ITCOMO

Maybe you've heard this word? Briefly, enshittification, as defined by Doctorow, describes the three phases that a (typically tech) company transits as it grows. The phases are:
 

1. Company/platform is good to its core, early users, in order to attract them to the platform, such as a new social media platform or retailer like Amazon.com

2. At a certain point, the platform reaches a size and level of importance where outside firms are now eager to engage with said platform, such as advertisers and business partners. The platform begins to forsake its users, changing the value proposition, in favor of these eager firms. Those outside firms are bringing in new ideas, opportunities, and money, after all.

3. At another, far higher point in terms of size and importance, when that platform becomes more or less unstoppable, the platform changes the value proposition again, to claw back all those revenue opportunities for itself, forsaking users and its business partners. By now, escaping that platform is very difficult.

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It's not enough to simply be huge, though becoming huge is often part and parcel with enshittification. Some of these large companies attain enshittification exactly as defined by Doctorow, but others that attain their zenith of shit might not hew exactly to Doctorow's (original) definition. i.e. The word is also being used to generally describe a company, service, or platform whose user experience has deteriorated for the sake of ever greater profits.

 

That's the elastic nature of words, especially newly coined words, that may not yet have a universally understood definition.

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A core feature of all Big Tech products and services is driving engagement. I use that term a lot when discussing modern Big Tech. This simply means pushing features, new or existing, in order to (they hope) further entangle you in their ecosystem, making it more difficult to leave. And make no mistake, dear reader, all Big Tech firms have a subrosa goal of keeping you on board by making it difficult to leave. That's also enshittification.

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Enshittification, as it applies to tech, was always going to be the endgame. Silicon Valley and Wall Street both want the number to go up. Year over year growth, examined quarterly, must happen. But what happens when a company has tapped out their organic market and the number that's supposed to go up stops going up or is merely going up more slowly (oh, the horrors)?

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They start abusing their customers in whatever ways are available to them. That's the essence of enshittification.

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A few stops in a long hall of horrors

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So, here are a few examples of tech platforms that have reached this dystopic milestone:

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Amazon : By far the largest online retailer and likely soon to overtake Walmart.

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Steps to enshittification:

1. In the beginning, the website was simple, clean, and useful. Treated users with respect, minimal extraneous promotions, excellent pricing, fast shipping, and hassle-free returns. (Hell, I remember way back when Amazon only sold books!)

2. Brought thousands of resellers on board into a 3rd party marketplace by offering a compelling retail platform for not-wealthy small companies to sell their products that Amazon did not offer. These 3rd parties were often not vetted on anything other than their potential to generate income. Some were good and others weren't.

3. Now competes with many of those same 3rd party sellers, buys up resellers on the cheap or drives them out of business (read the diapers.com scandal) and generally uses it strength to maximize its own profits, allowing resellers to earn just enough not to go bankrupt.

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​Google : Ginormous search engine and developer of hundreds of other services, most long since dead. Google has the attention span of a six year-old hopped-up on Pop-Tarts and Hawaiian Punch. They have introduced and killed hundreds of initiatives over the years in a throw a pot of pasta on the wall and see what sticks approach to product development. Any product that's not an instant hit is dumped.

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Steps to enshittification (regarding their number one retail product, the search engine)

1. Clean, fast, accurate, ad-free search results. Early Google was a breath of fresh air. Motto was "Don't be evil". No, really, it was.

2. Forsaking users by encouraging 3rd party businesses to focus on Google Search as a source of referrals, partly by selling ads in the search results.

3. Forsaking users and 3rd parties by clawing back revenue opportunities by directing users to Google's own summary of search and not readily displaying external links. Google's "AI Overview" feature is an example. It keeps more users on Google's properties, for longer.

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Microsoft : Their main canonical product is Windows OS but they also make numerous products that work with Windows.

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Steps to enshittification:

1. Windows and Office (Word, Excel, etc.) were straightforward*, relatively open, and user-controlled. Software was purchased, not subscribed-to, minimal telemetry (mainly error reporting), no ads. New features we generally useful, beneficial to users.

2. Transition to subscription models (Office and Windows as-a-service**), increased telemetry for non-error reasons, non-core apps like OneDrive, Edge, Bing, and CoPilot are deeply integrated into Windows and hard to avoid.

