rat's ass about the sewer that was Twitter or is X. Completely irrelevant to anything that I care about.
As for how web services are funded. If nothing else, going from a few thousand users to BILLIONS has profound effects on what it takes to serve those users. You have to pay for it somehow. I happen to prefer the subscription model to advertising but an awful lot of people will take "FREE" services that bombard them with ads. It appears Substack is showing a profitable path for subscriptions - I'm paying for YOU anyhow (and others).
And I actually do pay Google (for Google 1, for YouTube Premium, and as a Google Workspace user with my own domain). I am quite happy with the functionality I get.
Over in Zuckland, I've curated my Facebook feed into something actually useful - mostly in private groups on technical subjects. I also make heavy use of block and unfollow. Still, I'd happily pay them for a better experience.
Egregious offer: I'm also in the Austin area (NW) and would be happy to advise you at no charge on both hardware acquisition and more effective use of the systems running on that hardware! Meanwhile, maybe you could "learn" me a thang or to about jazz. ;-)
Figuring out how to contact me should not be very hard! Google me!!! Whatever...
Space travel isn't a thing yet. It's still way too expensive, and the only way to really get things cheap is to be willing to break things during test.
When you've got passengers or paid cargo onboard, things need to be reliable. But not during testing.
Surveillance Capitalism & targeting absolutely is not needed for advertising. It can be completely stripped out of the internet, and the only people who would lose out are those who profit from the Enshittification of the tech you talked about in this post.
Way back when - I used to love technology also. You didn't change so much Ted - the use & purpose of Tech changed. It started with (in my mind) SO much hope & wonder & it has, as you say, turned into a Cesspool of Raw Sewage.
Here's the ultimate stupidity of it all (to me anyway) - a few weeks ago I bought a new version of one of my worn out & broken Microphones. Ordered online of course, through a good company I have been dealing with for at least 2 decades. Within mere minutes, suddenly - anywhere I went online, every page was filled with banners of the same Microphone I had just bought. It was everywhere. For several weeks. After awhile the amazing, astounding & fantastic Ai out there seems to have figured out that I am not buying another one right now.
The stupidity to me is: WHY on Earth would I be shopping for or buying the product I JUST bought ? Maybe in 10 or 15 ears Ya, but 15 minutes later ? Before it even was delivered ? I think not.
And that marketing stupidity ,Greed & Utter desperation to sell sell SELL is just pitiful. This is almost all it is anymore ...
Unfortunately you are right Ted. I changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo a while back. As you know Google search keeps you on their advertising leash. They are searching you and your preferences. I have to be careful what I say about Google. A friend's daughter works for them. Her apartment rent is $3,800/month for a one bedroom. So you can imagine what her 6 figure income is.
I worked at Google, 2005-2017. The enshitification (not a word I invented) had begun around 2012 or so.
There's a lot to agree with here. However, leading with Musk is a mistake. That's not a case of technology getting worse; it's a case of technology being reinvented, cheaper. The only people putting things in orbit back in the day were giant government bureaucracies. There were never any private companies doing it better than now.
You're also right about Google's search results turning into garbage. However, companies never could pay for "placement" and they still can't.
What you can pay for is an AD, which is labelled as such, albeit less and less prominently. You can also pay for an SEO to try to get you placement in the non-ad results, and Google has surrendered in its war against SEO's. I use DuckDuckGo for most searching now.
More evidence for your argument: If you use Outlook (no choice for me, work requirement), you'll know that they have been trying to push a new version on users for at least 18 months. The new version is so bad (missing key features, etc.) that they have to include an option for people to keep using the old one, which I still do. You would think that when you're dealing with paying customers, you'd want the new version to be better than the previous one? The real customer is the enterprise buyer, not the individual user.
This is illuminating. I've not had the experience yet of a new computer performing worse than the old. Typically the battery stopped holding power or the processing speed slowed down, and the new model was demonstrably better. If that has reversed, it's truly alarming.
But the quality of search results is perhaps the most troubling. I have not read deeply into the causes for that, but it is useful to know that it goes beyond the irritating "sponsored" results at the top of a search. 3x this week I've failed at finding information I was looking for via Google. This may well be the explanation.
