Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital ⊗ Reimagining our built world ⊗ The death of scenius

By the way

Recently, grabbing a couple of coffees with different people, I mentioned a few times that I tend to split what I want to read in at least four buckets. Things I want to know as a citizen; things that might go in the newsletter or inform me about topics I cover; things I’d love to know but will scrap if I don’t have enough time; and n buckets where I pile links for client research. The citizen stack is for things I’m interested in but also make some effort to keep track of because they are important to know for my neighbourhood, city, province, country, planet.

The piece below, on enshittification, is kind of like that. I’m quite tired of reading about the corrosion of online public space, decentralisation, sp@m, slop, etc. But, kind of like a citizen in physical space, I want to keep myself informed as an online citizen. I’m writing this because people seem interested in how I keep up with so many things. That sorting habit is a small bit of the system. Writing the newsletter is more work than just reading, but it’s also a very useful filtering and thinking mechanism. More importantly for today, the first piece below is a good one with a useful shift in how we should consider zuckermuskian platforms and their ilk.

Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital

Cory Doctorow explains how the phenomenon of “enshittification”—the decline in quality of social media platforms—is not primarily caused by venture capital but by the lack of competition and regulatory constraints. Users often remain on platforms like Facebook and Twitter not due to addiction or because they don’t understand the issues. It’s because “they care about the other people there more than they hate Zuck or Musk.”

He argues that, yes, these CEOs want to make money for investors, yes they want to get rich, but they wouldn’t push the extraction lever that far if people could leave easily or if real legislative guardrails were a threat. They push the lever to the max because we are individually stuck and have collectively disarmed ourselves with deregulation.

Has he often does, he also looks to recent history and reminds us that many open platforms were first closed and it’s through the work of opening them that we have options today (Unix to Linux, the Office File Format to Open Document Format). That’s why, even though he supports Mastodon, he also supports Free Our Feeds, which aims to actually decentralise Bluesky, which is centralised but decentralisation-capable. It’s not how he puts it, but it’s better to force-open the easier to use platform so more people can move around, than to just focus on the “more pure” Mastodon for fewer people.

I know better than to count on markets as a reliable source of corporate discipline. Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the “pivot to video”), he would treat his users better. […]

This is the strength of federated, federatable social media — it disciplines enshittifiers by lowering switching costs, and if enshittifiers persist, it makes it easy for users to escape unshitted, because they don’t have to solve the collective action problem. Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else. […]

There is nothing unusual, in other words, about hacking freedom into something that is proprietary or just insufficiently free. That’s totally normal. It’s how we got almost everything great about computers.

Reimagining our built world

In her piece, malina dabrowska argues for a reimagining of the architect’s role beyond merely designing buildings, advocating for the incorporation of futures thinking into architectural practice. She writes about worldbuilding, where architects create narratives that envision alternative, regenerative futures, thereby challenging existing systems and practices. She also highlights the use of speculative films as effective tools for storytelling, engaging stakeholders in discussions about possible futures for the built environment.

I think this applies to more than architecture. Basically she’s arguing for a practice of looking further ahead and thinking holistically—I’m extrapolating a bit on the second part. In my view, architecture and many other practices should, done well, already be doing something like futures and holistic thinking. However, it might not specifically be included in the methods and tools of the field, it might “just” be something done when you take time. Which is why her piece also brings to mind the inclusion of futures not just as new practices but also as a new semantic field to think with, an additional layer of vocabulary. Put another way, some professions might already be close to thinking further in time but are “simply” missing the vocabulary. Making speculative movies and design fictions is great, but the first step of incorporating a new language and being aware of the usefulness of these practices could already go some way. (The article says “paid” at the top but the full text is above the paywall.)

While architects are concerned predominantly with the ‘now’ and creating physical representations of their ideas, I also understood that the climate crisis should push architects to imagine alternative futures for our cities, where nature and the built world are in a symbiotic relationship. […]

I refer to myself as an architect, and I advocate for the expansion of our duties beyond ‘just designing buildings’, but also modelling the futures. This should be a reciprocal act where the futures practice critically examines the intent of any design, and the design seeks to respond to the brief created by that enquiry. […]

The act of critical enquiry into alternative futures is required to rethink our current degenerative systems and propose new pathways into collectively designing futures we want the next generations to inhabit. We need to look far ahead on our horizons to understand how to undo the damage our cities and infrastructure created and align ourselves with the deep planetary timescales we are not used to dealing with.

The death of scenius

Ian Leslie explores the decline of the urban artistic scenius, which fostered innovative movements in the 20th century. The interconnectedness of artists in cities like New York, Paris, and Berlin historically led to significant cultural breakthroughs, driven by collaboration and competition. However, rising real estate prices and the isolating effects of modern technology have diminished these creative clusters, resulting in a stagnation of new artistic movements.

