And vampire squids
Some friends and stilletto-sharp thinkers lately are busy discussing the meaning and implications of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification.” ICYMI, Macquarie Dictionary declared it the word of the year, defined as: “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”
As Doctorow explained a couple of years back:
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, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Dave Roberts (a.k.a. Dr. Volts) spoke with Doctorow a couple of weeks ago on how enshittification is impacting the right to repair, monopoly power, and the clean energy economy:
But you know, products you pay for get rampantly enshittified — like, you know, John Deere tractors and iPhones and EVs, these are not free. And paying for the product does not make you not the product. Right? It’s, you know, payment is not like a consumer loyalty program where if you pay, suddenly the venal, callow tech-boss suddenly thinks you’re worthy of dignity and respect and stops screwing you. Tech bosses screw you if they can. And right now, we are at a point where they can. So, in this second phase, things are made worse for these platform’s business customers as well.
If you are in the mood to chew through your cheek about that this morning, read “Never Forgive Them,” the Sunday-length installment on enshittification and the Rot Economy at Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At. Doctorow will at the end of his interview at least provide an escape hatch to computer users enslaved by Microsoft or Apple and for-profit online platforms.
I spent a career in consulting work for national and international clients whose products you likely own and use. I’d bet money I’ve been on the inside of more factories than 99 percent of you where they make everything from clothes to paper to tires to plastic to biotech medicines to the white-powder Ms on your M&M’S®. Nevertheless, I am a bad capitalist. I don’t object to capitalism, per se. I just object to the enshittified version that, as Matt Taibbi once wrote, behaves today like “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Now that oligarch-branded capitalism has a stranglehold on our freedoms. It is strangling values like fairness and privacy like an infant in a crib, and enshittifying your experience of being an American.
Not to cast shade on my many friends on Substack (Roberts is there), but I’m rather fond of Digby’s old-school approach to delivering content for readers here. It’s free. There are no paywalls, no ads, pop-up or otherwise. Subscribing is voluntary, donating is voluntary. Nobody’s trying to extract value from your attention without your consent. What a concept?
We trust your experience here is not gradually deteriorating.
Happy Hollandaise!