I'm not sure this qualifies, but IMO it comes close. There's a lot of nuance in the whole discussion about ebooks and public libraries and handwaving about "enshittification" avoids all of it and dumps the responsibility for maintaining the concept of libraries on publishers and private companies.
Consumers and communities are free to continue consuming books using the same models libraries operated under for decades. Ebooks came along and don't fit well with that model, at all. It's another public commons problem we're basically hoping that Somebody Else will solve and then complaining when the foxes guarding the hen house do what foxes do.
I think Cory is about half right about enshittification but there's also a huge dose of entitlement and apathy. If you expect corporations or government to just Do The Right Thing when it's not in the interest of those in power, without regulation or continual threat of loss of power or market share, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
Ah yes, the enshittification of "enshittification". Definitely did not see that one coming.
Apart from being obnoxious and immature, "enshittification" doesn't communicate any concept beyond "something turning into shit." Being both vague and emotionally charged, semantic drift is inevitable.
/s
Parasitoids are parasites that corrupt a host, eventually resulting in its death. Endoparasitism is where the parasitoid infects and lives inside the host.
Note that again, libraries are already paying for the product. This is not "free."
It's not just corporations or government. Any system of organizing multiple human beings that depends on an unbroken chain of Good People Doing The Right Thing is bound to fail, and fail much sooner rather than later. This happens all the time in nonprofit organizations, civil societies, and what have you.
Individual people can be expected to Do The Right Thing, even at personal cost, sometimes. We've all helped strangers change a flat tire even when it's uncomfortably hot outside. But I'm sure we've all also just driven by someone on the side of the road, because we were in a rush to get somewhere.
Over time, and in groups, people can only be expected to operate based on the incentives and disincentives that are presented to them. (Hence your "regulation or continual threat".)
This.
Everyone should serve a stint as an officer in their condominium's homeowners' association or neighborhood association so they begin to understand.
(I want to underscore that the described behavior is not limited to capitalists, although one might at first suspect so).
No, this is missing the core reason due to believing in an inherent order or that implementing the "right" incentives is the solution.
The real core is that humans are sometimes irrational. This irrational behavior is why economists are regularly wrong (on both macro and micro scales, from recessions to struggling to understand why an incentive/disincentive is ineffective when it should from all other testing), and the core as to why groups can't stick to Do The Right Thing.
Sure, but do you think Cory expects people to do the right thing? The entire thesis assumes everyone basically having good intentions except the middleman who mostly wants to make money.
It's not a judgment, so much as a very obvious pattern driven by understandable and predictable human behavior.
If we can find a way to break away from the pattern while still assuming people will not do the right thing and keep doing human behavior, we should do that.
That's the whole point? Enshittification is a response to the idea the capitalism optimizes for the consumer, when instead it points out that it optimizes for the business. It doesn't provide a solution, but it at least names the problem.
I don't think the problems we're seeing are limited to capitalistic nations.
In any case, my understanding of the philosophical foundation of capitalism, wasn't that it relied on optimization or altruism toward consumers at all. Rather, that it structured incentives so that consumers would benefit from the selfish pursuits of industry.
Pointing out the failings of that system is easy. What's difficult is proposing a system that's better, and has a chance of working with human nature as it is, rather than as we wish it to be.
We don't really have any non-capitalist nations. Maybe NK or Cuba, but I don't think that was what you were thinking of.
China's economy is certainly driven by market forces, even though it is steered at the top by a dictatorship.
> Rather, that it structured incentives so that consumers would benefit from the selfish pursuits of industry.
Yes, and enshittification is the result of those incentives not actually being aligned in practice.
You seem to be rebutting me by saying the same thing.
And we need to be very careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because, capitalism has had some very profound and positive outcomes for humanity. So, by all means, let's improve incentives, and punish corruption where we find it. But let's do it with a scalpel, not a machete -- lest the patient die on the operating table.
kind of problematic that capitalism is seen as all-or-nothing. then there's nothing that can ever be done about it. i'm starting to see the perceived problem with calling out enshittification now.
It's an old joke that the only group besides Tech Companies to call their customers 'users' are drug dealers, but there is great truth in that.
When tech companies performs enshittification, it's not terribly different from a heroin dealer doubling the profits he extracts from a customer by cutting with other substances (mixing with cheaper substances to dilute the concentration of the most expensive component, for those unfamiliar with the lingo) when he knows that customer is experiencing withdrawal - he knows the customer is hopelessly hooked, addicted, and desperate for more, and he knows he can manipulatively extract even more value from the customer in such a vulnerable state.
