The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people they are on the service to communicate with. This is infuriating. Frustrating. And, depending on how important those services are to you,
terrifying.
In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us:
enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. It isn’t just a way to say something got worse. It’s 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 moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology. When doctors observe patients who are sick with a novel pathogen, their first order of business is creating a natural history of the disease. This natural history is an ordered catalogue of the disease’s progress: what symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order?
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 customers to claw back all the value for themselves – and become a giant pile of shit.
This pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you’ll start seeing it, too. Take
Amazon, a company that started out by making it possible to have any book shipped to your door and then became the only game in town for everything else, even as it dodged taxes and filled up with self-immolating crapgadgets and other junk.
www.theguardian.com
