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> The publicly funded IT industry gave us C, UNIX, the TCP/IP, the Web, and all the foundations we've built our things on.

Please don't rewrite history.

Web/WWW: ok, CERN. Yeah. That's publicly funded.

C and UNIX were invented at Bell Labs. That wasn't publicly funded.

Most people know TCP/IP was built upon ARPANET which was a defense project. OK, you can argue it was publicly funded through our taxes and a bunch of R&D happened stateside at several universities and the RAND Corporation, but this wasn't some gift to the American public.

the TL;DR is: the first full public demo was in DC in 1972, but it started in secrecy as Project CAM (not to be confused with Project Camelot, which it merged with later). The entire point of ARPANET was to help dismantle communism worldwide. Simulmatics Corp was basically a military contractor that worked on ARPANET 1961-1968 in South Vietnam to compile data on communists and make that database available to the military/government over a network. The data they promised to the military included:

• Public opinion polls from all countries
• Cultural patterns of all the tribes and peoples of the world
• Archives on comparative communism… files on the contemporary world communist movements
• Political participation of various countries.… This includes such variables as voting, membership in associations, activity of political parties, etc.
• Youth movements
• Mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social change
• Data on national integration, particularly in “plural” societies; the integration of ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the merging or splitting of present political units
• International propaganda output
• Peasant attitudes and behavior
• International armament expenditures and trends

ARPANET and TCP/IP was not some wonderful gift from a benevolent government using our public funds generously to improve technology in America or the world. It was a spy tool with very nefarious intentions.

All companies in 2023 be like "we'll start charging for every time the user unlocks their screen; we'll make a premium plan just to allow you to refresh your feed more than twice a day; we'll force developers to pay $1000's a month for an API that so far they could use for free; we'll drop all of our open-source licenses and abandon all of our open efforts; we'll kill all of the alternative clients without notice (after insulting as freeriders developers and moderators who have put in a lot of unpaid work); we'll ban you if we notice that you don't use our official client; we'll come up with more ways to bypass your ad-blockers; we'll expand the network of data brokers, advertisers and gossipers we share your data with, and share a generic "updated T&Cs" email with you that you can't refuse; we'll shovel more ads down your throat, while treating the usage of any tool that protects your privacy as a crime akin to piracy; we'll make an effort to change the Internet protocols themselves to account for surveillance patterns; and we'll make it impossible for you to copy your data out of our platform".

Enshittification, removal of features that people want and addition of features nobody asked have become the bedrock of how our industry works nowadays.

Then, when backlash, boycotts and a rush for alternatives obviously follow, these failures of our industry rush to put together ridiculous statements like these ("we have heard you, we work closely with our partners and customers to find the best solution, we care about our customers, bla bla").

No, you don't.

If you really cared about your customers, if you proactively listened to us, if you genuinely loved the product you build, you wouldn't be in this state.

The only thing that announcements like these say is "we are so deaf to our customers that we didn't even expect so many of them to go so mad; we spent too much time in meeting rooms listening to our own farts and those of our investors rather than getting in touch with those who use our product; we expected to be so big that people would have had no choice but to follow us, and the only reason why we are apologizing now is that we didn't know that there were so many open and free alternatives around comparable or better than our product that would threaten our existence at our first mistake".

You failed at listening to your customers, you overestimated your size and impact, you underestimated the free alternatives to your product, and you failed to predict the scale of the backlash - in other words, you failed at running a business that creates products and services.

When companies end up in this state, the damage is done. No further announcements can undo it. Everybody understands that these enshittified companies are desperate for money, and you can NEVER trust a business that is so desperate for money that it stops caring about its customers.

The unhealthy and unsustainable form of capitalism that has fueled the growth of our industry for years is dying. But, before it dies, it's trying to take everybody down with it. It's time for whoever said that this economic model is the most efficient way to create products and services aligned with the needs of the customers to publicly acknowledge their macroscopic failure.

The publicly funded IT industry gave us C, UNIX, the TCP/IP, the Web, and all the foundations we've built our things on.

The VC-funded IT industry only gave us a bunch of companies with unsustainable growth trajectories, unethical business models, pathologic short-termism, the future of technology being decided at quarterly earning calls, literally zero innovation besides the "cult of user engagement", literally zero business models besides "scoop up and resell as much personal data as possible", and a complete deafness towards the customers.

#Unity

https://twitter.com/unity/status/1703547752205218265?ref_src=twsrc%5etfw

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