Craft By Zen

Sign of no dogs allowed pooping on lawn, from Unsplash taken by J Dean
Sign of no dogs allowed pooping on lawn, from Unsplash taken by J Dean

📖 4 min read

🔖 concept   TIL

Enshittification

Cory Doctorow wrote a few articles chronicling Enshittification. This is my summary of ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything.

it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

This is about squeezing out the competition until you’ve become the big monopoly, then you are the only place consumers can go to as your product degrades while raking in money.

surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go. That’s terminal enshittification.

Capitalism can be warped as a way for making valuable products for users.

On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

Levees against enshittification

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses:

  1. Competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.
  2. Regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

The next two are more tech-specific

  1. Self-help. Computers are extremely flexible and so are the digital products and services we make from them
    • That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company’s shareholders
  2. Workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn’t mean that tech workers don’t have labour power. The historical “talent shortage” of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another, better job. (View Highlight)

What drives each of these forces to making better products, and companies, is a higher mission.

American academic Fobazi Ettarh calls it “vocational awe” in the article, Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves – In the Library with the Lead Pipe.

Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore”. Inside Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” Twitter - The Verge

Related Book: Start With Why by Simon Sinek

Mottos matter in terms of hammering a sense of mission.

Erosion

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

Regulatory wins like GDPR pushed out small EU ad-tech companies because of their invasiveness. That said, when Big Tech runs through adversarial interoperability, it’s “progress”. If you do it, it’s “piracy”. And if you try to make an alternative (like Facebook), you get slapped with a DMCA violation or Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive.

When you have a walled garden, like your own app, you can no longer run ad blockers.

adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony.

Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”. >> Source Needed. Probably here: Table of Contents - Jay Freeman (saurik)

Reversing Enshittification

We must restore the four constraints that prevent enshittification.

Example:

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has run more than 80 pieces trashing Khan, insisting that she’s an ineffectual ideologue who can’t get anything done. Sure, that’s why you ran 80 editorials about her. Because she can’t get anything done.

Enshittification is not the same as Capitalism.

The cynics among you might be sceptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn’t “enshittification” the same as “capitalism”? Well, no. (View Highlight)

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

While laws can’t undo companies from reversing enshittification, but it might make them see you more as a human. And maybe push their platform back in the right direction. (Either that, or just better off and die).

Additional Articles

Written by Jeremy Wong and published on , and last updated on .