The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
The report linked is damn good
The problem here is - in my opinion - caused by:
- the need to chase unlimited growth (by definition impossible)
- lacking regulations
- monopolies and such
- price fixing
- weak worker rights
The right always chasing “deregulation”? Well, here is the result. High profits, high prices, shitty products and services.
And the people suffer.
“the commons” has largely been privatized online. That is the result of what you have stated.
We should all be ashamed, and afraid.
Also the mental disease which is known as “wanting to be a billionaire”. Everything in the world is structured around making that status the ultimate goal. It is like endorsing sociopathy.
And every time you try to undo at least some deregulation, you get likened to Stalin, no matter how bad that deregulation was.
Yeah well america is one big business, they don’t care for regular citizens, they wanna know how they can make profit of citizens. I bet that wont ever change
The United States was in early release. We’re thrilled to announce we’ve officially launched and will be landing in a country almost certainly near you.
As they say. The cloud is someone else’s computer.
Emphasis on someone else
Irrelevant. They can do it to devices you physically own.
Only if it is linked to an online service or update service. In the absence of that they need to hard bake their enshitification strategy upfront.
A few days ago I tried to find the best frame of the video to turn into a meme. This is what I came up with.
This is a handy meme to have these days. I hope to see it in circulation and to spread it myself! Thanks!
I’m happy with the updoots that I got. I’d be even happier if I see someone else use it in a comment thread.
Not sure I agree with the statement that we wouldnt accept enshittification in our analog lives… ovens and refrigerators with screens and becoming unrepairable, cars are only sold with onboard computers and power windows with no other price point, materials for most household items becoming plastic / single use / or deliberately designed with a failure lifetime. I recently started buying clothing with no synthetics and they are unfathomably better performing in terms of breathing, odor, comfort and warmth. We’ve forgotten what physical products used to be like, in 20 years we will have similarly forgotten what un-enshittified internet / tech was like.
I think, and perhaps it’s scarier than anyone wants to admit, we’ve already gotten accustomed to or given up fighting against enshittification of the analog world.
The common thread is capital and financialization, and there can be never be progress until the ideas in “how to win friends and influence people” are called out as demonic and unhuman.
The fact that half of eligble voters in the US willingly voted for the ultimate enshittifier not once, but twice, is a testament to this.
I’ve also started buying natural fibers only. Noticable improvements in quality of life
I agree with everything you said, but why you gotta do power windows dirty like that 😭
I don’t think they were shitting on power windows, but rather the lack of option for a lower priced model without them. It wasn’t too long ago that there were economy models without power windows available for certain cars.
For me it’s a tale about loss of ownership in a dematerialised world. No one is going to cut a piece of my dining table because I own it and physically have it entirely at my side.
I’ll never own (my locally installed) Spotify nor the songs I listen to. Though for the later I have vinyl alternatives which no one is touching.
If you want a specific variety of a plant that’s patented by, say, Monsanto, you don’t own the seeds you get but rather their permission to plant them.
If you re-plant seeds in your own field produced by the crops of the previous year on that same field they can sue you and they will win (see Bowman v. Monsanto Co.)
This is why I only seed torrents
That’s cool. Good thing I have a black light, and can modify the seeds the same way they do. Therefore, not the same seeds.
Edit: didn’t make this clear enough, the idea is to lightly modify their seeds just enough to make it legal. If they want to be shitty, we can be shitty right back. Any rule they make for us they make exceptions for the rich. Therefore, with enough cleverness and a stubborn refusal to accept others bullshit(and a bit of spite) you can exploit their rules and bend them to your will.
Bit worse than that isn’t it?
Indeed. IP / patents is clearly a source of issue in physical objects as well. But once you buy them seeds they stay « according to the initial specs ». They won’t suddenly grow another plant once you have them.
You might not be allowed to do anything you want but that’s another annex issue.
You can have digital no problem. I have 25 year old mp3s. It just needs to be physically on your drives. You can pirate or purchase music today without issues. Spotify just scratched that laziness itch at one point in time and now you are locked in.
Self hosting as well. navidrome and an android app like symfonium and you can do anything.
As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue. It is a race to the bottom.
How do you fix that without massive upheaval for the people you are trying to help. I don’t know.