3. Forced online accounts (Windows 11) and cloud-dependency (OneDrive), rampant advertising built into Windows, forcibly prioritizing MS services (Bing, Edge, OneDrive) over 3rd party competitors. Most new features are designed to drive engagement and are of little to no actual, demonstrable benefit to users.

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* straightforward: Word and Excel did what you'd expect, nothing more. Today, MS products are loaded with bloat to drive engagement.

** x-as-a-service (XaaS): A product that is deployed online (not from local media), undergoes numerous involuntary, smaller updates on a regular schedule, is highly cloud-tied, and (often) has a recurring subscription.

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In short, Windows, today, has enshittified by becoming a bona fide consumer entangling, ad-delivery platform masquerading as an operating system.

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There's a perennial joke that, because of all this Windows enshittification, next year will be "The year of the Linux desktop". Linux is a free, streamlined, alternate to Windows. To the extent that most of what you do is online (little to no locally installed software), a Linux desktop is a perfectly viable alternative.

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HP (Hewlett-Packard): They have totally destroyed the consumer printer experience. HP pretty much single-handedly made people hate printers. HP's path to enshittification hews to the wider definition that is becoming more common.

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Steps to enshittification:

1. Early printers (1980s to early 1990s) were groundbreaking and set the bar. They quickly became the go-to for consumer and small office printer solutions. 3rd party ink and toner were available and not blocked.

2. By the mid-1990s, HP began introducing cartridge lifetime expirations to ensure a cartridge didn't last "too long" and introduced circuity/programming to recognize if a cartridge was previously used in another printer (a refill) and disallow it. HP also began the shift to a razor and blades* sales model: Cheaper (and cheaply made) printers, but ever more expensive ink and toner.

3. By now (2010s and later), HP went all-in on enshittification with complete disregard and outright contempt for their customers: Updating firmware that bricked printers using non-HP ink/toner (prompting a class action lawsuit against HP), and the printers themselves becoming ever flimsier and prone to failure. Essentially, a throw-away device if anything went wrong beyond a paper jam.

4. Introduced a subscription-based ink supply service, which in effect, turns their printers into a metered device.

5. Requiring users to create an online account with HP in order to use certain features, like scanning. Preposterous.

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Buying a consumer or small business HP printer is to invite a beating delivered by HP. Legalized corporate thuggery. It's that bad.

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Other printer brands have poked a corporate toe or two into the waters first enshittified by HP but refrained from diving right in. Brother is probably the least enshittified of the major printer manufacturers. Not perfect, but better than the rest.

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There are countless more examples of corporate enshittification you can look-up.

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* Razor and blades sales model: Selling for cheap, or even giving away, the headlining item (razor handle) and making all the real money on repeat sales of a consumable (blades).

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A hijacked utopia?

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Sadly, pretty much everything that Big Tech touches is predestined to become enshittified in some way. There's not really all that much that separates, or makes unique, the various players in Big Tech. They are a collection of big companies with huge data centers that all do more or less the same thing. Oh, sure, not exactly the same things. But there's far more similarities than differences. A good example are "cloud drive" offerings, discussed below shortly.

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As time marches on, they're all striving to maximize their corporate profits by trying to replicate the individual product or service successes that any other Big Tech player has enjoyed. In other words, everyone is stealing slices of pie from everyone else. Homogenization of Big Tech is the result.

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AI is just the latest, but it's a relative biggie. OpenAI saw success with ChatGPT and the underlying tech back in November 2022. Ever since then, tech firms with sufficiently large bank accounts and a fat Rolodex of VCs they can call on, have been trying to outdo OpenAI, and each other.

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A good example of product entanglement and homogeneity are cloud synchronization products. Microsoft, Dropbox, Google, Apple, and Amazon, to name five(!), all have a "cloud drive" offering. There are many others. They are all hawked endlessly and all do the same thing.

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Cloud-based file sharing is particularly ripe for abuse because engagement leads to entanglement which can exact a significant extrication cost if you decide to quit using that service.

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What the heck does that even mean?

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File sharing involves sending links between members of a cohort (people across companies, work groups, friends, club members, etc.) These cloud products are heavily targeted (driving engagement) to unsophisticated (in the I.T. sense) retail users who can become so entangled with the product that dumping it would be very difficult (high extrication cost). All those shared folders with links pointing every which way, files that people rely on, finely hand-crafted permissions, etc.

