in 1950 in the book "the human use of human beings", the famous mathematician Norbert Weiner pointed out your exact sentiment. Complaining that instead of solving problems, or doing anything new or interesting, people were using these "computing machines" to increase the efficiency of the parts of the capitalist machine that caused the problems in the first place.

Nobody listened, and nothing has changed.

I think this calls for a government funded national un-enshittification Laboratory to study the social dynamics of enshittification and develop hygiene practices. Work must be done quickly before enshittification research becomes enshittified!

Nah this tech will poison the web. People don't know what it is and take it too seriously.

I think the problem is then you eventually get SEOification. I suppose you can just reset every now and again. Maybe like give a training program to get SEO people real jobs.

> Hollywood has.. hard power

Um, what??

This is a clearly false collection of arbitrary useless and arrogant opinions. See any famous reclusive intellectual or writer for counterexamples.

Because this is so depressing I am going to try think of positive aspects:

The flip side to this is the government had power because these activities required enormous resources. Perhaps it will go the other direction, if there is less of a moat other players can enter. Eg all it takes to make a state is a bunch of cheap drones and the latest government bot according to your philosophy.

Maybe it means government will massively shrink in personelle? Maybe we can have a completely open source ai government/legal system. Lawyers kind of suck ethically anyway, so maybe it would be better? With low barrier to entry, we can rapidly prototype such governments and trial them on smaller populations like iceland. Such utopias will be so good everyone will move there.

They still have to have physical prisons, if everyone is in prison this will be silly, but I suppose they can fine everyone, not so different from lowering wages which they already do.

Great idea.

Sam's sad face in the NYT article is pretty priceless.

"...Google and tech industry allies responded with a massive lobbying campaign... convince lawmakers banning targeted ads would hurt the global economy. The gambit worked, and the draft law no longer threatens Google’s advertising."

Lol, sounds like Google and the tech industry used targeted advertising to prevent a ban on targeted advertising.