As #JohnHodgman is fond of reminding us, "#nostalgia is a toxic impulse." It is easy for an old net.hand like me to fall into the trap of shaking his fist at the #cloud. Having been on the other side of that dynamic, I can tell you it's no fun.

When I got on #BBSes in the early 1980s, there was an omnipresent chorus of grumps insisting that the move from honest acoustic couplers to decadent #modems was the end of the Golden Age of telecommunications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

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When I got on #Usenet shortly thereafter, the Unix Greybeard set never passed up an opportunity to tell us newcomers that the #Fidonet-Usenet bridge allowed the barbarian hordes to overwhelm their Athenian marketplace of ideas:

https://technicshistory.com/2020/06/25/the-era-of-fragmentation-part-4-the-anarchists/

When I joined #TheWELL in the late 1980s, I was repeatedly assured that the good times were over, and that we would never see their like again:

https://www.well.com/

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Now that I'm 52, I've learned to recognize this dynamic, from the #EternalSeptember:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

to the moral panic over menuing systems replacing CLIs:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses

to the culture wars over what would happen when the net got a normie-friendly GUI:

https://www.dejavu.org/1993win.htm

And yeah, I've done it too, explaining "Why I won’t buy an #iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)":

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

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The underlying pathology of that enshittification wasn't the UI, or whether it involved an app store. As the #Luddites knew, the important thing about a technology isn't what it *does*, but who it does it *for* and who it does it *to*:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The problem wasn't which technology we used. There is nothing inherent about touchscreens that makes them into prisons that trap users, rather than walled gardens that protect them.

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Likewise, the problem wasn't who made that tech. We didn't swap wise UUCP Monks for venal tech bros. Early tech was full of public-spirited sysops, but it was also full of would-be monopolists who tried - and failed - to get us to "stop talking to each other and start buying things":

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

If it wasn't the technology that killed the old, good internet, and if it wasn't the people who killed the old, good internet, where did the #enshitternet come from?

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It wasn't the wrong tech, it wasn't the wrong people: it was the wrong *rules*. After all, the Apple ][+ went on sale the year #RonaldReagan hit the campaign trail. Consumer tech was the first industry born after #antitrust was dismantled, and it created the modern monopoly playbook: buying and merging with competitors. The resulting unity of purpose and anticompetitive profit margins allowed tech to capture its regulators and secure favorable court and legislative outcomes.

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The simultaneous drawdown of antitrust enforcement and growth of tech meant that tech's long-standing cycle of renewal was ended. Tech companies that owed their existence to their ability to reverse-engineer incumbent companies' products and make #interoperable replacements and add-ons were able to ban anyone else from doing unto them as they did unto the giants that came before them:

https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980

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The pirates became admirals, and set about creating a "#FelonyContemptOfBusinessModel":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/painful-burning-dribble/#law-of-intended-consequences

They changed the rules to ensure that they could "disrupt" anyone they chose, but could themselves mobilize the full might of the US government to prevent anyone from disrupting *them*:

https://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

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