For this reason, I propose it may just as well be called something more like "Addict Abuse", or "Heartless exploitation of the vulnerable", because that's exactly what it is.
That society continues to cherish and prize companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, Apple, Twitter, and others rather than regarding them with the extreme prejudice and utter contempt commonly reserved for manipulative dealers of addictive drugs is nothing short of baffling to me.
P.S. Before any corporate shills accost me for using the previous names of technology companies - I know I'm using the old name. I'm using the old name for the same reason I still call Blackwater "Blackwater", even though they call themselves "Academi" now - rebranding to cover up old sins is itself a manipulative tactic to memoryhole the sins. I will be no more complicit in covering up the rampant psychological, privacy, and government-directed first amendment abuses of Facebook or Twitter than I am in covering up the war crimes of Blackwater.
You don't need to sell people on the idea. Cool your jets and reread the comment you replied to.
I read your comment 3 times; at no point does it sound like it addresses
>It's hard to take the phenomenon seriously when I sound like I'm just being edgy saying it aloud.
You just talk about the meaning of the word and companiies involved. And leave a foot note of
>For this reason, I propose it may just as well be called something more like "Addict Abuse", or "Heartless exploitation of the vulnerable", because that's exactly what it is.
That doesn't really address the issue. I wish we simply called it "rent seeking", an existing concept that can connect to other industries easily.
To be a "rent seeking" business is to be a business that is dependent on handouts made from the government with the taxpayers' money, with a business model that is otherwise less competitive, or uncompetitive altogether.
For example, see: every single business operated by Elon Musk post-Paypal.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/we-have-entered-the-self-loa...
BigVirtuousTech is now BVT!
Not to mention that this piece isn't even about "enshittification" at all -- it's a long rant against a feature change which is really just "I don't like this change in behavior". The search box likely changed to show results from only your library, instead of worldwide results, because it was confusing a lot of library patrons -- who, remember, are not always very tech-savvy.
The whole concept of "enshittification" is supposed to be about behavior that benefits the corporation at the expense of the user, like stuffing full of ads or jacking up prices. But this is just a UX change that the author doesn't like.
So it's a misleading example of "enshittification" even to begin with.
> But this is just a UX change that the author doesn't like.
That's not the case. This removed the ability for me, a library patron, to request a digital title that I had before. I can still request a printed book to be added to the catalog, but for digital title our library FAQ states (which I presume is copied from OverDrive): If you’re looking for a specific digital title that we do not have, you can use a Notify Me tag in Libby. Notify Me will alert you if the library buys the title. However, not all publishers sell their content to libraries in digital format. If you cannot find a title in Libby’s catalog, then we cannot buy the item.
This looks like the control for digital purchases was removed from the libraries and moved to OverDrive/Libby, which is definitely not a simple UX change.
This doesn't serve my interests at all and, according to the article, doesn't serve the library interests either, as they don't have the information they had before about who requests what books and can't control the purchase process. It's also (according to the author) a sign of the (coming) platform changes for the worse, which I tend to agree with.
Overdrive sacrificed its usefulness to its users to gain market-share with libraries, and it's achieved 95% penetration there. Now it's paring back functionality for libraries, hiding features that might enable them to leave their platform, and using its monopoly advantage to force them to pay more for features that were previously free and easy to use. The most apparent reason it's doing this is because it was bought by a notorious investment firm with a long history of squeezing as much money out of their acquisitions as possible before leaving them to die.
That seems to support the original definition pretty well. I agree that the word does a disservice to its definition.
that doesn't make sense because Overdrive seems to be a private company working with the government to provice a service. It was described as already having a monopoly before this feature change. It has no financial incentive to make things worse, not for money nor market share. This sounds more like Hanlon's Razor to me.
But maybe it requires people who are that shrill and eyeroll-inducing to change things?
It's a meme created by a fringe nerd blogger, primarily taken up by nerds on the internet, that no one else cares about.
It's not a scientific term, legal term or term of art, nor is it needed to describe some novel process. It's just a buzzword people like to use because it contains the word "shit."
But it's delivered in a way that is wholly unpalatable to anybody who's not already close to his thinking.
[1] Former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, continues to dabble in music with various bands / backing bands and has a YouTube series called "What Would Jello Do?" Also did a lot of spoken word shows but may have cut back on that in the COVID era.
I just think Cory Doctorow should grow the hell up. I've been reading his stuff for like, what, almost two decades now(!).
Edgelords were fun up through the mid-2000s and then the rest of us grew up, realized shock value was for teenage boys, and learned to prefer well-constructed and thoughtful arguments over angst and vitriol.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-b... is one I'm reading now. It's clearly, bluntly stated (good, makes it hard to avoid) and cites lots of examples.