I’m always up for some reading about this concept and those scenes so I liked it. However, I don’t think we necessarily know of sceniuses as they happen, so we might just not know of contemporary ones yet. Second, their supposed disappearance might have more to do with the dissolution of consensus reality. I’m sure various subcultures have a scenius, but they are seen only by the participants and their fans, not at large. And even there, as Gibson has been saying for years, “anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk.” In other words, it’s not that there are no cheap cities or that people don’t meet in person, it’s the speed and atomisation of culture that makes sceniuses fleeting and hard to see.

There’s something about living and working near other artists and art-adjacent people that multiplies individual potential. This is a measurable phenomenon: a study of classical composers during the period 1750-1899, in Paris, Vienna and London, discovered that they were significantly more productive when they lived in close proximity to other composers. Notably, it was the most talented composers who benefited the most. […]

“Nothing could have been more interesting than these talks, with their perpetual clashes of opinion. You kept your mind on the alert, you felt encouraged to do disinterested, sincere research, you laid in supplies of enthusiasm that kept you going for weeks and weeks, until a project you had in in mind took definite form. You always left the cafe feeling hardened for the struggle, with a stronger will, a sharpened purpose, and a clearer head.”

§ Hypernormalisation—a state where everyone knows the system is broken, but we all pretend it’s working anyway. Short video by Rahaf Harfoush. “If you feel like something is deeply off with the world, you’re not alone. Many of us, myself included, are looking around and seeing a society going through the motions—appearing functional, yet crumbling beneath the surface. The systems built over the past decades are failing us, unable to address the reality of this moment: navigating technological upheaval, climate catastrophe, and geopolitical shifts.” (Via The Nexialist #0210.)

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• New report highlights alternative futures for land use in Oregon. “A set of video scenarios designed to catalyze strategic conversations that address difficult and overlapping challenges such as climate-driven migration, environmental instability, affordable housing, and rural economic development.”
• Getting to know futures studies. “Getting to Know Futures Studies is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), that provides an easily accessible peek into futures studies. The course has been created with experts of the field and it gives the participants a solid starting point for further growing their know-how on futures studies.”
• AI Narratives: the Will to Power. “I used CLA [(Causal Layered Analysis)] to explore current AI narratives in terms of four archetypes, adding a horizontal layer to represent competing discourses”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• DeepSeek reader. An article I sent to supporting members earlier this week, open to read for anyone (for now). “DeepSeek is exploding onto the AI scene and already having a massive impact on AI labs, investors, business models, forecasts, and more. Here’s your overview and reading list.”
• Purely AI-generated art can’t get copyright protection, says Copyright Office. “Generative artificial intelligence output based purely on text prompts — even detailed ones — isn’t protected by current copyright law, according to the US Copyright Office.”
• OpenAI furious DeepSeek might have stolen all the data OpenAI stole from us. Irony, Sam Altman is thy name. “OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else's data without permission or compensation.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Chinese ‘artificial sun’ sets a record towards fusion power generation. “The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), commonly known as China's ‘artificial sun,’ has achieved a remarkable scientific milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for an impressive 1,066 seconds. This accomplishment, reached on Monday, sets a new world record and marks a significant breakthrough in the pursuit of fusion power generation.”
• A third of the Arctic’s vast carbon sink now a source of emissions, study reveals. “For millennia, Arctic land ecosystems have acted as a deep-freeze for the planet’s carbon, holding vast amounts of potential emissions in the permafrost. But ecosystems in the region are increasingly becoming a contributor to global heating as they release more CO2 into the atmosphere with rising temperatures, a new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded.”
• New York to make major greenhouse gas emitters pay for past pollution. “The New York legislation will require fossil-fuel companies responsible for the bulk of historic greenhouse gas emissions to pay a combined $3 billion each year for 25 years for infrastructure repairs and upgrades needed to recover from and adapt to climate change impacts like natural disasters, sea-level rise, and extreme heat.”

Asides

• Building a medieval castle from scratch. “In the heart of Guédelon forest, in an abandoned quarry, a team of master-builders is building a 13th-century castle from scratch. Quarrymen, stonemasons, carpenter-joiners, woodcutters, blacksmiths, tilers, carters and rope makers…are working together to revive heritage craft skills and to shed light on the world of medieval construction.”
• Archaeologists are finding dugout canoes in the American Midwest as old as the Great Pyramids of Egypt. “In the waterways connected to the Great Lakes, researchers uncover boats that tell the story of millennia of Indigenous history”
• Watch whales sleeping vertically together. “The whales, which spend much of their day hunting squid to eat, take what are essentially ‘power naps’ to recharge. The 12-15 minute naps are done near the ocean’s surface, and witnessing it would be quite the experience.”