The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
That’s not exactly what it is, though. Enshittification is the deliberate degradation of a product for the purpose of extracting maximum revenue, where the product is progressively degraded up to the point where the consumer ditches it, but not exactly to it.
Without the tie to maximum revenue and measurement of consumer ability to cope, it’s hard to understand why enshittification is so brutally frustrating.
Cory Doctorow describes the stages of enshittification as follows:
And for good measure he reminds us of the why and how things used to be better:
https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc
You know, I agree with him that the pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership, but I don’t think he got the reason for the change right. I think what we call Late Stage Capitalism comes from a single source: corporations don’t give a rat’s ass any longer if they exist in ten years. They are willing to toss reputation and long-term prospects out the window because the only metric that matters is quarterly numbers.
It’s a thing I noticed on the Internet. I wondered why so many sites become big and then shoot themselves in the foot. We are on Lemmy (well, I am on Piefed) now, many of us from enshittified Reddit. But Reddit was the savior from an enshittified Digg, which was the savior from an enshittified Slashdot, etc. It figures that each iteration knew they were going to die making the choice they made, but also knew the quarter would be spectacular.
That worries me, because it’s much easier to destroy something than to build it. If you go and look, the Internet is slowing down. It isn’t being innovated, despite the need to do so. Instead, the big players see something grow, and they use their massive resources to buy it and kill it.
That’s why I love open source: what is being built has long term plans. The main way that open source projects get enshittified is when they close source innovation and then follow the same trajectory as the big companies.
I think you’re being overly optimistic about the dying part. Folks here are not exactly a random sample - even if many people see the enshittification of Facebook or Reddit, they will feel unable to leave. Especially for social media there’s a huge network effect - the value of the product is in the fact that “everyone” is there. Or for Google products: there are just so many different problems for the user to solve (if there’s a current solution at all!) before being able to move. So yes, the focusing on quarterly profits extracts value at the cost of everyone else, but it might not be enough to kill the product. Or at least not for quite a long time. For me the root of the problem is that we gave up on countering monopolies. This has always been a grave enemy of “efficient” capitalism, but over the last few decades we kind of stopped efforts to prevent this. It automatically leads to worse service for any client, not just in the digital sector. Worse, it leass to concentration of power in such few hands that any political system shifts into an oligarchy.
Yeah, I do get it. I made fun of my younger brother because he still uses a yahoo.com email address, and then my older brother chimed in from his hotmail account.
Also agree on the dangers of monopolies. It may just have happened that the FTC was unable to crush them before they got too big, a side effect of Internet growth. The processes to control corporations could not cope with the phenomenal growth of Google, Facebook, and lately openAI.
Was there a “pre-enshittifcation era” or were we merely at the first stage of system-wide enshitification?
The late 90’s, early 00’s were pre-. About 2003-05 it started becoming enshittified, ie: ISPs started throttling, a lot of forums were bought out and/or priced out, etc.
Feels very fitting for The Guardian to downplay how the profit motive inherent in capitalism contributes to enshittification, even when Doctorow’s original definition clearly includes it.
Actually, I think that’s the main process of enshittification, but I don’t think enshittification is always deliberate.
Very often software products are tweaked, changed, or even degraded in an attempt to “simplify” or “improve” a particular user experience at the expense of another UX.
And to make matters worse, some companies end up with a Frankenstein product of confusing functions because they are trying to cater to two entirely different user bases within the same product.
E.g. Microsoft may genuinely have believed that changing their system settings UI in Windows 11 to “consolidate and reduce drift” of system configurations would improve the everyday user experience, but they failed to account for the decades of inertia they’d built up from their prior OS user base and how that would piss off a not-insignificant number of other users who had grown accustomed to the way the product had previously worked.
The “for the purpose of extracting maximum revenue” is a bit redundant, though.
Everything a corporation does is for that purpose.
That’s still not it, though. Extracting maximum revenue is just the default state for all things in capitalism, so it is not a qualifier or distinction that is useful to identify enshitification.
Enshitification is a model specifically for platforms. It’s not enshitification if it isn’t a platform; that’s just sparkling greed.