Somewhat related to this, I always wonder when I see people defending Apple (and to some degree Google) not allowing people to easily install software on their phones outside their app stores. The defence is usually that they provide some value-add, but then they take a more than ample cut from software developers—and even content creators via Patreon—to account for this purported value, without providing an easy/any alternative—if the benefits are so great, won't people keeping using the store? Prior to smartphones, if you owned the operating system, you truly owned it, and you could install whatever you wanted on it. It seems now that every time a new technology/updated product comes around, there seems to be a trend of finding ways to 'enshittify' it with ecosystem lock-ins, subscriptions, and gatekeeping for features and aftermarket parts that should be standard and interoperable. The normalisation of this kind of thing, and its defence by Joe Citizen, seems to be a kind of dispossession.
Somewhat related to this, I always wonder when I see people defending Apple (and to some degree Google) not allowing people to easily install software on their phones outside their app stores. The defence is usually that they provide some value-add, but then they take a more than ample cut from software developers—and even content creators via Patreon—to account for this purported value, without providing an easy/any alternative—if the benefits are so great, won't people keeping using the store? Prior to smartphones, if you owned the operating system, you truly owned it, and you could install whatever you wanted on it. It seems now that every time a new technology/updated product comes around, there seems to be a trend of finding ways to 'enshittify' it with ecosystem lock-ins, subscriptions, and gatekeeping for features and aftermarket parts that should be standard and interoperable. The normalisation of this kind of thing, and its defence by Joe Citizen, seems to be a kind of dispossession.