Enshittification

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Enshittification is a neologism coined in 2022 by journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow (1971–) describing the process by which products and services decline in quality over time. The concept itself was described earlier in 2018 as "crapification" by Yves Smith and by Maureen Tkacik in 2019, both regarding the Boeing Company. Doctorow has described the process as follows:

“”Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

The concept however is perhaps much older than these writers suggest. Brian Merchant wrote in describing the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution (~1750-1850) as it impacted Luddites and the cottage industries of Britain:

“”…once a labor-saving technology is invented and released into a capitalist environment, it will be exploited to maximize profits — if it works well enough, and even sometimes when it doesn't. Modern economic history is littered with examples of entrepreneurs taking an existing technology, improving or standardizing it, and combining that technology with exploitative labor practices to turn it into a market success.

During the Industrial Revolution, workers in the cottage industries complained about the poor quality of factory-made textiles compared to their own, and displaced workers were forced to choose between destitution and poorly-compensated grueling factory work. Complaints about this that were sent to Parliament were dismissed out-of-hand since Parliament was not democratic until 1832 with the Reform Act of 1832.

Doctorow, feeling optimistic in December 2023 that antitrust action against Google would proceed, and that there would finally be meaningful regulation of Big Tech, proposed two methods for reducing enshittification. Alas, cryptocurrency bros and Big Tech bought Donald Trump the election in 2024, so this is likely to be moot until at least 2028. Doctorow's proposals are:

1. "End-to-End: Connecting Willing Listeners With Willing Speakers": This is essentially an expansion of the idea of net neutrality, tech companies must deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers. In other words, nothing is pushed to the user that is not pre-authorized.
2. "Right of Exit: Treating Bad Platforms As Damage and Routing Around Them": Creators are free to take their own content with them to a different platform, and similarly subscribers are free to take their subscription with them if the creator leaves the site.

These two principles address the 'glue' that holds enshittification together: creators/advertisers/users feel stuck on the platform before the enshittification becomes too noticeable.

In 2024, Doctorow also coined the term 'enshittocene' (analogous to geologic epochs, e.g., 'Holocene') when everything turns to shit. Some evidence exists for the approaching enshittocene in that the percentage of adults who think that the internet is good for society dropped from 2014 to 2018 (76% down to 70%). A different survey 2024 found that only 64% of adults think thought that the internet is good for humanity, but with a much more negative view of social media specifically, with only 38% who thought it was good.

Examples

Some of these examples started out as shit or were known by the founders that they could become shit. But the platforms were not shitty enough initially for most people to care:

• Facebook's beginning as an espionage project
• Reddit's dark corners, which lacked meaningful site-wide content moderation until 2015
• Twitter was never a fun place and was initially considered superficial, particularly in the initial 140-character limit days ("Who cares what I ate for breakfast?" is sometimes used to characterize how mundane the site was). It is unsurprising since Twitter was based on Dorsey's idea for taxi cab software.

Amazon

Founder Jeff Bezos left his high-paying Wall Street job in New York City and incorporated Amazon in 1994 in Washington State, most likely to take advantage of the fact that there is no sales tax there. Amazon began selling books online in 1995, and reincorporated in Delaware in 1996 (also no sales tax). In 1998, Amazon began to move towards selling more than books. Amazon paid no sales tax in any state until 2008, which likely allowed the company to outcompete on price both against other online sellers and against brick-and-mortar stores. As Amazon grew in size, the small businesses shrank. "About 40 percent of the nation’s small apparel, toy, and sporting goods makers disappeared, along with about one-third of small book publishers."

In a Federal Trade Commission and state Attorneys General lawsuit against Amazon that was initiated in 2023, it was alleged that:

“”In addition to overcharging its customers, Amazon is degrading the services it provides them. Amazon’s online storefront once prioritized relevant, organic search results. Following directions from its founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon shifted gears so that it now litters its storefront with pay-to-play advertisements. Amazon executives internally acknowledge this creates "harm to consumers" by making it "almost impossible for high quality, helpful organic content to win over barely relevant sponsored content." This practice, too, harms helpful organic content to win over barely relevant sponsored content.” This practice, too, harms both sellers and shoppers alike. Most sellers must now pay for advertising to reach Amazon’s massive base of online shoppers, while shoppers consequently face less relevant search results and are steered toward more expensive products. Notably, Amazon has increased not only the number of advertisements it shows, but also the number of irrelevant junk ads, internally called "defects." Mr. Bezos instructed his executives to "[a]ccept more defects" because Amazon can extract billions of dollars through increased advertising despite worsening its services for customers.

Amazon laid off 100 customer support employees in 2024. This was preceded in 2023 by a chatbot replacement (or for now at least a first interface for support). Anecdotally (e.g., Reddit), customer and seller support on Amazon has been bad for a long time, but Amazon's solution to this seems to be people are expensive and unreliable; we can replace them with bots that are cheaper and also unreliable.

Facebook/Meta

Jesus fucking Christ, it's for an ad on Facebook!

Facebook started, as entrepreneurial projects often do,{{efn|Edmund Cartwright, inventor of the power loom and Richard Roberts, inventor of a automatic spinning machine both had their ideas stolen (patent infringement) during the Industrial Revolution and profited little during their lifetimes. The "look and feel" idea theft by Microsoft of Apple's OS appearance and Uber's theft of Lyft's technological ideas are more modern examples. While an undergraduate student at Harvard University, Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from from three classmates who were developing a similar idea.

