Politics and society
The internet enshittified
Just 30 years ago there was optimism about the possibilities opening up as the internet became available to all. The actual path of the internet is depressingly different.
Although nerds with soldering irons have been fiddling with computers (sometimes building their own) for at least 80 years, the affordable household computer became a reality only in the 1980s. For households, e-mail and basic internet services started to spread in the 1990s, but until people were able to connect to the internet through dedicated cables or 3G services, the internet-connected computer remained out of reach for many, because it had to be connected through a telephone line – a resource in demand in most households. How many readers remember this sound – the sound of a computer connecting to a telephone line through a modem?
It was all a bit primitive, but by the mid 1990s it was obvious to all where computers and mobile phones were heading. Optimistic visions abounded. Groups of friends would be able to establish social networks, as would people with shared interests. News would be available from our established and trusted sources. The technology would even come to our cars, so that we would never again have to drive through an unfamiliar city looking down at a Gregory’s street directory open on our laps.
The power in markets would shift from providers pushing products on to consumers through advertising, to consumers who would use this emerging technology to let the market know what they wanted.
All of these benefits, and more, came to be available, but not in the way we envisaged. The internet services usually started off well, but soon most of it went bad. Internet analyst and advocate Cory Doctorow calls this process “enshittification” (Macquarie Dictionary word of year in 2024), which he defines as:
the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
That’s a general definition. Doctorow explains the specific steps of enshittification in his book Enshittification: why everything suddenly got worse ad what to do about it. He explains four stages in the life of internet platforms.
First, they provide really good services for their users, prompting rapid enrolment.
Second, however, the platform owners pay more attention to their business customers – those who advertise on their platforms. An important aspect of this stage is that the customers are a captured market, because, once established, users do not want to leave the platforms. For example you may want to leave Facebook, but that’s a costly decision if all your friends use Facebook.
Third, having become the main intermediary between businesses and their customers, the platforms use their power to extract large profits from businesses in the form of charges to advertise on their platforms.
In the fourth stage, where we are now, to quote Doctorow “they have become a giant pile of shit”.
In his book Enshittification and a later work The reverse centaur’s guide to life after AI: how to think about artificial intelligence before it’s too late Doctorow is specific about this “pile of shit”. Suffice it to say neither the firms nor the users benefit: the only beneficiaries are the platform owners.
He describes the many ways those oligarchs have benefited from weak consumer protection law, having used their power in Washington to ensure the government does nothing that impedes their ability to exercise monopoly power. We may think that this is only a US issue, but these anti-consumer pro-platform-owner provisions are incorporated in bilateral trade agreements.
Such anti-competitive licence has allowed the platforms to block the development of apps that would put users back in control of search engines and social media.
The forms of exploitation know no end: for example owners of John Deere tractors can buy spare parts on line and fit them, but they have to pay an authorized service agent to get a code that allows the tractor’s operating system to recognize it. At the consumer level Doctorow refers to the well-known case of printer ink, where anti-competitive arrangements prevent generic suppliers from selling ink. “Printer ink is so expensive, you could print your grocery list with Kentucky Derby winning stallion semen and save money” said Doctorow at his Festival of Dangerous Ideas session in Sydney last weekend.
Tractor parts and printer inks are minor irritants compared with some of the exploitative labour practices, and the work of well-financed political movements, both facilitated by weak protections on the internet. Labour hire firms can buy databases about workers’ personal situations as a means of giving employment priority to those most likely to accept a low wage. Political parties can employ bots to create the impression of mass protest against a proposal, or to spread fear campaigns.
In the Saturday Paper you can read Amy Gray’s article Author Cory Doctorow on the disenshittification nation. It’s chatty in style, but she summarises his main points. A more thorough exposition of his ideas, covering the ways the people can take back control of the internet, is in his address A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet given at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg earlier this year. Why, for example, cannot we have an independent Australian social media network, governed in the interests of users and with newsfeed standards that comply with the practice of professional journalism or of a public broadcaster?
He urges Australians to become involved with Electronic Frontiers Australia, an organization dedicated to monitoring the internet and AI, and to pushing for legislative changes to shift the balance of power from platform owners back to users.
Taking a view even wider than Doctorow’s one could ask if enshittification is a path taken by other technologies that once had great promise for humanity. Coal and oil are cases in point. Perhaps the main differences are the more compressed timeline for the internet, and the compliance of a US government dedicated to serving the interests of oligarchs.
Who are One Nation’s supporters?
Immigration, rather than housing and the cost of living, is the main concern among One Nation supporters. That’s a significant finding.
Paul Sakkal, political correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, reports on a poll of 1000 One Nation supporters that examines their political beliefs and tries to work out what would shift them to the established parties.
The most outstanding finding, differentiating One Nation supporters from other voters, is that 91 percent of them believe Australia is on the wrong track. Sakkal reports that among all voters 62 percent believe Australia is on the wrong track. This means, with a little mathematics[1], that the belief we’re on the wrong track is held by 91 percent of One Nation supporters and only 52 percent of other Australians. That 52 percent is close to a 50-50 TPP Labor-Coalition split.
