Enshittification Happens

Once upon a time, Cory Doctorow was known for writing books (inasmuch as he was known at all, which was probably only in very specific circles).  Nowadays, he’s more known for his opinions on modern Internet culture: opposing DRM, encouraging Creative Commons, etc.  He’s been featured in xkcd comics and in Ready Player One (the book, not the movie).  I’ve never read a Cory Doctorow novel (or short story, or graphic novel, or anything).  But I know what enshittification is.

So I was quite surprised—but pleased—to see Cory Doctorow show up in a More Perfect Union video that I was watching.  If you don’t know MPU, they do exposé-style videos, primarily focussing on how the billionaires are trying to screw you over (and mostly succeeding).  Well worth a YouTube subscribe, if you’re into that sort of thing.  And, the other night, right in the middle of learning why food delivery has gotten so ridiculously expensive, there’s Cory Doctorow, talking about enshittification.

Now, if you don’t know what that means, here’s how he phrased it when he first coined the term in a Wired article:

Here is how platforms die: first, they 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.  I call this enshittification, and 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, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Or, if you prefer, just check out the video I just mentioned, and hop to around 6:19.  It’ll take longer, but it’s a more gradual explanation (with examples, even), so it may work better for some people.

Now, first of all, Cory is absolutely correct about what enshittification is, how it works, and that it’s a real, observable phenomenon.  But where I will nitpick his definition is that I don’t think it’s limited to Internet platforms.  This is a pattern that we’ve seen repeated in businesses throughout the modern age.  Remember AT&T?  Once upon a time AT&T was considered considered the most reliable name in the communications business.  Then they were a customer service joke that every business had to use because what other options were there?  None that a fledgling business could take seriously!  And then they were a monopoly and the government broke them up.

Since, I’m very old, I actually remember the breakup of AT&T and the creation of the “Baby Bells.” I distinctly remember my father (the staunch Republican) repeating exactly what he’d been told: this will hurt the consumer!  Prices will go up, not down!  And, you know what?  He was right.  In the short term, the prices did actually go up, while the Baby Bells figured out how to charge and what fees to tack on where.  But, less than 10 years later, minutes of long distance became so cheap that some companies tried literally giving them away: one 90s ad screamed “you can’t beat free!” But then I suppose concentrating on short-term gains and ignoring long-term consequences is sort of the whole vibe of the Republican party.

You see this pattern in plenty of other companies’ histories: IBM (when my father was in charge of computers for a large paper mill, buying Hewlett-Packard instead of IBM was considered a risky move; nowadays IBM marketing is a literal joke: “if IBM bought KFC, they’d rename the product to ‘greasy dead chicken parts.’”), Microsoft (their OS market share went from 93% in 2009 to 27% today; in the same period, their browser market share dropped from 65% to 5%), Boeing (from the only plane some people would fly in to the butt of late-night comedians, Congressional investigations, and NTSB sanctions).  And everyone has their anecdotal evidence.  In my case, it’s Dropbox.  When I first signed up with Dropbox in 2010, they were a small, scrappy company with amazing customer service.  What led me to cancelling their service entirely was having a single ticket closed 4 times in a row without ever receiving a single answer to my actual question.  Ten years ago I could get an email from an actual tech person.  Three years ago, it was obvious people were being judged on how fast they “closed” a ticket and not at all on whether the customers actually got any help.  They had their users locked in, they had their businesses locked in, and the amount of trouble I had to go through to drop them is just not something most people will suffer through.  Personally, I would have paid ten times what a Dropbox subscription cost, as long as I wasn’t paying it to them—hell, I’m sure I actually did end up paying about that much, in the long run.  But then I’m a stubborn asshole.  Most people will just suffer in silence, resigned to their fate.  It takes longer for a company than an Internet platform, but it’s the same process.  Enshittification.

