Absurdist video urges policymakers and users to resist deliberate deterioration of platforms and devices

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.

  • hcf@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    16·
    11 hours ago

    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.