He doesn't seem to go for shock value (to me.) That said, the term 'enshittification' is not shocking to me because of the swearword; I think we're all used to calling things BS, for example. I don't use terms like that at work, or at home, but that's personal taste in communication; it's not shocking and sometimes they are the most accurate and succinct terms.
What I can say is that I can't say "enshittification" on a quarterly earnings call – y'know, to audiences with the power and authority to affect actual change.
That's the whole point of the root comment.
>... swear word...
I know that what I'm about to say doesn't necessarily apply to every vulgar word (eg, racial slang) given historical context, but specific to the word "shit", what's the difference between "shit" and "crap" or "poop"? Personally, I've struggled to understand why certain "swear words" are still considered as such, when the use of them is no different than their non-swear counterparts (eg, heck for hell, screw you for fuck you, dang/darn for damn, etc.). I'd be curious to see what other people think about this.
"Shit" is a swear word; the other two aren't. That's all there is to it, it's convention. The same as "red" means red and doesn't mean blue.
But all three would be inappropriate as economics terminology. Using a smelly bodily function as an economics metaphor is simply gratuitous and unprofessional.
>But all three would be inappropriate as economics terminology. Using a smelly bodily function as an economics metaphor is simply gratuitous and unprofessional.
Why?
And it is absolutely not used the same way as "shoot". It carries a great deal of additional meaning. The entire purpose of swear words is to not be appropriate for polite conversation. Otherwise we wouldn't have them.
> Why?
Because it's unpleasant to come across gratuitously offensive things like smelly bodily functions. If I'm reading an article about economics and business policy, I don't want to be interrupted by something unpleasant that is totally unconnected to the subject at hand. I don't want a close-up photo of a pimple being popped either, as a gratuitous visual analogy for how resources are extracted from an economy. Does that satisfy you?
It's on that point that we, and I'd imagine the GP as well, strongly disagree.
It's just about understanding cultural context in order to legitimatize your point. I feel like Doctorow would have learned that by now.
no particular reason, and honestly it being a swear is the least intrusive part of this. As mentioned before, "enpoopification" or "encrapification" don't solve the problem. "poop" is not a swear but is something to avoid talking about in 95% of professional settings.
>Why?
because poop is gross and in general to be avoided talking about where possible? I don't even think this is a cultural thing. Is there any country where you can leave the bathroom and say "Damn I just took a huge shit" in formal company?
that goes for any bodily waste as well. Sweat, mucus, urine. Feces just happens to be the most messy, unhygienic, and smelly of them all.
In this case, it wouldn't really be better if it were "encrapification" or "enpoopification." IMO the problem with the term, aside from "shit" being a word you can't say on television, is that it's juvenile.
i really wish your message met my standards, so i am just going to put my fingers in my ears until it does.
..hyperbole aside..
semantics are important, but only when definitions need to be clear.
anything else is just darma battles for the sake of darma battles, and avoiding the discussion.
This is one of those "you can be right, or you can be successful" situations. Everybody can rally behind "enshittification" and make it super-easy for the actual message to be dismissed, or we could find a term that doesn't sound like it was coined by an edgelord.
The folks who are won over / have adopted "enshittification" aren't the audience that needs winning over. So what language and messaging is going to work for that next group that might actually turn the tide?
it's the combination of a swear word with the pomposity of en____ification. I get that Doctorow is trying to make a point about tech marketing as posturing about intellectuality of effort and nobility of purpose, while actually producing shit for easy money.
But what works as a clever inside joke among friends limits it for a wider audience, and makes anyone saying it sound like a snarky nerd trying too hard to be clever. This is a good way to get (metaphorically) stuffed in a locker, ie to have your valid concerns ignored and mocked.
if we're still relying on social media like Reddit and Twitter to spread the word organically, perhaps.
Consequently, from a user perspective, this leads to the counterintuitive idea that you probably shouldn't trust any platform who doesn't explain how they're making money off of you.
All the corporations accused of acting this way are network-effect quasi-monopolies. That's the root cause.
If you like it, that’ll be $0.79 per use or $5.99 per month on the value-saver subscription.
If you're going to argue for normalizing this word, you need a better reason than it being edgy to the straw pearl-clutchers living rent free in your head.
These people do literally believe that. They represent a sizable political faction in the United States.
best of luck with your mission. Meanwhile I simply want to convince companies to not make their products worse for short term profit.
Which is not especially new - rent seeking in general is explicitly not illegal. But historically, it was viewed as a general negative for society, and something to be addressed through policy.