Now, one thing you might notice about Cory’s original definition that doesn’t fit my examples is this sentence: “Then, they die.” AT&T got broken up, but they didn’t actually die ... they’re currently (as of 2023) 13th in the Fortune 500.  Microsoft was eventually declared a monopoly, but no one ever did anything about it; things like Internet Explorer and the Zune and the BSOD (or “Blue Screen of Death”) became cultural punchlines, but they’re currently 14th in the Fortune 500.  As for Boeing ... well the stock has dipped, and its Fortune 500 rating is down (somewhere in the neighborhood of 52nd, I believe), but it hardly seems in danger of disappearing altogether.  Time will tell, but I shouldn’t at all be surprised to see Boeing rising from the ashes in a few years.  It’ll likely get a bit worse before it gets better, but I’m sure it’ll be fine in the long run.

Of course, the trick here is that Cory was talking about platforms ... not companies.  Facebook may well die (and it damn well should), but Meta will likely live on.  Google’s search engine’s lifespan is probably measured in units of AI advancement, but Alphabet will continue to produce gobbledygook that we simply must use.  And how about Über, whose branch Über Eats was fingered in the very video that inspired this post?  Oh, they’re riding high right now: they locked in the users by killing taxi service, they locked in the businesses (in this case, restaurants) by making individual delivery drivers economically impratical and crushing their competition (like Grubhub), and now they’re (finally) making money by charging us as much as 50% more for food than we’d pay if we’d just get off our lazy butts and go pick it up ourselves.  But there will come the inevitable crash—at some point, we just won’t be able to afford to be lazy any more—and Über Eats will probably die ... but I bet Über itself won’t.  In business parlance, this is called “pivoting”: one market is performing poorly, so you pivot to another.  A more apt analogy would be a sharecropper who wasn’t bright enough to rotate their crops and so now the soil won’t grow anything, so they just pick up and move down the road to a fresh plot of land.  Or a traveling carny saying “we’ve fleeced all the suckers we can here; time to move on to the next town.”

It’s interesting to me to watch the landscape changing.  When I was a kid, “socialist” was about the worst thing you could call a policy or an idea.  Nowadays, when anyone on TV says “that’s socialism!” you’ll find a dozen (or a hundred) videos on YouTube or TikTok responding “so what?” All the adults in my life taught me that unions were terrible: any time you saw a bunch of people standing around doing nothing, you’d blame the unions.  It never made much sense to me—the organizations that brought us the weekend, and overtime pay, and minimum wage, and sick leave, and child labor laws ... those are somehow bad?—but almost everyone I knew bought into it.  Nowadays, there are new unions popping up everywhere, and the President is appearing on picket lines to show solidarity.  In my father’s time (and still in my father’s mind) it seemed to be universally accepted that rich people must be geniuses, and that giving them more money would somehow “trickle down” to the rest of us.  Now the majority of society seems to be waking up to the wise words of Dogbert, who once said “Beware the advice of successful people: they do not seek company.”

If you think about it, this makes sense.  Anyone who goes to the trouble of amassing a billion dollars (or more) is just getting money for the sake of getting money.  At some point, you had enough money to buy anything you wanted, to pass on to your children if you felt like it ... to just live off the interest.  But still you kept getting more.  Why?  Just to show you could, I suppose.  So these people—and the companies they found, or run, or espouse—are attempting to separate us from our wallets in the most expedient way possible, and, as soon as one way stops working—or even falters just a bit, so that an easier way seems more attractive—they move on to the next.  I don’t necessarily blame those people: to me, that seems like blaming a tiger for eating you.  The tiger is just hungry, that’s all.  But when there are people in the village telling you how awesome and handsome and brilliant the tiger is for eating all your neighbors ... well, those people I can blame.  The tiger doesn’t need your help.  He’s doing just fine all on his own.  You know who needs your help?  The people building the anti-tiger defense system.  How about we all pitch in on that?  At the very least, perhaps we can slow the tide of enshittification.  Because tiger droppings are full of the corpses of the most vulnerable members of the village.  And ignoring that reality is ... kinda shitty.