Incidentally, I came of age right when DOS-based email was popularized. Juno, Hotmail, and then Google were all significant innovations then. Strange to see the downward arc in my own liftetime.
The thing about driver-less cars that bothers me is not the success or failure of the technology. It's that the question "Should we?" was not asked, as a society. Technology was applied to an industry that works pretty well to begin with, and more importantly, employs actual people to do the work. Does it always have to be about maximizing corporate profit, or can we respect the dignity of work, and not go out of our way to take away opportunities for people to make a living? I feel the same way about the use of robotics in manufacturing. Sure, it's pretty slick, but what's the cost to our society in the long run?
When I need a good plumber or electrician, I've gone back to the pre-Internet practice of looking in the paper yellow pages or toddling down to the mom-&-pop hardware store and getting a few business cards. If I use the search engines, they will not give me the best local providers, but the highest payers, so I get a company with a large fleet of trucks and tradesmen who are constantly looking for ways to upsell me. Even the yellow pages site gives me results like that. So I've gone back to paper.
When I read your article I had just finished taking a look at a company on LinkedIn who offer data search content they sell by the seat like CRM software. I had the exact thought in my head... search results lately are just horrible. I can see why it will only get worse. I pride myself in using unique keywords to find good stuff, but results lately are worse then wishy-washy. Not only that, but LinkedIn requires you to scan a QR code with your phone to verify your identity, (managed by Microsoft). It's all out of control and I'm with you, absolutely fed up! Where did all the 'open source' guys go?
And then there's YouTube. 15 years ago, when I retired and started educating myself about the World, it seemed to have a simple algorithm that put videos that people thought were good at the top of the list. One could make progress quickly. Today, there is so much misinformation and deliberate red herrings.
You are so right! I have been so frustrated in recent years by software updates that make products less intuitive, less user friendly and take away all the best features. And also frustrated by newer products that are a huge step backwards from their predecessors. My Nissan has an interior light that automatically times out (turns off) 30 seconds after it comes on and won't come on automatically again until all the doors have been closed for 5 minutes. Why? Interior car lights have been turning on (and STAYING on) whenever a door is open, then shutting off when the last door is closed since I was a baby (and I'm 66 now)! Nobody has ever complained, nobody has ever had a problem with this that I have EVER heard of! I open my car door at night, get in, get situated, and just as I'm about to place my key in the ignition slot everything goes pitch dark! I then have to feel for the key slot to find it. I come out of the grocery store at night, open the rear hatch and place my groceries in the back, close the hatch, open the car door and guess what? NO INTERIOR LIGHT! The idiotic light circuit started counting down the 30 seconds the moment I opened the hatch, so by the time I finally open the door the light has already timed out! You have to be inept on a whole new level to screw up something as simple as a car interior light (something that was PERFECTED before I was born)! Who thought that something which has worked so well for the better part of a century needed to be fixed? What problem did they think they were solving? And what universe do they come from where ANYONE would think this was better? My TiVo, which was the best and most user-friendly DVR I have ever used (and I've owned dozens) updated to a new operating system that after a year I still have to think hard about in order to do what used to take no thought at all. And I have to hit so many more buttons to do the same things too! I went online and nobody seems to like it. So many people hate it, lots of them include instructions about how to make it revert back to the old operating system. My cable company just replaced my old Motorola cable box/DVR (yes, I have a cable box as well as two TiVos for reasons I won't go into now) and everybody in my family gets stuck on menu screens they can't figure out how to get out of. On one screen you can just hit the EXIT button, on the next screen EXIT does nothing and you have to hit the LEFT button to escape the screen, and the only way to escape other screens is to select the MENU button and hit some other menu selection. Exit used to work for ALL screens on the old box. Who designed this operating system in which the operating rules CHANGE for every screen? Did software designers all get hammer blows to their heads lowering their cognitive capacities or something? And doesn't anyone Beta test anything anymore just to make sure it works before committing millions of dollars to mass producing it? Either they don't, or else they do and ignore what the Beta tests clearly show them, defeating the whole purpose of testing in the first place. My friend has an older computer made by a very well-known company. It came with a built-in disc reader/burner. The company updated the operating system many years back and there was no way to use the built-in disc drive any longer. He had to buy an EXTERNAL drive to be able to play and burn discs--even though there was already one inside the computer! Every time there is an upgrade to ANYTHING that I own, I start to sweat bullets that it won't render a great product a piece of useless and confusing junk. What is going on? Do you know why technology seems to be going so rapidly backwards? I could name dozens of such examples. It reminds me of the scene in the 1960's film of Fahrenheit 451 when Montag's wife Linda throws away his electric razor, replacing it with an old-fashioned straight razor, presenting it as the newest thing. Why are things designed so ineptly now?