There’s an excess of surveys reporting people’s beliefs about whether the country is on the right track, and most of them are useless, because they give no indication of the track people want to follow, but this survey asks One Nation supporters why they think we’re on the wrong track, and out of six possibilities “immigration” tops the list at 39 percent.
Others, in order, are “cost of living and prices” (35 percent), “politicians and government” (32 percent), “the economy and debt” (26 percent), “housing” (17 percent), and “crime and safety” (12 percent).
That low concern with housing is explained, in part, by the age of One Nation voters (they are older and therefore likely to be housed) and they disproportionately live in non- capital city regions. But the important point is its contrast with the high concern with immigration; the issue doesn’t seem to be a supposed link between unaffordable housing and immigration, the line the Liberal Party is taking. Another part of the survey confirms that the main reason for concern with immigration is a belief that Australia’s culture and identity are changing too quickly.
The pollsters also find a significant difference between One Nation’s traditional support base and others who have come to support One Nation more recently. The former are more inclined to nominate the background of migrants as a concern, and they don’t seem to be put off by Hanson’s offensive language about Muslim Australians.
It’s hard to escape the uncomfortable possibility that some form of racism keeps a core of voters attached to One Nation. We get a slightly clearer idea in another Sydney Morning Herald article by Peter Hartcher, drawing on the same survey, that asks who One Nation supporters consider to be their heroes. Pauline Hanson comes out on top, but she is closely followed by Ben Roberts-Smith “a tough, patriotic, white guy who does his duty for his country in a struggle against an alien enemy, and feels persecuted for it”.
It’s a reminder to those who tend to imagine “racism” in terms of hatred or contempt for the outsider. It could be attraction to a “white” role model, existing alongside indifference to people of different skin colours.
The only significant unifying factor among One Nation supporters is that they “detest Labor and Albanese himself”. That suggests Labor will probably leave the work of discrediting One Nation to the Coalition parties. In fact Labor must be enjoying the Schadenfreude of watching the right-wing parties deal with One Nation’s involvement in a class struggle. As Hartcher suggests, in backing Roberts-Smith, a corporal in his military service, One Nation supporters are turning against Liberal leadership aspirant Hastie, a captain in his military service, unswayed by populist opposition to the workings of military law.
But the main issue for all parties is immigration. This survey suggests that David Farley’s clear explanation on the ABC’s Insiders pointing out that there isn’t much room to cut immigration – that the raw numbers are “not too different” from the government’s – has kicked a major plank out of Pauline Hanson’s platform. No wonder she’s upset.
It also helps explain why the government is re-writing the speech on immigration policy that Tony Burke had planned to present earlier this month.
As Tom Crowley writes on the ABC website, Everybody wants to cut migration but nobody wants to say how.
1. This estimate is based on assumed 25 percent national support for One Nation.(0.62 - 0.25*0.91)/0.75 = 0.52. ↩
Kos Samaras on Gen X
We’ve dealt a bad hand to Gen X – people now in their fifties. No wonder they’re annoyed.
Kos Samaras has a reputation as a well-disciplined political analyst and former Labor strategist.
He reveals another side of himself in a short essay in Pearls and Irritations: Gen X is driving down to The River – and finding it dry.
It’s a whimsical but serious piece about the poor deal Australia has delivered to those now around their fifties.
In past times there was a kind of lifetime deal. Our early adult years would be tough as we tried to establish ourselves financially and to deal with the stresses of bringing up children. But when we reached our fifties things would start to improve. The mortgage would be paid off, and the kids would be launched on their own journey. We may even have advanced to better paid and more respected positions in the workforce.
That contract is broken. Writing as a member of Gen X, Samaras states:
We are carrying mortgages into our 60s, and some of us will carry them beyond that. The house that was meant to be paid off by now will follow many of us all the way into retirement, and a growing number of us will retire renting, something that would have been almost unheard of a generation ago. Our kids are not launching, and it is not because they are lazy. They are 24, 27, 30 and still in their childhood bedrooms because the maths of moving out simply does not work. We watch them do everything right, study, work, save, and still fall further behind the housing market with every passing year. The quiet dream of seeing your children prosper has been replaced, for many of us, by the quiet fear of watching them go backwards.
Our careers, meanwhile, have been restructured, offshored, casualised and disrupted more times than we can count, and the story of our working lives is really the story of an economy being hollowed out around us while we stood in the middle of it.
Samaras admits that he, himself, belongs to a fortunate minority of Gen X, who have been spared this dismal mid-life experience, but in view of the general thoroughness of his political research, we can be reasonably sure that he speaks for a large segment of our population.
Wild swans
Why do we expect footballers to be male role models when there are far better choices?
Five young footballers have misbehaved. Quite separate from allegations of some form of misbehaviour towards one or possibly more women they had invited to their hotel room, the issue raising so much fuss is that they disobeyed club rules, which apparently required them to be quietly tucked up in their own beds, rather than drinking to celebrate a win.
