My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
Very true. The Dead Media Project of the 1990s showed that even if profitable, media can go dark.
Some things are made to exist and then go away, like dance or radio. But if you want to make something to last, digital is not the way to go. Not at all.
A fine short (digital) work on why digitizing everything is not the answer...