The Enshittification of Everything

Cory Doctorow invented the perfect word for our time of collapsing complexity.

by Andrew Nikiforuk - 15 Jul 2024 - The Tyee

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” — Antonio Gramsci

Last year the American Dialect Society chose as its word of the year “enshittification.”

Cory Doctorow, a clever fellow and Toronto-born internet dude, invented the term to characterize the declining service and products made by IT monopolies that generate armies of algorithms to bully people like storm troopers.

But I think the descriptor has far broader applications. Everywhere you turn, it seems, civilization is facing a massive and cumulative failure of excessive complexity. Enshittification explains the state of just about everything.

Doctorow laid out his concept in a brilliant Marshall McLuhan lecture delivered at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin earlier this year.

Enshittification proceeds through stages, wrote Doctorow. A platform such as Facebook or Google begins by offering a tidy product to all. Then it starts to abuse users to make more money for its business customers. The service declines, ads proliferate like viruses, privacy goes to hell and before you know it the platform charges you a hefty fee for choosing to leave its appalling embrace. Hence the word enshittification.

Doctorow writes with flair: “The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crap gadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names and cryptocurrency scams.”

But make no mistake: the Communist Party of China has delivered the same breakfast from hell. Technology overrides ideology.

To me enshittification stands as a brutal reminder that wealth and power aren’t permanent, and when they start to fail, as they must, a sort of predatory decay prevails at all levels in society. At that point enshittification becomes the norm. It’s what unmakes your day.

Allow me to illustrate with a modest personal example. I walked into my local supermarket last week and to my surprise found the shelves half empty.

A laminated printed sign explained the retro pandemic look. It was sorry to report that an “IT incident” had occurred at the distributor, which was under cyberattack. Nobody knew who the aggressor was. The distributor regretted the two-week-long attack was “impacting some internal and customer-facing systems and could impact our current inventory of certain grocery items.”

I have no idea what a customer-facing system is, but it appears to have been fried. I suppose that’s why I couldn’t find the faces of yogurt or fresh lettuce on the shelves. With its computer system down, the distributor didn’t know where its trucks were or if they even existed, explained a disillusioned cashier.

Then I went to the provincial registry office to update my driver’s licence. “Can’t do that today,” said the registrar. “Why,” I asked? The government computer is down. He didn’t give a reason. So enshittification is overtaking daily life. It starts with a few drops and then it pours.

Enshittification, of course, can also be found on the food shelves even when they are stocked because whole foods are being replaced by ultra-processed stuff the same way TikTok or Facebook has replaced and debased human communication. The results aren’t good either way. One changes the metabolism of the human body while the other reduces the brain to its tyrannical bits: the left hemisphere.

Now that about 70 per cent of the products on the shelves are ultra-processed foods, the supermarket serves as a platform downloading sugary drinks, savoury snacks and refined grains. Ultra-processed foods crash civilization’s metabolism with heart attacks, cancer, obesity, diabetes and brain fog. Ultra-processed foods hack our brains the same way algorithms on Facebook, Google or YouTube overwhelm our minds. They disrupt normal functions and trick us into rabbit holes of consumption with softer, saltier, sweeter shit. The focus is on speed and volume and upping cravings — just like the internet. Enshittification.

Let’s apply Doctorow’s handy concept to appliances such as refrigerators, washers and dryers. I remember that when I was a kid my parents never replaced their appliances. They just kept on running. In fact, appliances built in the 1970s lasted 30 to 50 years. And imagine this: they were simple and repairable. You didn’t need a computer degree to understand a washing machine.

But someone figured out that durable and repairable was bad for the economy, and enshittification set in.

Appliances now last about five years if you are lucky because they are made with lesser materials, greater complexity and bad design. They can talk to you but don’t like to work. They also drain energy all day long and come with bullshit names like Unitized Spacemaker or UltraFresh System Smart Top-Control. Ever try replacing a motherboard on one of these suckers?

Only five brands of appliances now dominate the market the same way the Big Five (Alphabet [Google], Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft) now rule the internet. Like their digital brethren, the appliance monopolists don’t keep spare parts for longer than three to five years. Some companies even restrict access to parts and service information. Or use proprietary screws.

As a result of this planned obsolescence, appliances crowd our landfill cemeteries. Appliances make up half of the world’s electronic waste, which is growing by leaps and bounds.

What’s happened to appliances is a pretty good metaphor for how complexity undermines society. The Utah anthropologist Joseph Tainter has argued that civilizations tend to collapse when they can no longer afford the social and energy costs of maintaining their complexity or, for that matter, their appliances. In other words, societies die when they can’t fix things in an affordable way.

