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I will never forgive them for what they did to the computer.
—ED ZITRON
This era, the Enshittocene, is the result of specific policy decisions, made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us.
Enshittification infects a specific kind of digital business: platforms.
The term platform gets thrown about a lot. Formally, a platform is a business that operates a two-sided market, that is, a system that connects business customers and end users.
In its purest form, a platform’s value comes from the people and companies that use it, not from anything it brings to the table. The more people there are selling things on an e-commerce platform, the more value that platform holds for shoppers. Likewise, the more buyers there are on a platform, the more value it holds for sellers.
Think of eBay and Amazon, which connect buyers and sellers. Or Uber and Thumbtack, which connect workers and customers. Or Google, which connects publishers and advertisers to searchers. Or Facebook, which does the same but for people who want to socialize rather than search.
The platform has emerged as the endemic form of online enterprise, which is weird, because another word for platform is middleman.
If you’re old enough to remember the early excitement about the coming digital age, you’ll recall how enthusiastic we were about the prospect of disintermediation—that is, cutting out the middleman.
Intermediaries are part of the solution to the age-old problem of connecting people with one another—but they become part of the problem when they grow so powerful that they can act as gatekeepers who can usurp the relationship between the two sides of their markets.1
There was a time when disintermediation seemed to be living up to its promise. Small businesses popped up to supply us with online goods and services, and while some of them were founded explicitly as fast-growing startups with global ambitions, some of the most successful disintermediators—like Craigslist—were basically hobbies that accidentally turned into hugely disruptive businesses, serving as a vessel that people with something to offer and people seeking out those offers could fill up.
But the internet’s early blush of disintermediation faded quickly. Waves of mergers and acquisitions consolidated the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.”2 Meanwhile, the non-tech intermediaries were also consolidating: most of the key sectors of the global economy shrank to five or fewer firms, and the most pronounced consolidation took place with intermediary sectors like shipping and finance. The entertainment industry, too. Remember the early-2000s dream of disrupting the dozen major publishers? Today, there are five major publishers, four major studios, three major labels, two companies that dominate apps, and a single company that dominates ebooks and audiobooks.
Here’s the natural history of enshittification:
First, platforms are good to their users.
Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.
Switching costs is another useful piece of economics jargon. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you switch from one product or service to another.
Most online businesses enjoy high network effects. This is the economist’s term for a product or service that gets more valuable as it attracts more users. You joined Facebook because the people who were already there made it valuable to you, and once you were there, you made Facebook more valuable to the people who wanted to hang out with you.
Here’s where the collective action problem comes in. That’s our third and final piece of economics jargon: the collective action problem is the incredibly difficult business of getting other people to do what you want them to do, when you want them to do it.
contraction in Facebook’s user numbers—triggers shareholder panics. In the first quarter of 2022, Facebook posted lower-than-projected US user growth, and the stock market responded with a mass sell-off, dumping $250 billion worth of Facebook shares in twenty-four hours, at the time the largest decline in any corporate valuation in the history of the human race.10
When their company’s fortunes turn uncertain, tech leaders panic. Being techies, they have a technical name for this panic: they call it pivoting.
Facebook’s pivot was decidedly weird. Mark Zuckerberg addressed the world and said, “Look, I know I’ve spent the past decade insisting that the future would consist solely of you arguing with your racist uncle using a primitive text interface of my own devising. But I have had a revelation. It turns out that the future really will involve me converting you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character in a virtual world called the Metaverse, which we ripped off from a twenty-five-year-old dystopian, satirical cyberpunk novel.”
A rival—and frankly terrible—theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its scale to raise prices or lower quality. This is the “consumer welfare standard theory,” and its premise is that when we find monopolies in the wild, they are almost certainly large and powerful thanks to the quality of their offerings. Anytime you find that people all buy the same goods from the same store, you should assume that this is the very best store, selling the very best goods. It would be perverse (goes the theory) for the government to harass companies for being so excellent that everyone loves them.
It was under this theory that Jimmy Carter started to remove a few of the Jenga blocks from the antitrust system. Then Ronald Reagan came along and tore them out by the fistful. (Most of the right-wing policies for which we remember Ronald Reagan started under Carter, who was hoping to woo conservative voters. He failed.) Every president since—Republican or Democrat—followed Reagan’s example, up to (but not including) Joe Biden.
The Amazon flywheel is designed to fit neatly into the
Then there’s Amazon’s “search” product. The quotation marks around search are there for the purpose of expressing withering sarcasm, because Amazon’s “search” product isn’t about search at all. Amazon makes $38 billion every year charging merchants for search placement. When you search for a product on Amazon, the top results aren’t the best matches—they’re the matches that pay the highest bribes to Amazon to be at the top of the list. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you’ll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, that best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.
The researchers Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal call this “Amazon’s pricing paradox.”4 Amazon gets to insist that it has the lowest prices in the business, but no one can find those prices. Instead, we all pay a massive Amazon tax every time we shop there, and the merchants we buy from are paying an Amazon tax, too.
We are living through a Great Enshittening. Somehow, humans have unleashed the Enshittocene, in which all of our artifacts and hyperobjects are turning into piles of shit. What is it about this moment that allowed this contagion to spread so fast and so far?
Every computer we know how to make is capable of running every computer program we know how to write.
That is, computers are universal. There is no known practical way to make a computer that only runs the programs its manufacturer approves of. If there were, we’d make computers that were incapable of running ransomware and spyware and other malware.
The implications of this universality are really the story of the past forty years. For one thing, the fact that every computer can run every program means that there’s a nearly infinite coalition of industries that benefit from (and invest in) faster and better computers. The faster, cheaper chips that make your phone do more also go into your car and your thermostat and your medical implant.