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Quitting them and redoing all that on another cloud platform could be a costly, labor-intensive interruption.

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Case in point: Dropbox, the first widely used cloud-based file sharing provider, raised their prices by 20% a few years ago. But, great news they said, we're doubling your storage from 1 TB to 2 TB! Woo hoo! Thing is, only a small percent of Dropbox users were consuming anything close to the 1 TB quota, never mind 2 TB. ALL of my clients that use Dropbox are in the two or low three figures of GB consumed. So for them, that extra 1 TB is useless. But they got whacked with the 20% increase all the same.

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Dropbox could have just offered an additional 1 TB to those that need it. But they chose instead to hike the rates for everybody while providing no real additional value for the great majority of their users. And all the while, mass storage (hard drives) have only gotten ever bigger and cheaper per GB so there was no cost imperative. This was a naked, cynical cash grab by a company that knows its users are entangled and hesitant to leave.
 

Dropbox also pushes users toward higher, more expensive tiers by placing lower data transfer caps on their less expensive tiers.

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They can get away with this because of high extrication costs. In other words, quitting and going with another file sharing provider can be a huge pain in the ass.

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That's (cynical) enshittification.

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But it's not the only abuse.

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Many major aspects of life today involves tech that is becoming ever more complex, ad-filled, costly, and unreliable. In other words, enshittified (in the inevitably broader definition.)

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A list, in no particular order.

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• Cars: Pretty much all new cars today are connected to the internet. Many are logging everywhere you go, when, and selling that data. Features like remote start, remote climate, faster acceleration, greater range (for an EV) and even heated seats, are becoming locked behind a paywall, requiring a one-time unlock fee or subscription-based. Look up BMW heated seats for an example of this.
   

• Appliances: Difficult and finicky touchscreen UIs (User Interface) make using many appliances needlessly more difficult than they were before. Some Wi-Fi enabled appliances have features locked behind a subscription paywall.
   

• Watching TV has become too complex for many people. Dozens of subscription services, each with their fees, make finding and enjoying programs needlessly difficult. Once ad-free, many subscription services are adding advertising, then offering yet-more-costly ad-free options, and beginning to display "limited" ads on those as well. TV shows, even those that organically wrapped, are often dropped before you finish a series, due to contract non-renewals. And the TVs themselves are also spying on you, reporting your viewing habits to the maker of the TV who then sells that data. This can influence the ads you see. Something you certainly did not knowingly and willingly agree to.
   

• DRM (Digital Rights Management) that limit and control the terms of how people may use all manner of products. Digital goods like movies, TV shows, music, and e-books but also tangible goods such as home appliances and most consumer electronic devices. Among other ills, DRM makes it difficult or impossible to self repair many items, leading to a "right to repair" movement that is trying to take hold. See my article here for more on DRM: Intellectual Property
   

• Subscription fatigue: TVs, cars, some appliances, security systems, video doorbells, software of all kinds, even the way we listen to music, are requiring monthly or yearly subscriptions. Owning software with a perpetual license, or movies and music, is becoming rare.
   

• Customer service representatives are increasingly chat-based and are moving to being AI powered. These systems don't help much since they are not empowered to actually fix a problem, like a billing error. They are designed to placate, with minor incentives if necessary, and to frustrate and delay getting a human to solve a problem. It's quite shocking how bad its become. They day is coming when getting a human will be impossible. For some companies, that day has arrived, giving you email or chat as your only options.
   

• Planned obsolescence is when a gizmo, usually cloud-enabled, stops working because the manufacturer is tired of supporting it and wants you to upgrade. How long to support a product is a very deliberate calculus -- more revenue vs. keeping customers from fleeing.
   

• Passwords and security are the absolute bane of everyone's existence. There is no more "confidential" data. That ship has sailed and sank in the Mariana Trench. Virtually everyone has had their data breached multiple times due to the carelessness of corporations and governments that are entrusted to keep it safe. This is nothing short of a human rights violation.
   