I absolutely want to read everything about this, I'll keep an eye out. But you're for sure right about the community element - no one is really building a community (even if they say they are), they are building a thing they one day want to sell to another thing. Even Substack will eventually sell out to another company when the board decides they need a payday. Then this application will be a subset to another aggregate service.
My oh my! We are GRUMPY aren't we?
I disagree with almost all of this. I'm 75 years old with a couple of EE degrees and first got paid to write software in 1967. I've spent a long and lucrative career at the border of hardware and software.
Even though I'm also a recent widower, having lost my wife (and CPA) of over 40 years in 2023, I'm amazingly upbeat. It helps that for almost 40 years I no longer drink alcohol or do drugs. Pro tip: do NOT watch any broadcast or cable TV "news." Read things instead, across a broad spectrum of views.
The performance to price ratio of computer technology has undergone something like a million to one transformation over the last 30-40 years. If you managed to get a slower computer for more money something is very wrong. Personally I'm enjoying dirt cheap off lease systems (mostly Dell) with extremely good performance - especially for the money.
And... I'm using a 43" 4K (UHD) TV that cost well under $250 as a monitor. That's mind blowing as is the price for 4K TVs in general.
I should probably mention that I use Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android after having used dozens of systems over my career (which predates the existence of UNIX!). What do I prefer? Windows hands down for desktop and iOS for mobile phones. [I've had cell phones since 1986.]
As for SpaceX - I am shocked if you don't understand how they are already at 1/100 the price to get mass to orbit and will be less than 1/1000 compared to most options when the BFR finally is flying. Good grief, it's only been TWO launch attempts and looking quite good for the third one. "Failure is not an option." is why SLS costs more per launch attempt than SpaceX has spent in its entire existence. Meanwhile it took SpaceX to get the US away from having to use Russian rockets to get to the space station. Not to mention over 200 successful landings of Falcon 9 boosters.
Starlink is nothing less than revolutionary.
As for Mr. bad boy's other main ventures, yeah, he is a seriously socially challenged person (as was Mr. Jobs) but to actually bring a new US based car company into functioning profitable existence is nothing short of astonishing. I have my engineering based suspicions as to how that's happened but I'll summarize it as realizing that designing the system to make the vehicles (or spacecraft) is at least as important as designing the thing you're making itself.
Meanwhile, even though journalists do, I don't give a rat's ass about the sewer that was Twitter or is X. Completely irrelevant to anything that I care about.
As for how web services are funded. If nothing else, going from a few thousand users to BILLIONS has profound effects on what it takes to serve those users. You have to pay for it somehow. I happen to prefer the subscription model to advertising but an awful lot of people will take "FREE" services that bombard them with ads. It appears Substack is showing a profitable path for subscriptions - I'm paying for YOU anyhow (and others).
And I actually do pay Google (for Google 1, for YouTube Premium, and as a Google Workspace user with my own domain). I am quite happy with the functionality I get.
Over in Zuckland, I've curated my Facebook feed into something actually useful - mostly in private groups on technical subjects. I also make heavy use of block and unfollow. Still, I'd happily pay them for a better experience.
Egregious offer: I'm also in the Austin area (NW) and would be happy to advise you at no charge on both hardware acquisition and more effective use of the systems running on that hardware! Meanwhile, maybe you could "learn" me a thang or to about jazz. ;-)
Figuring out how to contact me should not be very hard! Google me!!! Whatever...