The best account of Google’s internal power struggles comes from Ed Zitron, a PR specialist whose newsletter, Where’s Your Ed At?, is an indispensable chronicle of the internet’s decay. (Zitron calls the tech giants’ collective businesses “the rot economy,” a term I love.)
Roszak wrote: “Search advertising is one of the world’s greatest business models ever created … Illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics … We can mostly ignore the demand side … (users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales.” Roszak goes on to claim that Google is “able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics … supply and demand.” Take Roszak at his word and call this hyperbole—but hyperbole or not, Google is a company that sure acts as though it has transcended the “fundamental laws of economics.”
It turned out that “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” was wishful thinking. It was truer to say, “Even if you pay for the product, you’re the product if the company can get away with treating you as the product.”
enshittificatory impulse
economist Charles Goodhart) has it, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” If you tell employees that their workplace esteem is contingent on moving a mouse a certain way or typing at a certain rate (and that they will receive promotions and raises accordingly), the least motivated, least honorable employees on the shop floor will master the process of wiggling their mice or typing on their keyboards in ways that please the algorithm, irrespective of whether that translates into getting their job done. Rinse and repeat, and you’ve got an office full of algorithm-pleasers, while everyone else who was so focused on getting their jobs done that they didn’t bother to reverse engineer the ranking system has been fired.
Riley Quinn, showrunner for the excellent Trashfuture podcast, says that whenever you hear the word fintech (financial technology), you should mentally substitute unregulated bank.
That’s chickenization: a system of total control over workers who have to borrow money to pay you for the privilege of working for you, and to whom you owe nothing. Those workers rely on you for everything, and they know that you can ruin their lives at the stroke of a pen and that, if you do, they have no recourse.
After a supply chain has undergone this consolidation, only two groups remain, fragmented and disorganized, easy pickings for the cartels that have sewn up the industry: workers and customers. Writers have five major publishers to turn to, as do workers in the publishing industry. Readers overwhelmingly get their books from a big-box store, Amazon, or the one remaining chain. Even if you shop at a beloved indie store, the books you buy cost more than ever, and pass through the hands of the private equity–owned monopoly distributor, or through one of the Big Five publishers.4
This move attracted the attention of some of Google’s top scientists, including Timnit Gebru, a distinguished AI researcher whose career had involved stints at Apple, Microsoft, and Stanford before she came to Google to work on AI ethics.
In 2021, Gebru and several outside peers wrote a paper titled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” that was accepted for the Association for Computing Machinery’s highly selective Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.
Right about now, you might be thinking something like this: What did you expect? That’s just capitalism, right? Minimize costs (including labor costs). Maximize profits. Take care of the shareholders first, as is the sacred duty of every CEO.
But is it capitalism? In his 2023 book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, the radical economist Yanis Varoufakis, formerly both the chief economist of the video game company Valve and the finance minister of the sovereign nation of Greece, argues that tech firms have transitioned away from capitalism and into a new system he calls technofeudalism.
This is Varoufakis’s technofeudalism exemplified. It’s an economic system in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff, at the expense of people who do stuff. Of course, workers are used to living under this system: whether their bosses are people who rent access to their assets, or people who pay the rent so they can get something done, the person doing the actual work gets the smallest cut. The fight between technofeudalism and technocapitalism is a fight over whether the landlord or the café owner takes the value that’s created by the barista.
In other words, the story of technofeudalism is a story about struggle, and the way to figure out whether you’re living under technofeudalism or technocapitalism is to ask how conflicts between profits and rents cash out.
If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product. If you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.
The enshitternet that succeeded the old, good internet was also a place where people could do all those things, but only at the sufferance of unaccountable multinational tech firms that are largely or wholly insulated from any repercussions when they are malevolent, negligent, or just plain wrong. These firms grew steadily worse over time, abetting genocide and siding with fascists.
Microsoft claims that there’s no way to deliver its Azure cloud computing platform without anticompetitively trapping Azure customers into using its Outlook email/calendar system and without locking them into using its cloud-based Office365 platform. It also claims that there’s no way to deliver Office365 without letting your boss count the number of keystrokes you make and produce ranked lists of the most “productive” employees in your division based on this meaningless metric.
This trick—insisting there’s no possible arrangement of affairs apart from the current one, no matter how miserable it makes you—is literally neoliberalism’s oldest and cheapest rhetorical gimmick.
“There is no alternative,” though perhaps mantra is more apt than maxim, as Thatcher repeated this so often that her supporters turned it into an acronym, TINA, and sometimes referred to her as “TINA Thatcher.”
There is no alternative” also serves to insulate the individuals who built and profited from the Enshittocene from criticism. If they are merely conduits through which the inevitable outcome flows, then it would be unfair to hold them responsible (or liable) for the harms they enacted on their way to amassing their vast fortunes. (This is what Dan Davies, author of The Unaccountability Machine, calls an “accountability sink.”)
Google Search can be great without spying, too. We know that because the 1998 PageRank paper in which Sergey Brin and Larry Page laid out their plan for a “large-scale hypertextual web search engine” declared that “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” Which is why, during Google’s early years, the company did no commercial surveillance and served the best search results of its entire commercial life.
The problem isn’t the existence of intermediaries; it’s intermediaries that grow so powerful that they usurp the relationships between the individuals who rely on them.
But just because something is encrypted, it doesn’t mean that it is end-to-end encrypted. Take the wildly popular messaging platform Telegram, which bills itself as an encrypted messaging service. Nearly all of the messages exchanged between Telegram’s 950 million users are in group chats, which are not encrypted at all.
We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.
We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “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, also.”
And it may be true that the law can’t force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.
But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn’t think you deserve it.
And I think that’s pretty important.
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