I started writing this as a great “journalistic” piece with full sentences and full concepts and thoughts, but I’m so aggravated today by this exact topic that I’m just going to rant in bullet points and un-nuanced statements that will feel great to publish, but probably won’t further the over-arching conversation about this issue.
- Apartment property managers (is “landlord” a term that really applies to this group of staff in an onsite office?!) install Amazon Hub Package Lockers so they don’t have to field the traffic of packages from the mail/package services like USPS, FedEx and UPS. They charge a monthly fee (mine is up to $20/mo now) despite not incurring a monthly from Amazon for these things. It’s billed as a convenience, but I used to get my packages to my door, now they’re literally about 1/2 mile away in the locker, which is outside the office. Who’s convenience am I being charged for?! Certainly not mine, I have to go further more often to get my packages!
- UPS drivers went a strike a while ago complaining how hard their jobs were and won $49/hr rate. Those same drivers now deliver less packages to the door, and more to lockers. Their jobs arguably got easier. When those aforementioned package lockers get full, the drivers don’t always bring the package to your door, they leave them at the office or actually mark it as undeliverable and make an attempt to fill the lockers the next day. So either my package is available only when the office is open or not until the following day, if I’m lucky. That’s the exact same system as before the lockers were installed and I was losing $20/mo. on them.
- Door Dash, Instacart, et. al. have made grocery shopping a gamble at best and a nightmare at worst. My most recent shopper couldn’t even communicate in my language to ask about substitutions, and didn’t understand replies when I used a translation app or even emojis. Services that deal with food (and likely medications) should have some basic language requirements. This would be less of a challenge if people weren’t trying to “game the system” and create their own sub-networks of shoppers complete with AI photos and fake names. People enshittifying services for the sake of money (I get it, the gig economy is dumb, brutal, and exists) apparently don’t realize that many of us will go back to shopping ourselves. That leads me to:
- AI bros leading the biggest enshittification drive in the history of humanity. Corporations race to shove AI into everything, trying to maximize profits harder than ever before, and dehumanize as many aspects of human interaction and expression as possible. All while providing an inferior, buggy, often completely wrong, ugly, plastic-y, gross experience. No one needs an inaccurate summary of the doc they were asked to read. It’s not efficiency if you’re told wrong info, it’s the kind of corner-cutting that should get you demoted. Humans who rely on or actively seeking out opportunities to use AI more have already been shown to be more gullible, have worsening critical thinking skills, and worsening basic life skills and working knowledge of the world. Simply put, AI is rotting brains to the point where they’ve can’t function well without it. Humans need the challenge of doing the things, failing and succeeding at the things, and learning the things from other humans. This isn’t the forefront a transhumanist movement on the cusp of replacing frail humanity with superior quantum rugged individualism, it’s the precursor to the decimation of our species by a weapon of our design.
All of this is made worse by the fact that “the bros” don’t even want to let you avoid the AI-driven enshittification. You can’t (easily) opt out of many of these ways that AI has been inflicted on you, and you can’t at all for others. So far, they’ve gotten away with it because most humans have a pretty limited time-frame for their outrage, and these bros have calculated into their machinations that time frame of just waiting people out until the ruckus dies down and proceeding as planned. A lot of the times, you’ll notice these “innovations” are solutions in search of a problem. No one needed or was asking for a system to generate sub-par images and videos. Now that those systems have lowered the bar of entry so far, humanities worst can take advantage, literally. Most AI usage these days is for dangerous, weaponized propaganda, not innocuous “cute cat” videos. Thanks, Sam Altman et. al. 🙄
It would be great if a “back to analog” movement, similar to the “back to the land” movement, could at least slow this shit down, but it’s going to take even more enshittification before people rebel against the one thing so ingrained in human existence in the 21st century that I don’t even know how bad it has to get to tip that scale: the Internet itself.