• Smart home devices that are difficult to setup and fail to work due to any number of reasons: Forgotten password, device reached end of life and is no longer supported, credit card on file expires, internet access issues, device or the company cloud gets infected with malware, device isn't compatible with your particular home automation platform, and many other reasons. The home automation world is an interoperability train wreck as all the players want to control everything and no one is fully cooperating.
   

• Algorithmic manipulation that inorganically affects all kinds of experiences: Social media, shopping, buying airfare, countless others.
   

• No respect for privacy: Websites, apps, even physical retail stores, relentlessly tracking you, manipulating you, and then selling that data unless, and even when, you opt-out. We have no significant post-internet privacy laws in the US. It's a sloppy wet kiss to Big Data.
   

• Digital Rights Management (DRM) makes it very difficult to enjoy TV shows, movies, music, e-books, games, and other creative content on one's own terms. Ever more such content is available via subscription only, time-limited, region-locked, and subject to revocation at any time. Want to watch a movie on your iPad while on a transcontinental flight? That is surprisingly and needlessly difficult to do unless you're a computer-savvy pirate. All because Big Entertainment frets at the potential loss of every last nickel.
   

• Scams of every imaginable, and unimaginable stripe, are rampant today. Being a non-tech-savvy senior citizen today is downright dangerous with scammers coming from all directions armed with creative cons that would confound even a seasoned security researcher. Millions of people, especially seniors who aren't up on all these tech-enabled cons, are victimized to the tune of billions of dollars every year, much of it unrecoverable.
   

• Robocalls and junk text messages have made the telephone and text message platforms nearly unusable for some people, requiring creative solutions to avoid the pests akin to a biblical ravage of locusts. All because feckless telecom companies refuse to fix the problem technologically and our equally feckless congress refuses to enact effective legislation. Hundreds of millions of hours per year are collectively wasted by the citizenry dealing with this problem.
   

• Social media is a toxic waste dump of humanities' worst impulses. It ranks high on most lists of tech-induced ills. Humanity has amply proven that it can't handle the influential and abusive power that social media unlocks.

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Wow, that's quite a list, eh? And that's just off the top of my head. I could probably go on for another hour.

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Technology, once hailed as a Jetsons-esque key to an easier, more convenient, and enjoyable life, is failing to live up to its potential and promises made. That promise has been dulled by Big Tech, whose rapacious, enshittified business models are making life needlessly complicated instead of better.

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Then why are you doing tech work if it all sucks so bad?

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• Because none of the above is going away and it's only getting worse.

• And to the extent I can help deshittify someone's tech experience, even if only a little, by writing articles like this and helping them personally, then I'm happy to do so.

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Digital Detox

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Unplugging yourself from as much of modern tech as you reasonably can is good start. You won't be able to ditch all of it, but you can reduce your tech exposure quite a bit.

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• Don't buy a car that has any cloud-connected components. Alas, this is getting harder. But it's possible to disable the cloud-connectivity on some cars by pulling a certain fuse or using other hacker techniques. This may disable a built-in navigator so you may want an "old-school" (by today's standards, anyway) portable Garmin navigator.
   

• Don't buy any appliance that has Wi-Fi capabilities, period. Or, at the very least, do not connect them to your network. As Nancy Reagan put it back before tech became intolerable, "Just say no".
   

• Subscribe to old-school cable TV. You'll pay one bill, once a month. It may be higher, but it'll be way less hassle. Or or use a "digital" TV antenna to receive local and free TV broadcasts.
   

• Cancel as many software subscriptions as you can. Do you really need Office 365? Or Adobe Acrobat Editor?
   

• Don't buy any home-automation gadgets or devices that require the internet to work. Standalone systems with no internet access, or more to the point, that are not cloud-integrated, are generally fine and won't obsolesce nearly as fast. Honestly, the home automation universe is best left to hobbyists who understand and are willing to deal with it. HA never met its potential because too many players in this arena don't want to cooperate with each other by promulgating open and interoperable systems. Their attitude is if they can't control the entire shebang, and exact onerous subscription fees, then they'd rather not participate at all.
   

• Minimize the websites that you create accounts on. Most people wanting to minimize web exposure should be able to get along with maybe a dozen or so. And on those accounts, enable multi-factor authentication. Don't reuse passwords.
   

