Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.” The company also nixed an editorial that Scarlata planned to write about the retractions.
Springer 'only the author' comment is bs, as the author died and stuff is now in public domain. Refusing an editorial explaining the issue is a signal too
Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
wtf? Asking money for an empty pdf. Springer will be Springer.
My blogging activity peaked about 5 years ago. Around that time, I started seeing this effect of enshittification of online platforms. Before Musk bought Twitter, it was the number one source of visitors to my blog. I had 20k followers on Twitter at the time, and I noticed that these platforms were starting to use the algorithm, filtering things down.
Says his blogging peaked 5 yrs ago (2020-21, pandemic?) then saw enshittification impact traffic
[[Cory Doctorow p]] on AI en the economic dynamic behind the hype that bigtech is pursuing to remain growth stocks even as monopolists. 'tech centaur' me in a car, a human head on something else vs 'reverse centaur' a meat puppet doing the machines bidding, e.g. an Amazon delivery driver
Steve Jobs must be....
The independent web is already here, quietly thriving while Big Tech implodes under its own extractive weight. All you have to do is join it.
Extraction as limited viable by def
I am hopeful. Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed. Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.
hope, Vgl my talk #sotn18 where I said the same thing. It's an action
The fact that you have to figure out whether the discussion you're trying to join is on Twitter or Bluesky, Mastodon or Instagram – that is just the most Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve-ass way of running a digital world. I mean, 1990 called and they want their walled gardens back
current silos compared to AOL and Compuserve era. Good one
But most of all, enshittification is the result of anticircumvention law's ban on interoperability.
Core premise: enshittification is caused by anticircumvention bc you've nowhere to go. This is a deepening of his adversarial interoperability concept
[[Cory Doctorow p]] published the transcript of his talk at ccc 2025
[[Cory Doctorow p]] oped in Guardian, on US tech policy and enshittification. Points out that the US basically reneged on a deal (no tariffs if you allow our tech, but now we have the tariffs) so we can renege our part of it (circumvention laws). This aimed at UK audience, points out that that circumvention is inside a EU reg (art 6 of Copyright and Information Society Directive 2001) so it would be relatively easy after brexit to ditch the thing
Note 2001/29 has been amended by Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market 2019/790, but I don't think in this aspect.
t was reported that a staggering one billion PCs were still running Windows 10, even though a full half were eligible to upgrade to the AI-satured Windows 11.
1 billion PCs still running Windows 10. Here seen as sign of resistance to Win 11 and AI slop
Google Chrome marks people's self-hosted password manager's vaults as 'unsafe'. Mostly bitwarden and it seems if your subdomain is vault. Obviously immediate mitigation: dump Chrome.
[[Cory Doctorow p]] talk at CCC 2025
Description of moving away from Spotify to Qobuz. Spotify is Swedish but in the spotlight for hosting ICE ads in the USA at the moment. Qobuz is French, but hosts their stuff on AWS.
A July 2024 posting (via Alper Çugun on Masto) signalling a decline in functional quality in GitHub. In his Masto message Alper anecdotally says "many leading edge developers have already moved off or are seriously considering it."
In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.
1) markets 2) regulation 3) interoperability 4) labor
And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result of a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.
enshittocene enshitternet bit too cute I think. Valid point: if it's policy that results in it, we can roll things back. Also w the current Trump chaos-admin there's opportunity as US is dismantling international agreements, making room for other nations / EU regs to disalign too.
I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states
'crimogenic', indeed, I think e.g. all current adtech is illegal in the EU, except it hasn't been tried in court much yet.
I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment
[[Cory Doctorow]] exploring enshittification in a third talk. Says here it's enabled by changes in the policy environment rather than technology. This as tech platforms started doing it at the same time, not in the same phase of their existence.
then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers;
Tinfoil hat theory: This is the stage Google Search is at in April 2024. Not looking good bruv.
I like having as few opportunities as possible for would-be enshittifiers to mess around with what I'm trying to do
Molly says: "If anyone enshittifies my newsletter, it's going to be me, dammit!"
Enshittification, you'll recall, is the lifecycle of the online platform: first, the platform allocates surpluses to end-users; then, once users are locked in, those surpluses are taken away and given to business-customers. Once the advertisers, publishers, sellers, creators and performers are locked in, the surplus is clawed away from them and taken by the publishers.
The post continues to explain how this happened with [[Facebook]]:
1 First, gain a huge user base with network effects and lock users into the platform. 2. Spy on users to offer precision targeted advertising. Companies added beacons to websites to improve targeting. 3. Raise ad rates and decrease use of expensive anti-fraud measures.
The enshittification of Amazon – where you search for a specific product and get six screens of ads for different, worse ones – is the natural end-state of chokepoint capitalism: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola
That same enshittification is on every platform, and "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" is just a way of saying, "Now that you're stuck here, we're going to enshittify your experience."