Well-mannered and elegant
Judging by the proscriptions on their behaviour, and the shock about their having broken the club’s rules, one might assume they were minors, and that the football club was acting in loco parentis. But in fact they are all aged between 25 and 30.
Workplace lawyer Paul O’Halloran, writing in the Financial Review, expresses the widely-held view that the club is quite justified in enforcing its strong rules about their off-field behaviour: Swans scandal is cultural lesson for business from the CEO down. It’s a big business with much to lose if it does not keep control of its employees.
But is it a cut-and-dried matter? Is this a case of paternalistic overreach?
The players have clear duties – to turn up in good shape for training and to matches, to keep themselves fit, to be ready to present themselves to the media.
Also they should not do anything that brings the organization employing them into disrepute. For people in most occupations this is about being careful about one’s behaviour in the public sphere – for example not wearing an organization’s uniform when doing anything likely to offend or upset some people.
Organizational norms and rules should have limited reach on employees. Among the great reforms of the last 200 years have been the abolition of slavery, dispelling any notion that people can be “owned”, and the establishment of hard-won conventions such as the 8-hour day. The employment contract is, or should be, explicitly and implicitly limited. People have their lives to live as responsible citizens, guided by social norms and laws, not the rules of some organization that employs their services for a limited time.
As reported by the ABC’s Kate Halloran, commenting on the Swans case, the employment contract applying to league footballers seems to go further than normal contracts, because as pointed out by Catherine Lumby, a highly regarded scholar of gender issues and an advisor to the NRL “Whether they like it or not, these young men are role models to younger men and society in general.” That’s a formidable task.
Lumby and other advisors have done a great deal in countering misogynistic and racial behaviour among football players, and their expertise is well-regarded. But is it a losing struggle, because of the culture of contact sports? We give them hero status, but should we expect them to be role models for other young men?
While we were wringing our hands about one incident, Sabrina Wang writing in the Columbia University Journal of Global Health, a long way from the AFL, explained the relationship between football culture and the incidence of sexual and other forms of violence committed by players and spectators. In her article Beyond the pitch: addressing violence in sports culture she summarized the factors driving that dysfunctional behaviour:
Athletes who participate in contact sports are encouraged to be violent on the field, and often that mentality does not stop once the game is over. By encouraging violence through competition, we create a culture that glorifies male aggression. A study done on the impact of sports on interpersonal violence in young men found that, compared with non-athletes, football players and wrestlers are 40% more likely to engage in a serious fight. This study also found that men with friends who all play football have an 8% higher likelihood of getting into a serious fight. In addition, male participation in contact sports has been shown to correlate with sexual assault. Sports culture at the collegiate level may create an environment “conducive to sexual violence toward females.” By promoting a hyper-masculine culture, men's sports can become a conduit towards violence and misogynistic behavior.
(It’s worthwhile clicking in to the article itself, because it is rich in hyperlinks providing empirical support for her more generalized conclusions.)
A similar point about the contrast between the way football clubs promote aggressive behaviour on the field, contrasting with their attempts to encourage players to act as civilized citizens, is in the Conversation contribution To eliminate misogyny, the AFL needs social change, not just crisis management, written by Suzanne Dyson of La Trobe University, weeks before the Swans incident.
Do we really want young men immersed in the football culture to be role models for other young men? Most parents put great effort into their children’s transition from childhood to adult autonomy – that breakthrough when young men and women develop their own moral sense and norms of behaviour: young men subjected to proscriptive rules do not make good role models. Most parents observe their children learning how to handle finance, to ration their expenditure, to save for things they want: grossly overpaid young men do not make good role models. Most parents hope their sons will grow into young men who relate to women as friends and colleagues, rather than as objects for sexual gratification: young men in a milieu where their work colleagues and friends are all male do not provide good role models.
If we want the role models for young men to be a bunch of infantilized, overpaid men, uncomfortable about relating to women, living in a culture not far distant from the manosphere, we are setting ourselves up for failure.
As Wang says, in the wider community we need to change the way we see football. She doesn’t go further with that recommendation, but perhaps we could see top footballers simply in the same way as we see, say, champion orienteers or mountaineers, whose achievements are away from a commercial stadium and away from the avaricious hands of football administrators. These unsung sports, particularly those in which men and women perform equally, could provide some more modest and self-assured role models for young men and women.
Former Olympiad Georgie Park (Hockey, Rio, 2016), puts it neatly in a short opinion piece in The Nightly: Why can’t athletes pass the pub test?
I don’t think athletes need to live like monks, nor should they be banned from drinking. They’re adults and should be able to enjoy themselves. But perhaps that’s exactly why I struggle with allocated drinking nights and curfews. Because ultimately, culture isn’t just about what you are allowed to do. It is about what you choose to do when nobody is telling you what to do.
She concludes:
Perhaps elite sport doesn’t need better drinking rules. It needs athletes to understand why, sometimes, they shouldn’t need the rules at all.