The more I experience the increasingly enshittified world controlled by corporations, the less surprised I am when they find new ways to squeeze money out of both customers and creators alike. In their continual quest for profits, I’m extremely skeptical of any promises made and instead wait to see what actions companies take and then I’m almost always disappointed with the new ways they weasel out of any change.

But I also think we are often too quick to apply the same logic to people. We cancel at the first sign they’re not virtue signalling hard enough and then will always point back to things they said years ago as proof that they’re still evil.

Today let’s look at a company dodging their promises, and then at how people can change and how we should leave room for people to change.

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I Am Jack’s Complete Lack of Surprise that Audible is Evil

Yes Audible is finding sneaky ways to dodge their promises and working to pay authors less and I’m completely unsurprised by this continued enshittification of Audible. If you too are fed up with Audible’s stranglehold on audiobooks and authors then take a look at Libro.fm which you can combine with Audiobookshelf to host your own audiobook library free from anyone else.

If you need to get your paid for books out of Audible check out Libation which will download your audiobooks to your computer and change them to mp3 files from Audible’s locked down DRM laden format.

Leave room for people to change

I’ve heard the saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks applied to many places in life. I’ve heard it say that once you’re over 30 you won’t change your beliefs, or 40. It depends on how old the person you’re talking to is.

But I don’t believe this is true, people can change and we should be leaving room for people to change. I would have been right there beside Annie protesting women’s right to choose. I would have told the LGBTQ+ community that they were sinful and an abomination.

Now I support women’s right to choose and I don’t think we should spend any effort worrying about what consenting adults do with each other. Love is love and let love live.

I believe that up to a point in life we can attribute the things we learn and believe to the ideas that our parents provided us with. My early life was dominated by the fundamentalist Baptist flavour of Christianity. My parents looked up to figures like Dobson and took his advice to heart. Focus on the Family resources were around my house. The published lists of what was okay for kids to watch were treated almost as close to gospel as the Bible was.

I didn’t realize this was all bad because it’s all I knew. Even into my late 30s I was part of the church. I sat on the board of a bible college that was specifically against the LGBTQ community. But I changed in large part because I started asking questions and had a great bookstore that would suggest books contrary to my thoughts because they knew I was interested in being thoughtful.

I’ve still got years of indoctrination to work out of my head. Things I’m sure I don’t even notice today.

But I changed, and others can too. If I can change, we need to leave space for others to do the same.

The Cost of Cancelling

Finally, this great post about cancelling someone for a belief they hold lines up with much of my recent listening and reading. In Moral Ambition the author talks about the historic civic organizations, that won the right to vote for women, or boycotted buses, or started the end to slavery in Britain, and how diverse they were. Many of the prominent figures disagreed on a great number of topics that today would have had them outlawed from the group. Instead they put aside the “petty disagreements” in favour of looking at the big cause they were fighting for. Then they got together and did the work that was needed.