Enshittification

Have you noticed that seemingly your favorite services or products recently has gone noticeably worse? It’s not just about quality, it’s also about back then what we all loved to our products was that they meet our expectations of what it should be doing and now it doing less (by removing features). The introduction of certain “new technologies” doesn’t help it either.

Let’s quote some lines from my new favorite book - “Enshittification” by Cory Doctorow (yes em dash, no don’t freak out about it it’s entirely human made):

Here’s the natural history of enshittification:

1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification is just more than saying your (or our) favorite products has gone into shit. It’s also “an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once.”

This is why your Facebook feeds now suddenly show the posts from the people you barely know of or those seeding ads that literally cover almost all of your web view. This is why I called Android’s “developer verification” is bullshit cause it literally will serve no benefit for both developers and users and only for Google. This is also why your Google’s search results worse by day and that “AI overview” pops of nowhere literally instructs you to drink bleach. Oh should I say your favorite “AI products” like ChatGPT or Claude now using more “tokens” than normal and now Claude blocking you from using third party apps.

Once you digging into them deeper, the sights of such filth are already making you vomit. Surveillance stalking your every single keystroke, every swipe you make; every product introducing subscription tiers that have features which should be already included in the base version and etc of many unthinkable things that’s already becoming true you can think of. “Even if you pay for the product, you’re the product if the company can get away with treating you as the product.”, as Doctorow states.

Okay, why is that happening? How can we reclaiming back the Internet, the good one, back to us? Doctorow does offer us this explanation:

• regulation (the laws to keep those tech comps in check),
• interoperability (plainly speaking it’s the way that different product or service must be interchangeable and can interact with each other despite being designed differently)
• tech worker power (you, me and others who are building digital products are all tech worker).

Laws that encourage healthy competition between companies and prevent one such company becoming “too big to handle”. Regulation, of course, to keep those greedy companies in check and step in before too late.

Interoperability, or I would rather to say, the right to be able to own and repair our own devices without having to pay such massive bloated money to fix them (also to encourage us to make things that works as quality alternatives).

And tech worker power, the people who behind and support all of those things above to make products better both for them and for us - the users, to have a say and a right to speak against those big tech companies’ vile strategies and in my naive hope that we can destroy this “Torment Nexus 5.0” for good and never ever rebuild it again.

The book inspired me so much. We need to understand how bad things have become, why they are happening before we learning how to change (or destroy) them for good. Those tech companies only see us as merely “infinite money printer machine”, they will keep mining us over and over and then toss us to garbage when we can’t “produce” and “optimize” their money more. Besides “Enshittification” written by Doctorow, I also want to encourage you to read “Ruined by Design” by Mike Monterio too (yes third time mentioning him I know what I’m writing about). Highly recommended.