• Quit using social media, especially today's ADHD, seizure inducing, short form video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, Snapchat Spotlight, etc. Those are the worst of the worst. There was a time not all that long ago, ya know, when social media didn't exist, at all. It was a better time.

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If you're of a certain age, then you'll remember what times were like before tech took over and pretty much ruined many aspects of life. You can choose to revisit and relive those comparatively more innocent times.

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For you digital natives that might be tired of it all and don't know any other existence, ask someone that was born before 1985 or so what life was like back in the day.

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So how did we get here?

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Late Stage Capitalism

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Big Tech enshittification, as discussed above, is but one microcosm of late stage capitalism. Any in-depth discussion of enshittification necessarily requires discussing late stage capitalism. This is an entire field of study beyond just this small article.

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The following bullets, in no particular order, briefly enumerate ​some of the immediately recognizable hallmarks of late stage capitalism. Each one of these points is complex enough, in their own right, to warrant several books written on the topic.

 

• Corporate Dominance – A small number of multinational corporations exert immense control over markets, politics, and public life, often/usually at the expense of smaller businesses and consumers.
   

• Wealth Inequality – The yawning chasm between the rich and the poor continues to widen, with the wealthiest among us accumulating unprecedented fortunes while wages stagnate for the majority.
   

• Financialization of Everything – Economic growth is driven more by speculation, debt, and financial instruments than by production or tangible goods. Essential services like housing, healthcare, and education are increasingly seen as assets to be exploited rather than rights or public goods to be nurtured and available to all. Healthcare is especially affected as hospitals, physician groups, big pharma, pharmacies, and insurance, becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer ultra-wealthy operators.
   

• Commodification of Daily Life – Many things, including basic human needs and relationships, becomes a commodity. Subscription models where none existed before and monetized social interactions (e.g. influencers) exemplify this trend.
   

• Planned Obsolescence & Overconsumption – Companies design products with shorter lifespans or artificial limitations to force continuous consumer spending, leading to environmental degradation and waste. Fast fashion is notably a horrifically wasteful and polluting industry.
   

• Worker Exploitation – Stable, well-paying jobs with benefits give way to precarious gig work, contract labor, and algorithm-driven employment, leaving workers without security or bargaining power.
   

• Surveillance Monetizing – Tech companies monetize personal data, tracking and influencing consumer behavior through targeted ads, AI algorithms, and surveillance tools.
   

• Political Capture & Deregulation – Governments, as an apparatchik, increasingly serve corporate interests through lobbying, tax cuts for the wealthy, and deregulation, eroding public trust in institutions.
   

• Environmental Predation – Profit-driven industries continue to exploit natural resources, accelerating climate change, deforestation, and pollution while greenwashing their practices. I have little confidence that humanity will make any meaningful dent in the climate catastrophe unfolding before our very eyes.
   

• Bread & Circuses – Media, marketing, and entertainment create distractions from systemic issues, fostering a shallow culture of consumerism, endless content consumption, and ideological narratives that reinforce the status quo.

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I'm pretty sure you can recognize many of these realities that, collectively, demonstrate that we've reached late stage capitalism.

 

Every one of the points above, individually, are unsustainable in the long term. They are all marching along their own spectrum toward their own failure mode. Now imagine all them doing it at the same time.

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Capitalism today has transformed from a 20th century primarily productive system that floats all boats to a 21st century primarily extractive system that floats only the yachts owned by the wealthy. Rather than build wealth by, well, building things organically (growing the pie), it seeks wealth via financial machinations and with all that entails (grabbing larger pieces of the existing pie).

 

Notable examples of extractive capitalist practices (this list is by no means complete):

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• The meteoric rise of online gambling. No constructive good comes from gambling

• Cryptocurrencies and other crypto-assets like Bitcoin, NFTs, etc. Crypto is front and center for scams and money laundering.

• Corporations and investors buying up properties during temporary market downturns then converting them to rentals. This leads to fewer homeowners and more renters, which is suboptimal for long term community stability.

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This is clearly unsustainable. But today's richest money men, the real lever pullers, are living large and don't care.

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I know this article is rather depressing and there's not much you can do as an individual. I mean, it'd be like trying to change the course of a cruise ship by leaning against the rail on one side of the deck.

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If you are so inclined, just try to live your most ethical life, and strive to avoid all the discussed ills as best as you practically can.

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