‘The platform has turned into a pile of shit… and we’re at the bottom of it…‘
I’ve long suspected that everything is going to shit. Chocolate bars are smaller. Bills are bigger. That pain I sometimes feel in the small of my back if I stand up too quickly is becoming more intense. That last one might not be as universal as the others, perhaps, but that doesn’t make it any less valid. Well, it turns out there is a term for this. Enshittification. While it originates as a description for the steady decline in value offered by various insidious tech companies, depressingly, it can also be applied to pretty much any area of modern life. As Damon Albarn once mused, modern life is indeed rubbish…
The brainchild of Canadian journalist Cody Doctorow, Enshittification can be broadly broken down into three stages: “First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.” After establishing this truism in the opening chapter, Doctorow goes on to provide several case studies (Facebook, Apple, Windows, Twitter, etc) that fit this hypothesis. Obviously, reading them is a bleak and infuriating experience; no matter how evil you think these tech companies are, you’re not even close to the true extent of their malevolence, but it’s also necessary. If we don’t know what these fucks are up to, we can’t do anything about it. The sad truth, however, is that while reading Enshittification made me want to delete all of my apps immediately and throw my iPhone into the sea, I obviously haven’t done any of that, and it’s unlikely I will do so any time soon.
People will often react to a topical, hot-button-issue piece of culture by passionately stating that whatever that thing is should be taught in schools. Well, Enshittification definitely should be taught in schools. But it won’t be. Christ, it’s all so depressing. Still. Good book, though.