A Note About Enshittification

I run a 3d printer for fun. I need 3d modeling software to go with it. The two work together.

I make things which never before existed. Even if it’s just a sawhorse jig it’s something I created. Evil cannot create. Good loves to create. That’s a key to understanding life!

A year and a half ago I picked Autodesk Fusion 360 more or less at random for my 3d modeling software. Technically I’m using “Autodesk Fusion 360 For Personal Use”. It’s massive overkill but that’s where I landed after escaping analysis paralysis.

I suffered through the learning curve. Brutal! But I was more or less happy with the software.

My use is well within the “free” personal use category. I’d be willing to upgrade if they had a cheap low end variant. They don’t. Pricing goes from zero to nosebleed in the blink of an eye.

They don’t want small fry like me. They’ve got Microsoft syndrome… chasing offices and schools and “business to business” until they’re intolerable for a normal human. I consider this a red flag. The company either is or wants to be a ward of the State; ask Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin about their consumer divisions.

I soon  encountered another complaint. It’s ridiculously cloud based. It’s an absolute bitch if my internet slows (which was happening with some frequency). I’d do something that shouldn’t be hard, like draft a circle, and the whole system would creak like a Soviet field commander dealing with a mandatory meeting of commissars to discuss the monthly toilet paper ration. Drawing a circle does not need to be cloud based!

I was still willing to put up with it. I even updated my broadband with Starlink.

Meanwhile, Microsoft (the ultimate planetary enshittification kings!) phased out Win10. My hardware can’t easily upgrade and more importantly I don’t want to upgrade to WinEnshittify. I don’t need or want anything new from Microsoft but Fusion 360 seems addicted to it for no clear reason. It started whining that my OS was “out of date”. This had no affect on anything; just a warning that warned me about nothing. I got a Mac laptop running as a backup and tried that. It worked fine with Fusion 360 but didn’t fix my underlying situation.

Mac is just like Win, in both instances my hardware is limited to an unsupported OS level. I got a Linux box running but Fusion 360 (with some caveats) is allergic to Linux. I’m not sure why. Fusion 360 is so cloud based it shouldn’t matter how I’m logging on. But… enshittify.

I’ve been busy with real life. I’m not using Fusion 360 much lately. I just started a very simple little project. So of course just now it needed an urgent software upgrade. Predictably the upgrade was convoluted and annoying. Why? Enshittification.

Meanwhile, other parts of the world seem intent on sucking. I keep reading news that Washington State, or perhaps New York, or some other ninnies out there are trying to get their nose into the 3d tent. They’ve been trying to regulate 3d printing since it was invented, as if every machine shop in every town can’t do the equivalent in metal. People who don’t own a drill press have opinions. They don’t like the peasants having 3d printers. Honestly they don’t like peasants having cars, hobbies, families, religion, or fun either. The current general idea is that a magic unicorn verification system will scan all print files lest a printer do crimethink. Sooner or later one of these nimrods will succeed in their unworkable bullshit. Of course they’ll also kneecap their own State’s industry but that never bothers a commie. To commies, failure isn’t just an option, it’s the goal. Look what they’ve done to education.

Putting aside concerns over civil liberties, it’s a huge foolish hassle. Running all files past a grand inquisitor which doesn’t yet exist and probably never will is just plain unworkable. Software will never truly be able to identify if my home designed combination flower pot and carburetor wash basin with add on sexual toy and D&D barbarian mini-fig is or is not crimethink. The ill defined limits of what the hopeless subject is allowed by his overlords is not a solvable geometry problem.

You can’t censor a tool’s ability to do stupid shit and still preserve it’s ability to do useful shit. People who use tools know this. People who can’t do real world things don’t care what they’re doing when they nuke their own societies capabilities. Sorry folks, you can’t auto-detect a CNC machine or a 3d Printer into harmlessness any more than you can detect an equation in a spreadsheet cell and decide its moral content.

None of this hypothetical regulation should affect me. I make simple things like sawhorses in a State that hasn’t (yet?) gone full retard. But Fusion 360 is hopelessly cloud based and some of their customers are in prison states… so then what. Surely there will be some sort of hoop jumping to determine who is and who isn’t within that state; even if it’s just to disallow export to 3d machines for beings of lesser rights. Who knows where it’ll go?

I don’t want to deal with it. The software is already making itself annoying. It’s not inconceivable a cloud based system will eventually bend over and let my designs get probed. If some dweeb in New York thinks my diy trekking pole handle looks like a trigger, I’ll have a whole different level of enshittification.

Time to adapt.

So here I am, downloading new and different software. All because Fusion 360 couldn’t keep it in its pants and neither can government. I predict more bullshit in the future so I might as well switch to local and Linux now. I don’t want to relearn new software but such is the invisible tax of enshittification.

Wish me luck finding something new to run locally on my computer without a Microsoft upgrade. I hope the learning curve isn’t so hard the second time.

A.C.