Sometimes the term is so suitable, its meaning is so clear and so appropriate for our circumstances that it becomes larger than just a useful fashionable word and grows to determine the whole moment. “Strengthening”, which is given by a fertile technological critic and author of Corey, the doctor is one of them. Doctorow came up with a phrase in 2022 to describe how all digital services that were increasingly dominated in our daily life seemed to worsen at the same time. Google's search has become included, showing advertising and links to products instead of the corresponding results of the website. Tiktok He became augmented, artificially “heating” of specific videos, so that some become viral, inspiring imitations and rutual participation, at the same time disappointing creators, whose results did not receive the same treatment. Twitter will soon become Korolevsky, in Korolevsky is fixed in his reincarnation as X, having lost his status of the Global City Square, since he turned on musk extremism and rewarded the schemes and accounts of memes from the legal sources of news. Spotify, iPhone, Adobe Software, mailboxes, it was difficult to come up with a platform or device that did not see decay in user experience. Wasn't the technology endlessly to improve in the long run? All counter-productive corporate intervention reminded of the silicone valley since 2017, when a company called Juicero attracted more than a hundred million dollars to build a car with juice pressure, whose proprietary bags, it appeared, it can also be easily displaced by hand-to support the device.
The “consolidation” was called the “Word of the Year” by the American Society of Dialects in 2023 and in Australia to the dictionary of Maccuori in 2024. The announcement of the term reflects a sense of collective disappointment. Technology was Improvement after fashion, but too often these improvements made platforms more skillful in extracting the cost from users and customers, which led to profit and involvement for the companies themselves. The worse, the more you have experience on Facebook, the more meta -paying labor from the creators of content while maintaining income from advertisers. Uber ultimately reached profitability, algorithmically manipulating the tariffs who paid drivers, and, determining users to reduce their expectations; The drive application even became permeated advertising. X Musk's X, reduced to a full -made bot in the right -wing conspiracy hall, can use its data as a training food for its own artificial intellectual company.
In the doctors' argument, confirmation was a deliberate model from technological companies. IN His new book From the same name, he expands his various messages on the blog and articles on this subject in the general theory “Why did everything suddenly become worse and what to do with it”, as the subtitle expresses. The consolidation unfolds in three stages: first, the company is “good for users”, writes doctoral, attracting people in the crowds, since the funnels of the trap are made by Japanese beetles, with a promise of communication or convenience. Secondly, thanks to this mass audience, the company is “good for business -clients”, putting on some of its functions, so that the most profitable customers, usually advertisers, may flourish on the platform. This second phrase is the one in which, say, our Facebook channels are filled with advertising and posts from brands. Thirdly, the company turns user experience into a “giant bunch of shit”, aggravating the platform for both users and enterprises in order to additionally enrich the owners and leaders of the company. The Facebook market, now panting from AI-seized garbage and video with short form, is well engaged in the third act of inclusion. As well as Tiktok, which cluttered his interface, to such an extent that it distracts, with e -commerce, trying to compete with Amazon, which also included the results of searching on the market, promoting meaningless brands.
Perhaps we were Waiting for too much From the digital platforms that we live. The experience that we enjoyed in the early days of social networks and applications on demand was unstable; Services that were originally free or subsidized should ultimately pay for themselves. The dream of an early, more open Internet was that people would contact each other with minimal mediation, and the doctoral transfers structural factors that guarded from influence in that era. They included a moral rollback by technical workers, who once were in such a high requirement that they could keep their corporations hostages with the threat of dismissal and compliance with monopoly rules that were dissuaded by companies such as IBM and Microsoft, last decades, from too zealously turning the screws to their users. These protective barriers were destroyed, but users were also involved in their own operation. Some of the same functions that make applications so convenient, such as the service on demand or instant purchases also facilitate their abuse. Uber can instantly adjust what he levies from consumers, and for paying contractors, a trick, which the doctoral calls “Twiddling”. The platform algorithms are designed to manipulate us involved, and too often we do, even against our best interests. Uber drivers who choose every concert offered by him from the “indiscriminate desire to please the algorithm”, in fact, “signal that these are simple choice” that will work on the “salary of substance”, the doctor writes.
One underestimated exit strategy for those who are tired of inclusion is selected: we, users, can bring to the platforms that compare our passive participation and give us little in return. There are applications and platforms that are more fair, regardless Bluesky For social networks without uncontrolled toxicity or curbing for a taxi on demand without labor violations. But, it seems, the doctor does not bring many reserves in the credibility of a mass outcome with fixed platforms. Instead, it is focused on structural changes, offering legal and technical drugs, starting from the best ensuring compliance with antimonopoly laws to the destruction of technical conglomerates to regulating the collection of personal data, so that users have more reliable rights on the Internet. There is a reason for optimism on this last front: new laws in the United Kingdom and the European Union force technological companies to be better about users in these regions, which, in turn, can improve the conditions around the world, since it is easier for the company to create a single version of its products than many local ones. But American enterprises have invented many of these problems, and so far the American government does little to correct them.