Facebook initially followed a stereotypical, or perhaps prototypical, pathway of enshittification. First initially giving users what they wanted, staying in contact with friends and relatives. Then forcing feeds from media companies into users timelines, then after creating media company dependency, forcing the media companies to pay to get onto users' timelines. Then forcing ads into users' timelines for cheap, then after after the companies behind the ads were dependent on the fees, jacking up the prices. The enshittification then took a side turn with alleged collusion with Google and the Jedi Blue agreement.

Starting in 2009, independent marketing agency Rapleaf started mining Facebook user's private data, particularly through gaming app such as Farmville on Facebook. When caught doing this in 2010, Rapleaf claimed that they weren't doing it on purpose. Facebook claimed that they were taking steps to "dramatically limit" this process.

As bad as that all of that was already, things got decidedly worse when AI-generated 'slop' invaded Facebook in 2024, which according to Zuckerberg:

“”I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI-generated or AI-summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way. And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time.

If Zuckerberg is to be believed, there are more than a million businesses generating AI-based 15 million ads/month. Who needs real people in one's feed after all?

Examples of the awfulness of the AI-generated ads include clickbait "shrimp Jesus", and clickbait ads with AI-generated Elon Musk images that coincided with Musk's endorsement of Donald Trump in the 2024 U.S. presidential election that were produced in the Philippines, Vietnam, and India.

One can see the 2014 short film Too Many Cooks on the Adult Swim network as a metaphor for the enshittification. The film seemingly starts as a light parody of the opening scenes of 1970s-1990s American sitcom TV shows of happy families and gentle humor. The film soon takes on a more sinister appearance of a slasher film though it never entirely leaves the sitcom genre while entering a surreal mashup of both genres (and a few others). The film initially seems to end with a happy sitcom-style massive family photo, but then the slasher slowly rises up from behind the family. The villain in Too Many Cooks has a faint resemblance to J. D. Vance, and so parallels the AI-spam of Trump-supporting Musk on Facebook.

Google/Alphabet

Google's AI Overviews' self-pwn from the search of "enshittified google" on October 24, 2024. "AI search chatbot: Google is developing an AI search chatbot that will show users what it thinks they should see, rather than what they ask for." The result was removed a few days later for this search.

Google began as a research project in 1996 by the co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at Stanford University. By 1998, they had a prototype ready and released a white paper on the project. The search ranking methodology proved to be superior to existing search engines of the time. Google soon incorporated and started using the (now implausible) unofficial slogan of "Don't be evil", which is still used as of 2024. Despite Page and Brin maintaining controlling interest in Google after the company went public, with the specific aim of not being beholden to stock owners and short-term gains, Google still managed to turn to shit.

Google's founders had acknowledged in their 1998 white paper for the Google prototype that advertising degrades search results. Nonetheless, advertising was added to Google search results in 2000 with the launch of "Google AdWords".

In the founding white paper document, Page and Brin described the importance of having the first 10 pages being relevant:

“”People are still only willing to look at the first few tens of results. Because of this, as the collection size grows, we need tools that have very high precision (number of relevant documents returned, say in the top tens of results).

The top 10 pages did stay relevant for several years, but with creeping ad-bloat, particularly for simple searches, it can be difficult to find a non-sponsored/non-commercial result. Worse yet, the best products/services don't come to the top, rather the best companies at gaming the system (search engine optimization or ad bidding) come to the top.

As part of a 2023 Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit, an internal Google document was released, written by VP for Finance Michael Roszak who wrote some time after 2008,

“”Search advertising is one of the world’s greatest business models ever created… illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) that could rival these economics, but we are fortunate to have an amazing business. When talking about revenue, we could mostly ignore the demand side of the equation (users and queries) and only focus on supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales

In the antitrust trial, evidence was presented that Google panicking about declining ad revenue, and decided on modifying the 'semantic matching' algorithm for searches that normally might secretly (but reasonably) add synonyms, variant spellings or the like to one's search. The boardroom proposal instead was to modify the semantic matching to maximize the ad revenue, hence more ads and/or more profitable ads would be shown for each search. Google has claimed that they don't do this (but not in yet court), and a Wired article this based on attendance of the trial pulled a few days after it was published.

In 2018, Google and Facebook/Meta made an agreement known as Jedi Blue that allegedly included price-fixing and cross-platform ad placement. Starting in 2020, the two companies were sued in various venues for violating antitrust law. In 2022, the two companies came to a partial agreement with the Texas court, which resulted in dismissal of some of the charges. As of 2024, cases are still ongoing.

In 2024, Google officially launched its generative AI called 'AI Overviews' as part of its search results, which is still-experimental as of November 2024 appears sporadically. Doctorow has said of that AI Overviews "is a tool that won't show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see."

See also

• Digital Rights Management — besides discouraging piracy of copyrighted material, this also binds users to the platform
• Planned obsolescence — In the case of enshittification, the plan of extracting maximum value from the platform for shareholders until the platform dies

External links

• The Internet is starting to Break - Here's Why. — Mrwhosetheboss