Now it seems to be "business as usual" in the race to accumulate as much wealth as possible, consequences to society at large be damned.
Seems people want a nicer word than "Enshittification". Something more polite.
But then the 'nicer' word like 'rent seeking', half the people don't recognize that it is bad, or what it is.
So think that is the argument that "Enshittification" is a good description, because people instantly get what it means,
Definition->'something is happening and it is taking something good and turning it into shit'
I think that's an illusion. Proponents of capitalism and privatisation will argue that things go bad because of the goverment policy, not because of rent seeking and privatization.
You really can't sum up history in a single word, it's prone to disinterpretation.
Why does this particular word have to "Sum up History"??
I think you are correct, that left and right think that 'shit' is happening and it is because of the other side.
One blames Government, and One blames Capitalism, thought I'd say both are wrong, or over-simplified. But both agree things are 'shit'.
So guess we need even finer grained definitions of 'shit'. like:
"EnCapitaShitification"
and
"EnGoveShitification"
But also, I don't think it is a new phenomenon. Capitalism always seeks to extract all resources that are available to it; that's the systemic nature of it. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes (as when it does to human attention, and other stuff, in general when it happens in the extreme) it's a bad thing.
Kinda like with fire. It's akin to conning a new word for forest fires caused by climate change, which would connect the dots with climate. People who haven't connected the dots already are unlikely to do so with the new word either.
That is good point.
But now, I'm trying to think of the word we already have for this? Just using the word "Capitalisms" is too broad, really encapsulates too much. What is the word for the end state of "Capitalism", or what it drives towards?
If you have ever read Moloch By Scott Alexander, I think that is the same 'jist' of what we are trying to get at with "enshitification".
But at the moment, I am having hard time thinking of an existing word that already means this.
If something is "verkakte", then it is "enshittified", i.e. it has has reached the end of the process of "enshittification".
The new English word has a more specific meaning though.
Yes, companies would like to make more money for doing the same work or less. So would everyone. Would you like a raise every year, even if you’re the same person doing the same job? Would you like to have passive income so you don’t have to work so hard?
It explains why some things get worse over short or long periods of time, but is not great at explaining why so many things get better over time. Like if I held mobile phones from 2003 and 2023 and said “you can buy either for $600,” for most folks it would be a no-brainer. How did mobile phones, a huge market with huge investment, avoid “enshittification”?
Now I know that Cory’s writing is more sophisticated than what I’m saying. But most folks who throw the term around (like this blog post) are not. It’s become a broad label for anything some people don’t like, like “late stage capitalism” or “woke.”
App changes interface slightly: “enshittification!!”
The original essay was interesting. The broad application of the term, I am finding tiresome.
Do you have any friends who are companies?
Its all people, all the way down.
They don't need to be. They are automata with emergent behavior independent from the individual humans comprising them - paperclip maximizers in a very literal sense. The overly-simplistic "corporate decisions are just human decisions" take entirely ignores corporate policies, material interests, and countless other drivers of corporate decisionmaking with zero dependence on any particular actual human.
And those policies came from...?
And those material interests relate to...?
...the ether? Jesus Christ? The "Invisible Hand"? The void?
Those policies were written by people at the direction of people to be given to people to do because some people are interested in achieving that goal.
And those policies continue to be in effect long after any of their authors or beneficiaries have left or otherwise ceased to be authors or beneficiaries - as highlighted in the part of my comment immediately following that which you quoted.
People being involved at one point says nothing about their continued involvement or about the eventual autonomy of the thing with which they were once involved - just like how any person's decisionmaking is independent from that of one's constituent cells, and from one's parents and their constituent cells. The interests of the creation can and do diverge from the interests of the creators.
Your argument is like saying "we've already solved biology -- it's physics all the way down!" Except, it's not. The information-processing and entropy-generating capacities of biological organisms surpasses those that would be expected from a purely physical perspective.
Specifically in the case of companies, they're generally deliberately organized such that specific humans in the leadership/ownership are not individually responsible for decisions, otherwise it would be easier to pierce the corporate veil and/or claim violation of fiduciary responsibility. Hence diffuse responsibility, meetings and meeting minutes, reams of pages justifying decisions, etc - what we commonly know as "bureaucracy", with a life of its own. Each human-reasoning-unit only focuses on some very small part of the company's behavior, adds their own personal incentives to not rock the boat, and then rolls the shit downhill.
So no, it doesn't sense to pigeonhole company behavior as just "human behavior", especially when individual humans in the system often would very much like to choose differently, but for all the incentives lined up against them.
