The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
At my school the windows PC's were just as locked down as the Chromebooks. In either case, you clicked the chrome icon and went. I don't agree with this take
Where I live, Chromebooks never really took off. I had access to computers since kindergarten, but in my home I only had phones, so I mostly learned tinkering with them (installing custom ROMs, cracking, etc.) until I got an old Intel Atom with 2GB of RAM lol (I tried **anything **to get pirated games running). My younger sibling and cousins never really learned much about computers because they were introduced directly to smartphones, and since they weren't taught very much (other than basic Office tasks), they were never interested on computers nor my family was buying something kids didn't ask for. So in my case, Chromebooks didn't have anything to do, it was mostly bad parenting and the boom of smartphones :P
Anyone selling a computer to an institution, like a school or company, it is expected that they will be locked down, especially if the end user isn't technical.
If anything, if google didn't make things locked down and controlled schools would never have bought them and had to worry about debugging the 20 kid's messed up environments.
Kids SHOULD have been tinkering with their own private computers, a laptop from their parents or something like that.
The issue is
All tech companies, Google, Apple, Microsoft, are all pushing for users to store their stuff in their clouds instead of locally on their machines and having to worry about their local filesystems, and their local environments.
Software as a Service, or much better environment standardization through things like steam means if you want to just use software it usually works without much effort. You don't need to debug bad installs or dive through the installations unless you want to mod things, and even then many things have native mod support so you don't even need to poke through the folder structure or understand how software loading works to run sophisticated mods for most games.
I’m on the millennial train here, and am fully onboard with the monopolization angle, but this is taking it a bit far? Chromebooks aren’t that bad.
Stepping back and maybe over generalizing again, I think the problem might be… attention spans? Like kids are so bombarded with feeds and notification spam that, on average, there’s less patience to sit down, look stuff up, and neurotically tinker (which was still the vast minority in my generation). Its the same problem leading to less interest in literature, TV, anything long form.
Learning the bare minimum to function in Windows is not exactly “tech literate” to me, it just happens to be the system so many businesses are stuck with, and some generations were forced to learn by coincidence. Looking back, modern Android and iOS are really accessible by comparison, though of course they have enshittification issues.
Finally someone who is sane & smart
Every corporation have a student program. Universities promote corporate products because teachers get money from corporations. But no, blame Google, because they're responsible, it's like saying that IBM was responsible for Hitler. Evil corporations did nothing wrong because evil cannot be changed to good. That's just people who make decisions to put the money on top of morality.
It's tough. No one is supplying hardware below cost and losing money. They're cheap because by offering only a chrome browser, you don't need much hardware. Most everything was headed online anyway because with the advent of Mac popularity, no one wanted to put out little pieces of software for both Windows and Mac.
Chromebooks weren't unpopular at the start just because, they kicked around until the market shifted enough to everything being online and until schoolboards adopted the "laptop for everyone" mentality. Then schoolboards adopted them because they were cheap cheap cheap. I recall a teacher saying they were also good because it meant everyone was on the exact same office suite (google docs). No different versions where the buttons were in different places, no 2010 version, 365 version, whatever. Everyone had the exact same version. Something broken? Factory reset was dead easy. No techs needed.
Now do cars.
Man I really need to get the desk for my kid’s PC set up. The machine is already there and got switched to Linux back during the winter.
He will have long creative hyper-focused minecraft build sessions on console, so I bet he’d be pumped to find out he could use the CLI with a keyboard. Or as he calls it, “the commands.”
They did. They also basically came in around the early 90's in San Francisco and all the tech hippies were like, "Yeah, we're gonna give people all these wonderful tools to create new realities and it's gonna be like a Star Trek utopia!" Then the VC investors and money men showed up and said "No, we're gonna use these tools on people to make them more predictable." So now instead of giving people tools, tech uses tools on people.