I read an excellent analysis by Allison Morrow on CNN the other day: “There’s a reason why it feels like the internet has gone bad”. Ms Morrow goes on to remind us of a term that Cory Doctorow coined several years ago:
Enshittification
Enshittification is the process by which a platform destroys itself. “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.”
The thing about enshittification, though, is that it’s more universal than just social platforms and online endeavors. My wife and I have noticed enshittification taking place in restaurant chains, for example.
Take a chain called Fresh Choice. I don’t know its status these days. When it first came to the SF-SJ bay area, my wife and I loved it. She fluctuates between being a vegan and a vegetarian and all shades in between. Now she eats fish and eggs but not cheese, and never, never eats pork, beef, or fowl. So Fresh Choice, focused on breads, soups, salads and a small dessert offerings, was a reasonably-priced place to go for lunch or dinner.
We had certain favorites, like a squash soup. But then one month, it tasted different. Now, we don’t have evidence but we believe that Fresh Choice was using quality ingredients. But to sustain their profit margins and reduce costs as they expanded, they switched ingredients to less expensive ingredients. We soon no longer found the food as tasty. Then they raised prices. Started doing different levels of purchases, if I recall right. The cleanliness of the local franchise declined, and the wait staff became less friendly. We ceased going.
The thing is, we knew enshittification without naming it, because we’ve seen this happen time and again to businesses. We saw it happen to cable companies and phone companies. Internet streaming services. The airlines, of course, are big examples of enshittification, reducing legroom, monetizing every aspect of travel, stealing away all the aspects we used to take for granted as part of the flying experiences.
As Ms Morrow noted, “In other words: Products are good when they first hit the market, because companies need to lock in as many consumers as they can to achieve the huge scale they desire. Once everyone’s using the product, the company refocuses on creating value for business partners, padding its profit margins and letting the product corrode. Eventually, the company maxes out what it can extract from its business partners, too, and the whole thing fades into obsolescence.
Once you wrap your head around the idea, you start to see enshittification all around — not only online, but across the economy, in services that have been picked over by private equity (vet clinics, nursing homes, prisons, countless other industries) or in the products peddled by highly concentrated industries.
I’ll go one further, though. I think the GOP is undergoing the process of enshittification. As Mr Doctorow said in a Nightline interview, “In terms of the future of enshittification, these platforms that have hollowed themselves out, where there’s just no value left in them except this kind of awful lock-in. It’s the old “we go broke a little, and then all at once.””
That’s this century’s GOP, hollowed out, going for broke. Enshittified, with a shitty leader and a shitty agenda. Let’s hope that we survive as a democratic nation and don’t become too enshittified while MAGA is in power. More than hoping, let’s work against our nation becoming enshittified.
Michael Seidel, writer 