They didn’t. They spy on you more and more to extract more value from you after purchase. They have non-replaceable batteries and screens, which means you can’t service them easily. They are worse at being phones than plastic Nokias 20 years ago. Companies are incentivized to create apps which are trapped in the phone’s walled gardens rather than creating webpages which anyone can access. The list goes on.
People don’t care about replaceable batteries and voice calls. They want the magic pocket oracle to just work with a minimum of faffing about.
You have to reach people on what THEY care about, not preach to them about what they should care about. (And yes, I’m self-aware enough to see the inherent irony of this comment.)
For instance, Apple tends to drive how mobile phones look and what external features they have even if their changes are objective steps backwards in functionality. People generally liked headphone jacks, but not enough to cut themselves off from flagship devices. There is no way to make an apples-to-apples comparison since usually there are never two devices whose literal only difference is the specific feature under discussion.
What was this supposed to say?
And the first-gen iPhone didn't have a replaceable battery or screen either.
As far as I can tell, iPhones have only gotten better. And ever since Apple introduced the SE, they've become more affordable as well.
It's way better at being a phone than an old Nokia as well -- the convenience and sound quality of wireless earbuds, using higher-quality audio and background noise removal, is really something.
Well, based on Docorow's term, it's because there wasn't a 2 way market. Instead of phone manufacturers playing 2 sides off each other, it was a a much simpler arrangement: manufacturers sell phones to consumers, and there are enough manufacturers that they can't get entirely complacent.
Perhaps in the early days, when manufacturers acted as an intermediary between the carriers and consumers, that was more prone to enshittification. And phones in those days were pretty stagnant, looking for new ways to grab a couple of bucks (remember when they charged for ringtones? Or wildly overcharged for SMS messages?). Phones becoming unlocked, and phones rapidly improving in abilities and price did happen roughly around the same time, but perhaps that's unrelated to enshittification.
It's amusing that so many people who comment here are so bothered by this, while using absurd words like "orthogonal" to describe a concept for which simpler words exist. Just one example.
that's the issue. We don't need to be crude to get a point across.
I understand why the blogger chose his words. His goal isn't to propose change at Google. He wants views and the internet loves crudeness, free from the shackles of reality.
But Attention is only one ingredient. And the way this is framed it will stay as some crude internet lingo and nothing more. Which is fine for a blogger, because they got the attention desired and will simply make more blogs.
If your goal is simply to rant on the internet, the term is perfect. If you want this to spread to larger and larger news and around corporate meetings, we already shot ourselves in the feet.
And again, enshittification is a very real phenomenon. It's pervasive on the internet and sometimes it seems that at least half the comment threads on this site veer off into lamenting it each day, so I don't see the problem with naming it crudely so that a nice, simple, rude word can summarize this very real thing that so many here and elsewhere make their daily bread in expanding.
>I don't see the problem with naming it crudely so that a nice, simple, rude word can summarize this very real thing that so many here and elsewhere make their daily bread in expanding.
I already laid out the problem:
>If your goal is simply to rant on the internet, the term is perfect. If you want this to spread to larger and larger news and around corporate meetings, we already shot ourselves in the feet.
I guess in this case you are the former. Which is fine. But I personally sought a larger scale change. Tired of arguing over the internet to no effect.
Not everything has to be jargon.
But it's a goofy term, and Doctorow is indeed annoying. Bird of a feather with this writer, whose style is also incredibly irritating. Nevertheless, good points worth making.
If the telephone were invented today, we'd be listening to ads instead of ringing tones.
It seems to me that capitalism reinvented itself over past 100 years by privatizing things that were either previously public or nobody could imagine them to be private goods. Aside from the military, utilities, copyrights (and fair use), attention and personal data, there are also various forms of consumer debt (mortgages). So I think it's important to put all these things into same context.
If this term must be ironic. And I guess, dismissed.
Then what is the non-ironic, serious word, that does capture this intent, that we can use without being dismissed.
Libraries are a great public service. Really, these moves to enshittify otherwise free or modest cost to use public works, can be seen as an encroaching of capitalist ways and means into what are traditionally public ways and means.
And it really is not that either is bad or good.
Markets, sales, money, competition, ADS and all that clearly have a place and value in society.
So do public works, like libraries, parks, and the like.
The branding should better reflect these realities.
It is really nice to have places where there is not an expectation of spending money.
Cory sees denying society of these places as "shitty"
While I agree, that is toxic when it does not need to be.
slumping into the melt
reversion to the mean and nasty
californication
Instead of discussing the very real social consequences of companies like KKR gaming the ridiculously over-revered economic system and notable absence of any legislation preventing that.
HN falls prey to simpleton spin-doctoring.
You mean HN is getting enshittified?