Enshittification is Everywhere
THROUGHOUT the month this month we opened 20 Kinder Surprise eggs. The contents were "duplicates" about half the time, so there was not much of a surprise there. Maybe the German company behind this wrongly assumes that kids will only buy a few of these and thus won't encounter the same surprise as many as 4 times (same contents 4 or 5 times!).
This is a form of enshittification because more than 3 decades ago when I was a kid repetition was very rare in Kinder Surprise, the egg was made of a better material, the plastic split apart into two pieces (maybe this has changed for child safety or environmental reasons), and the contents were mostly educational, not a 3-piece animal that can be composed/assembled in 5 seconds or less.
So what happened? Are kids presumed so dumb now? The most they can handle is 2 or 3 pieces of plastic? Has Kinder Surprise lowered manufacturing and packaging costs? Is that what's happening? Is there some veiled message here?
Either way, as each year passes it seems we're being conditioned to the expectation of failure in space missions (even basic things like moon landers) and tossing some vessel into the Sun (to burn, not return or transmit back physical material) is considered a major scientific achievement.
Have humans given up on accomplishment (or equipping other humans to accomplish stuff, other than amass fake 'friends' and 'likes' in social control media 'farms')? Is this intentional? A dumb population is a lot less potent or likely to resist inequality (or power imbalances), it's distracted and sedated.
Likewise, Computer Science has been reduced to just "computer" (spyphone) and programming is nowadays "memorising frameworks" (or APIs like function calls and library names). No wonder modern computing stinks so badly and the average "messaging app" is about 100 times heavier than a functional IRC client. The battery of the average spyphone might last a day without charge; weird, we could carry them for a month without charge only decades ago.
We need to teach kids to be creative and engage in "playful cleverness". We need to teach science, not worship of high school dropouts.
Without education there can be no science. Science must matter. That's just not happening, but 'LaunchLibre' will try to change that.
As long as people vote based on social control media, their Internet connections will get cut and they will panic that their spyphones no longer receive a "lifeblood" of notifications. █