“After a certain point, increased investments in complexity fail to yield proportionately increasing returns,” explains Tainter. “Marginal returns decline and marginal costs rise. Complexity as a strategy becomes increasingly costly, and yields decreasing marginal benefits.” Ergo, enshittification.

Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshittification holds that popular digital platforms evolve to abuse their users and then their business customers to ‘claw back all the value for themselves.’ Photo by Joi Ito, Creative Commons licensed.

Another hallmark of complexity is growing concentration and top-heavy institutions. Doctorow says in his talk that enshittification is the direct product of concentration, lack of competition and the absence of regulation. Monopolies rule the IT world just as they rule almost every aspect of life these days.

Three transnational companies — Bayer, DuPont and Syngenta — control about 53 per cent of global seed sales. Four companies control 45 per cent of farm machinery sales. Four companies account for 58 per cent of pharmaceutical sales. Five retailers control what’s on Canadian grocery shelves and how it’s produced. Two companies slaughter 95 per cent of Canada’s beef. And so on. Such concentration, all accelerated by technology, is a form of decay. Lots of rotting platforms everywhere. Enshittification.

What was once promised to be a miracle breakthrough that will liberate humanity cannot escape the entropy of enshittification. You may think I am describing the internet again, but no, this applies equally to fossil fuels.

One hundred years ago it went like this: roughnecks drilled a hole, found a rich pool of oil and then pumped away. But those big milkshakes have been drained. As a result, the quality and quantity of energy is getting worse and more expensive.

The technology today used to pry bits of oil and gas from underground formations is called fracking and is one destructive innovation. It requires assembling hundreds of trucks, plundering lakes of water, mining mountains of sand and mixing tons of chemicals to blast rock two kilometres underground at such high pressures that the industry causes earthquakes from Argentina to northern British Columbia. Then the industry has to bury Olympic-sized pools of toxic and radioactive wastewater, causing more earthquakes and changing bacterial communities to boot.

Think about it. The industry that keeps planes airborne and cars on the road now depends on a platform that makes earthquakes, poisons groundwater, leaks methane, fragments agricultural land and defies regulation as arrogantly as Meta or Google. Most of us “users,” meanwhile, can’t understand why the costs of flying, driving and heating our homes are rising.

Here’s a hint: according to a recent study, the amount of energy needed to frack and mine petroleum products now cannibalizes about 15 per cent of what is produced. Thanks to the intensification of LNG, fracking and bitumen steaming, half of petroleum production will be consumed by energy-intensive mining processes by 2050. That means less energy for homes, schools and the whole AI madness.

As a consequence the world faces a three-way conundrum: “an energy transition that seems more improbable every passing year, increasing environmental threats and the risk of unprecedented energy shortages and associated economic depression in less than two decades.” Enshittification, in other words, of pretty much everything.

Doctorow defines the stages of enshittification in the IT business, and they are worth reviewing.

“Platforms are good to their users.”

1. “Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.”

2. “Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

3. “Then there is a fourth stage: they die.”

The alarming thing about Doctorow’s chronology is that it pretty well matches the rise and fall of platforms knowns as civilizations. The average lifespan of a civilization is 250 years (or five times longer than a washing machine built in 1970).

Every civilization goes through stages of co-operation, overreach, stagnation, decay and collapse. Things start out good for users (freedom and purpose) and then decline into tyranny and wars. And then the cycle repeats.

At some point in each round, as societies increasingly complexify, elites get greedy and start quarrelling and abuse commoners. All the energetic bustle and acquired abundance leads, as William Ophuls writes in Immoderate Greatness, to faded ideals, diminished energy, feuding elites, genocidal politics and problems that can’t be solved. Nobody can fix a dishwasher anymore, and its maker, who lives in a gated community in Mexico, doesn’t give a shit.

So, once enshittified, where to next? Clay Shirky, an internet maven like Doctorow, finds wisdom in the work of anthropologist Tainter, who outlined the perils of accelerating complexity. “When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to,” wrote Shirky in an essay on failing TV business models.

“It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”

As a journalist, nowadays I am often at a loss for words. My work can’t stop what’s coming, and who’s listening anyway? This predicament reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut story.

An alien named Zog arrives on Earth with a mission to explain how wars can be averted and climate change arrested and other marvels. But Zog comes from a planet where the only means of communicating is farting and tap dancing. The first thing Zog sees when he arrives in Connecticut, of all places, is a human house on fire. So Zog rushes into the house and starts farting and tap dancing to warn the occupants about their mortal danger. The owner immediately brains Zog with a nine-iron. And so it goes.

Enshittification. It’s far too apt and useful a word to confine to wondering about why the internet has failed to deliver on all the hype.

Thank you, Cory Doctorow. We now have the perfect descriptor for how it feels to live in the twilight of an inattentive civilization that has sacrificed sanity for complexity.