- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
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You’d need to make better humans first. oops
A few days ago I tried to find the best frame of the video to turn into a meme. This is what I came up with.
Not sure I agree with the statement that we wouldnt accept enshittification in our analog lives… ovens and refrigerators with screens and becoming unrepairable, cars are only sold with onboard computers and power windows with no other price point, materials for most household items becoming plastic / single use / or deliberately designed with a failure lifetime. I recently started buying clothing with no synthetics and they are unfathomably better performing in terms of breathing, odor, comfort and warmth. We’ve forgotten what physical products used to be like, in 20 years we will have similarly forgotten what un-enshittified internet / tech was like.
I think, and perhaps it’s scarier than anyone wants to admit, we’ve already gotten accustomed to or given up fighting against enshittification of the analog world.
The common thread is capital and financialization, and there can be never be progress until the ideas in “how to win friends and influence people” are called out as demonic and unhuman.
I’ve also started buying natural fibers only. Noticable improvements in quality of life
I agree with everything you said, but why you gotta do power windows dirty like that 😭
Absolutely - enshittification isn’t just an internet phenomenon, but literally everything has been getting worse because oligarchs are squeezing more money out of us.
I think the point was if it was a person physically doing it to you, you wouldn’t just sit there watching them do it.
Here’s the video, it’s funny cause it’s infuriatingly true.
As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue. It is a race to the bottom.
How do you fix that without massive upheaval for the people you are trying to help. I don’t know.
Companies used to have a smaller reach, meaning less total and potential customers. So they had to balance what what was good for the shareholders qith what was good for the customers or risk losing both. But products are often global now, especially digital ones. There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose. And investors don’t care as much about the long term since they can trade stocks so quickly. Maybe the solution is required holding periods for stocks or something. Higher short term capital gains taxes, and better incentives for long term gains.As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue.
I’d say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people’s pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they’d have made long term.
It isn’t merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they’re gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.
It isn’t enough for Zuckerberg’s company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into… the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they’re doing, to make human labor irrelevant!
Because they’ve bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.
There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose.
So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.
It’s increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.
Government should be the balancing act in response to this. Regulations enforced by Governments.
It won’t stop until stocks are no longer a thing.
Honestly it seems like a bad idea to have stocks in the first place
Like a loan shark you can never get rid of.
Why does this even exist ?
I remember learning about the stock market in grade school and I thought it was stupid then and I think it’s stupid now.
It’s harmful in pretty much every way.
Stocks aren’t necessarily a bad thing since they in theory represent abstract ownership of a thing. Perfectly fine when privately held, it becomes an increasingly problematic thing when. Traded on an open market though.
I think whenever stocks exist, regardless if private or public, the goal of the company becomes focused on increasingly profits instead of sustainability.
Not that non-traded companies don’t want profits too. But the goal of “forever-increases” in profits will ultimately be destructive to a company as it will lead to lower quality, more exploitation, and intense focus on monopolizing their industry as that will be the only way to retain customers.
I think investing in companies is not really a bad thing. But it should be more like a set contract with an end date and/or amount.
More like a loan with interest. From a bank. Or how some contracts are made with movie actors and such.
A percentage of profits over a 10 year period or something.
Idk. There has to be a better way to do this.
The stock market has too much influence on the economy without bringing a benefit that surpasses the damage it does.
As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue. It is a race to the bottom. How do you fix that without massive upheaval for the people you are trying to help. I don’t know.
Remove shareholders from the equation.
It can change, but it’ll require a large number of people seeing it as a problem worth addressing. Companies currently don’t value customer experience very well and haven’t for a long time, witness how phone customer service has become loaded with automated services standing between users and a small phone support staff. But if that were change, if stockholders were to come to see how much users hate that, and more importantly if users were to base their habits on that decision, it might cause things to improve. Money people, despite their near-legendary density, tend to be very nervous about trends. It might be possible to spook them.
Well, I think it could happen. I’ve been wrong before.
The problem is capitalism. Specifically, the consolidation of power in a small number of decision makers.
Break up the big companies. Stop letting them do mergers and acquisitions. You don’t even have to do something radical like dismantling capitalism entirely.
the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere
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.
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.
The “for the purpose of extracting maximum revenue” is a bit redundant, though.
Everything a corporation does is for that purpose.
Cory Doctorow describes the stages of enshittification as follows:
It’s a three stage process: First, platforms 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.
And for good measure he reminds us of the why and how things used to be better:
The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me it’s a tale about loss of ownership in a dematerialised world. No one is going to cut a piece of my dining table because I own it and physically have it entirely at my side.
I’ll never own (my locally installed) Spotify nor the songs I listen to. Though for the later I have vinyl alternatives which no one is touching.
You can have digital no problem. I have 25 year old mp3s. It just needs to be physically on your drives. You can pirate or purchase music today without issues. Spotify just scratched that laziness itch at one point in time and now you are locked in.
If you want a specific variety of a plant that’s patented by, say, Monsanto, you don’t own the seeds you get but rather their permission to plant them.
If you re-plant seeds in your own field produced by the crops of the previous year on that same field they can sue you and they will win (see Bowman v. Monsanto Co.)
That’s cool. Good thing I have a black light, and can modify the seeds the same way they do. Therefore, not the same seeds.
Edit: didn’t make this clear enough, the idea is to lightly modify their seeds just enough to make it legal. If they want to be shitty, we can be shitty right back. Any rule they make for us they make exceptions for the rich. Therefore, with enough cleverness and a stubborn refusal to accept others bullshit(and a bit of spite) you can exploit their rules and bend them to your will.
This is why I only seed torrents
They’ll also sue your neighbour if your plants spread seeds to their land.
Enshittification is the product of high-barriers to entry in markets, especially monopolies.
As it so happens, the entirety of Intellectual Property legislation purposefully and artificially creates monopolies where they would naturally never exist and give said monopolies to specific people, supposedly the creators of intellectual works and inventions, but in practice it’s to companies.
So, unsurprisingly, it’s in the domains were Intellectual Property dominates - were monopolies are not just common but actually the norm - that the most enshittification happens.
So yeah, Patents, anything to do with Music or Video distribution, Software and because of things like anti-circunvention legislation (which is supposed to block unautorized copy of copyrighted materials) in general any form of digital content since for-profit companies invariably place digital content under some form of access control exactly because they can use anti-circumvention legislation to block their customers from moving to better products and services without incurring significant inconvenience.
IMHO, tearing down Intellectual Property legislation (or at least have it include forced interoperability as well as make consumer data be owned by the actual consumers with company-bankrupting fines for abuse) would reverse most enshittification, at least in the digital world (were anti-circumvention legislation is especially bad in terms of destroying even the smallest element of a Free Market).
Indeed. IP / patents is clearly a source of issue in physical objects as well. But once you buy them seeds they stay « according to the initial specs ». They won’t suddenly grow another plant once you have them.
You might not be allowed to do anything you want but that’s another annex issue.
Someone call Richard Hendricks
The problem is upload speeds are too low on consumer ISP, and monopolies like Microsoft that Norwegian countries many times break their own procurement laws to use.
More of this plz
Why is the thumbnail Zach Galifianakis?
It’s a screenshot from the ad on Norwegian tv.
Always good to check the article before commenting.
It was a joke due to the resemblance
Sadly, enshittification on wiki is defined somewhat different and without official sources they well not change it.
