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.

  • manxu@piefed.socialEnglish
    7·
    2 hours ago

    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.