"We've entered into a Faustian pact with these companies: While it's brilliant to have access to high-quality products and software, very often for free, it's important to remember that there is a trade-off involved—often of our personal data and privacy. We give these companies our attention and our information, which they then turn into big bucks and apparently unassailable monopolies."
"Silicon Valley's leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes—sorry, gifts—and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that's before we get to the rampant enshittification, as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them."
"Google has cornered 90% of the search market for the past decade, but it is often no better, and sometimes demonstrably worse than its rivals, perhaps on purpose—Doctorow has called Google the poster-child for enshittification citing its alleged strategy of worsening search quality so that users spend more time on the site."
Big technology companies face widespread criticism for social media harms, misinformation spread, data exploitation, environmental negligence, and tax avoidance. Tech leaders maintain close relationships with political figures while their products deliberately deteriorate through enshittification—designed degradation that makes services less useful and more extractive. Users accept a Faustian bargain, trading personal data and privacy for free access to quality products. However, alternatives exist globally, particularly in Europe, offering greener, more ethical, privacy-respecting options. Switching from dominant platforms like Google's search engine, which controls 90% of the market, is straightforward and increasingly necessary.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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