Space travel isn't a thing yet. It's still way too expensive, and the only way to really get things cheap is to be willing to break things during test.
When you've got passengers or paid cargo onboard, things need to be reliable. But not during testing.
I migrated to https://kagi.com/ a few months ago, haven't looked back
Surveillance Capitalism & targeting absolutely is not needed for advertising. It can be completely stripped out of the internet, and the only people who would lose out are those who profit from the Enshittification of the tech you talked about in this post.
Way back when - I used to love technology also. You didn't change so much Ted - the use & purpose of Tech changed. It started with (in my mind) SO much hope & wonder & it has, as you say, turned into a Cesspool of Raw Sewage.
Here's the ultimate stupidity of it all (to me anyway) - a few weeks ago I bought a new version of one of my worn out & broken Microphones. Ordered online of course, through a good company I have been dealing with for at least 2 decades. Within mere minutes, suddenly - anywhere I went online, every page was filled with banners of the same Microphone I had just bought. It was everywhere. For several weeks. After awhile the amazing, astounding & fantastic Ai out there seems to have figured out that I am not buying another one right now.
The stupidity to me is: WHY on Earth would I be shopping for or buying the product I JUST bought ? Maybe in 10 or 15 ears Ya, but 15 minutes later ? Before it even was delivered ? I think not.
And that marketing stupidity ,Greed & Utter desperation to sell sell SELL is just pitiful. This is almost all it is anymore ...
Nuff said
Unfortunately you are right Ted. I changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo a while back. As you know Google search keeps you on their advertising leash. They are searching you and your preferences. I have to be careful what I say about Google. A friend's daughter works for them. Her apartment rent is $3,800/month for a one bedroom. So you can imagine what her 6 figure income is.
I worked at Google, 2005-2017. The enshitification (not a word I invented) had begun around 2012 or so.
There's a lot to agree with here. However, leading with Musk is a mistake. That's not a case of technology getting worse; it's a case of technology being reinvented, cheaper. The only people putting things in orbit back in the day were giant government bureaucracies. There were never any private companies doing it better than now.
You're also right about Google's search results turning into garbage. However, companies never could pay for "placement" and they still can't.
What you can pay for is an AD, which is labelled as such, albeit less and less prominently. You can also pay for an SEO to try to get you placement in the non-ad results, and Google has surrendered in its war against SEO's. I use DuckDuckGo for most searching now.
More evidence for your argument: If you use Outlook (no choice for me, work requirement), you'll know that they have been trying to push a new version on users for at least 18 months. The new version is so bad (missing key features, etc.) that they have to include an option for people to keep using the old one, which I still do. You would think that when you're dealing with paying customers, you'd want the new version to be better than the previous one? The real customer is the enterprise buyer, not the individual user.
As always you're a voice of hope in the dark. I miss the era of tech enthusiasts.
This is illuminating. I've not had the experience yet of a new computer performing worse than the old. Typically the battery stopped holding power or the processing speed slowed down, and the new model was demonstrably better. If that has reversed, it's truly alarming.
But the quality of search results is perhaps the most troubling. I have not read deeply into the causes for that, but it is useful to know that it goes beyond the irritating "sponsored" results at the top of a search. 3x this week I've failed at finding information I was looking for via Google. This may well be the explanation.
Incidentally, I came of age right when DOS-based email was popularized. Juno, Hotmail, and then Google were all significant innovations then. Strange to see the downward arc in my own liftetime.
The thing about driver-less cars that bothers me is not the success or failure of the technology. It's that the question "Should we?" was not asked, as a society. Technology was applied to an industry that works pretty well to begin with, and more importantly, employs actual people to do the work. Does it always have to be about maximizing corporate profit, or can we respect the dignity of work, and not go out of our way to take away opportunities for people to make a living? I feel the same way about the use of robotics in manufacturing. Sure, it's pretty slick, but what's the cost to our society in the long run?
When I need a good plumber or electrician, I've gone back to the pre-Internet practice of looking in the paper yellow pages or toddling down to the mom-&-pop hardware store and getting a few business cards. If I use the search engines, they will not give me the best local providers, but the highest payers, so I get a company with a large fleet of trucks and tradesmen who are constantly looking for ways to upsell me. Even the yellow pages site gives me results like that. So I've gone back to paper.
