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.
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.