Not Yet Enshittified
Well, here we are. Again. After announcing the end of One For The Road as an email newsletter last month, it’s back. And not just as a blog post, but also an email dispatch.
I really thought last month’s edition of the O.F.T.R. newsletter was going to be the end of a pretty solid run. I’d had enough of Substack’s bullshit. Try as I might, I just can’t bring myself to mount a full-fledged return to corporate social media platforms where my friends congregate and my interests pass me by. So I’d resigned myself to posting this to my blog and distributing it across a handful of small federated sites and niche photography-focused social platforms.
So be it. My mental health is too important to me (especially with the state of the world these days) and I’d rather focus on creative pursuits with less exposure than focus on exposure in the name of creative pursuits. I have that luxury — I don’t count on this as a revenue stream to help pay the bills.
Because I hadn’t found a replacement email service for Substack, I forced myself to be okay with killing the email, and I let it be known in my final dispatch from Substack. I got some supportive messages from some of y’all about it. In one of them, my buddy Scott Evans decried the end, and rightfully placed the blame on the enshittifcation of the corporate platforms that we as individuals, independent creatives both professional and hobbyist, and society as a whole have become reliant on.
“This is a total drag and is exactly where this stuff is always bound to end up…because all platforms are doomed to enshittify.” Too true, homie.
If you’re not familiar with the idea of enshittification, the term was coined by tech journalist Corey Doctorow in 2022 and further explained in a 2023 blog post he authored on the Wired website:
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a 'two sided market,' where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
If you’ve spent any time online over the last 15 years using search, social, and e-commerce platforms, you’ve experienced this. There are plenty of examples out there, but Google, Amazon, and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) are the easiest to point out — they’ve all gotten increasingly shitty to use as their corporate parents have raked in unbelievable amounts of capital. As Doctorow so deftly points out, these two things are directly correlated.
Turns out that July 1, the Monday after I sent that last dispatch of O.F.T.R., has officially become known as Enshitification Day, dubbed such by a buncha nerds on Mastodon (love those Mastodon nerds) to commemorate Google’s shuddering of Google Reader on July 1, 2013, and more recently, the day Reddit cut off API access, Twitter required login to view anything, YouTube began experimenting with a ban on ad blockers, and Meta (FB/Instagram) began blocking news access in Canada.
Basically, if it don’t pay it don’t play, and if it pays it plays regardless of the consequences on users, businesses, and society at large.
As I mentioned previously, I don’t get paid for this stuff. I’m fortunate enough to have a relatively lucrative day job, my creative pursuits are purely in service of my personal growth and mental health. But I have a lot of friends who are professional independent creatives (writers, artists and photographers, musicians and recording engineers), and in many ways they rely to varying degrees on these platforms for income. And I feel for them. Enshittification is real.
But back to this newsletter… I got some solid suggestions for email solutions from some Mastodon users (again, love those Mastodon nerds), but ultimately spent some time tinkering with the email services that my website platform provides, and was able to resolve (I think) the technical and workflow issues I was having. And though there’s a small fee associated with it, I’ve chosen to go that route. Is it doomed to eventually enshittify? Likely. But it’ll do for now.
As always, thanks for riding with me, and being patient with me as navigate all this BS.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Big news. I managed to complete a photo booklet I’ve been working on for a while, called Take A Seat Vol. 1. It’s a series of images of places to sit. Thrilling, I know. But I think it turned out pretty alright. I’m selling them for $12 each in my site’s store — that’s a flat fee that covers the cost of production and includes shipping in the US (only $3 more for international orders!) — and I’m adding a print from the book with each order of the first run. I only had 25 of these things made and I’ve sold a few already, so get on it if you want one.
To whet yer whistle, the images in this month’s edition of One For The Road are selects from the booklet. Not convinced yet? Read a little more about it in a recent blog post.
MUSIC
I’ve been more preoccupied than usual with work lately, so I’ve been relying on two streaming music apps, both free of enshittification, that require very little work on my part to keep the sounds on…
This app was founded way back in 2013, but I only recently learned about it. It’s so good that, after only a few days of riding on the free version, I ponied up the $50 annual subscription fee for unfettered access.
In it, users are presented with a map of the world. You select a country, a decade, and some combination of “Slow,” “Fast,” and “Weird,” and the app begins playing music from the selected place, time, and mood, without genre restriction.
Taxi mode allows for multiple countries and decades, there are curated lists for artists, and themes (“Unreasonable Gym,” “Cuisine Island,” “Broken Hearts,” etc.), and weekly top 10s and special playlists are added regularly. You can “like” songs to save them to a list, and if you’re like me, go hunting online for the records they came from (dangerous).
Lately I’ve been in Taxi mode kicking out the jams from Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and Chile in the 1950s and ’60s, or in France, Nigeria, Tunisia and Algeria in the ’60s and ‘70s.
This free website has been online for over a decade, and I’ve been using for about that long, specifically for those working hours when I’m doing the kinds of things that require deep focus (like spreadsheeting and strategic planning…you know, math).
The premise is pretty straightforward: The site streams from two separate embedded audio sources — SoundCloud music tagged as “ambient,” and the user’s choice of a number of emergency service scanner feeds (I’m partial to the LAX Air Traffic Control and LAPD South Bureau feeds) — with separate volume controls for finding just the right mix of the two. When I first started dating my wife, I mentioned this to her in passing, and it turned out that this is a side project of one her coworkers. Random.
Anyway, the point here isn’t that I like listening to cops work (I don’t, and I can barely make out what’s being said anyway), it’s the overall effect this soundscape has on my productivity. The spikes of unpredictable radio chatter mixed with the droning synth of ambient music serve to keep my brain engaged by drowning out external distractions and yet still remaining the in the background and not distracting me from the tasks at hand. There’s actually science behind this, notably a University of Illinois study focused on why people are productive while working in coffee shops, which provides a similar auditory environment. Pretty cool stuff.