When I read your article I had just finished taking a look at a company on LinkedIn who offer data search content they sell by the seat like CRM software. I had the exact thought in my head... search results lately are just horrible. I can see why it will only get worse. I pride myself in using unique keywords to find good stuff, but results lately are worse then wishy-washy. Not only that, but LinkedIn requires you to scan a QR code with your phone to verify your identity, (managed by Microsoft). It's all out of control and I'm with you, absolutely fed up! Where did all the 'open source' guys go?
And then there's YouTube. 15 years ago, when I retired and started educating myself about the World, it seemed to have a simple algorithm that put videos that people thought were good at the top of the list. One could make progress quickly. Today, there is so much misinformation and deliberate red herrings.
You are so right! I have been so frustrated in recent years by software updates that make products less intuitive, less user friendly and take away all the best features. And also frustrated by newer products that are a huge step backwards from their predecessors. My Nissan has an interior light that automatically times out (turns off) 30 seconds after it comes on and won't come on automatically again until all the doors have been closed for 5 minutes. Why? Interior car lights have been turning on (and STAYING on) whenever a door is open, then shutting off when the last door is closed since I was a baby (and I'm 66 now)! Nobody has ever complained, nobody has ever had a problem with this that I have EVER heard of! I open my car door at night, get in, get situated, and just as I'm about to place my key in the ignition slot everything goes pitch dark! I then have to feel for the key slot to find it. I come out of the grocery store at night, open the rear hatch and place my groceries in the back, close the hatch, open the car door and guess what? NO INTERIOR LIGHT! The idiotic light circuit started counting down the 30 seconds the moment I opened the hatch, so by the time I finally open the door the light has already timed out! You have to be inept on a whole new level to screw up something as simple as a car interior light (something that was PERFECTED before I was born)! Who thought that something which has worked so well for the better part of a century needed to be fixed? What problem did they think they were solving? And what universe do they come from where ANYONE would think this was better? My TiVo, which was the best and most user-friendly DVR I have ever used (and I've owned dozens) updated to a new operating system that after a year I still have to think hard about in order to do what used to take no thought at all. And I have to hit so many more buttons to do the same things too! I went online and nobody seems to like it. So many people hate it, lots of them include instructions about how to make it revert back to the old operating system. My cable company just replaced my old Motorola cable box/DVR (yes, I have a cable box as well as two TiVos for reasons I won't go into now) and everybody in my family gets stuck on menu screens they can't figure out how to get out of. On one screen you can just hit the EXIT button, on the next screen EXIT does nothing and you have to hit the LEFT button to escape the screen, and the only way to escape other screens is to select the MENU button and hit some other menu selection. Exit used to work for ALL screens on the old box. Who designed this operating system in which the operating rules CHANGE for every screen? Did software designers all get hammer blows to their heads lowering their cognitive capacities or something? And doesn't anyone Beta test anything anymore just to make sure it works before committing millions of dollars to mass producing it? Either they don't, or else they do and ignore what the Beta tests clearly show them, defeating the whole purpose of testing in the first place. My friend has an older computer made by a very well-known company. It came with a built-in disc reader/burner. The company updated the operating system many years back and there was no way to use the built-in disc drive any longer. He had to buy an EXTERNAL drive to be able to play and burn discs--even though there was already one inside the computer! Every time there is an upgrade to ANYTHING that I own, I start to sweat bullets that it won't render a great product a piece of useless and confusing junk. What is going on? Do you know why technology seems to be going so rapidly backwards? I could name dozens of such examples. It reminds me of the scene in the 1960's film of Fahrenheit 451 when Montag's wife Linda throws away his electric razor, replacing it with an old-fashioned straight razor, presenting it as the newest thing. Why are things designed so ineptly now?
I absolutely want to read everything about this, I'll keep an eye out. But you're for sure right about the community element - no one is really building a community (even if they say they are), they are building a thing they one day want to sell to another thing. Even Substack will eventually sell out to another company when the board decides they need a payday. Then this application will be a subset to another aggregate service.