Companies used to have a smaller reach, meaning less total and potential customers. So they had to balance what what was good for the shareholders qith what was good for the customers or risk losing both. But products are often global now, especially digital ones. There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose. And investors don’t care as much about the long term since they can trade stocks so quickly. Maybe the solution is required holding periods for stocks or something. Higher short term capital gains taxes, and better incentives for long term gains.Government should be the balancing act in response to this. Regulations enforced by Governments.
That is a nice thought. But the government has never been “for” the people. And you can’t reasonably expect people who are chosen by a popularity contest to be able to devise a way to provide that balance. It’s not a required skill to get elected. And you can’t expect the voters to know what real skills a polotician has. The spin and propaganda are just to effective at manipulating voter impressions. So it can’t be the government…
Governments should be more or less thinktanks for the Nations issues. They’re not expected to know all the answers, but collectively, they’re in a position where they have access to the people who do. Ideally, they work together to solve a Nations issues.
What is the alternative if not government?
There is no alternative, but that doesn’t mean we can reasonably expect our governments to do it. History says they won’t. Humans need to evolve more in some directions before any group larger than can truely know each other can sustain working for the common good.
As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue.
I’d say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people’s pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they’d have made long term.
It isn’t merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they’re gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.
It isn’t enough for Zuckerberg’s company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into… the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they’re doing, to make human labor irrelevant!
Because they’ve bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.
There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose.
So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.
It’s increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.
So I will disagree on one point. If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders. Shareholders only make money if the stock price goes up, which requires people to buy it at the higher price. And if the company isn’t growing double digits, buyers will go elsewhere. So the drive to produce shareholder value forces companies to chase the double digit growth or die. And shareholders want quick gains, so they can move on to the next company with double digit growth.
It’s not the ceos who are the reason for all this. It’s that all this causes boards to chose ceos that operate this way. People see that, and then aspire to do the same so they can be rich. This is why ceos spend so much time essentially marketing thier companies ideas. Thats how you get the stock price to go up. Buyers buy on the perception that a company is doing great things, or will. Reality doesn’t often factor in like people think it does.
As for AI. They don’t care about replacing humans. All they care about is a sales pitch that makes the stock price go up. If telling people that there software will replace humans does that, then that is what they will say. They don’t let reality get in the way.
If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders.
Artificial scarcity is its own driver of revenue. At that point, you’re not competing for space on the screen, you’re competing for number of people who see your content. “Do you want 5000 views or 50,000? Do you want them to see this once? Ten times in a month? Daily? That’ll cost you extra.”
The value of an ad has diminishing returns. One billboard on the side of the road attracts your eye. Ten in a big messy cluster get ignored.
Facebook could have leveraged this to command higher rates for their ad content, rather than trying to engage on sheer volume. Now the website is down the same rabbit hole as Yahoo.
It’s not the ceos who are the reason for all this. It’s that all this causes boards to chose ceos that operate this way.
The Founders trade out shares to partners who then occupy the board. Normally, one of the Founders is the original CEO, because they have a controlling stack in the firm. New board members are introduced by the founders and often have a personal relationship with them. And with stock swaps, the CEO of one company can sit on the board of another. Michael Dell sits on Broadcomm’s board for this very reason.
Tesla’s board is a classic example of this incestuous back-scratching. Robyn Denholm moved from CFO of Juniper Networks - a major supplier for Tesla - to the audit committee chair of Tesla (and yehaw, what a job that must have been, given their shady business practices). She also is an operating partner at Blackbird Ventures, a venture capital firm which is a major investor in xAI, another of Musk’s pet startups.
Once you climb to the top of these hierarchies (or you start getting into seriously investing in any of them) you start noticing these circular networks of leadership and trade. The Oracle / OpenAI / Nvidia circuit is another great example.
As for AI. They don’t care about replacing humans.
The very real and explicit and demonstrated belief among these tech billionaires is that they can automate away the need for humans - both as labor and as clients. They’re building (or, at least, trying to build) a financial closed loop.
I agree with you about the circular networks of leadership on boards. But they do still have to answer to the hedge funds and such that have large stakes in the company, and can tank the stock price by selling suddenly. And they also have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, who can and do sue. But my point was that the boards chose CEOs that favor the short term. And because of that, more people who want to be ceos try to follow that pattern.
As for the replacing humans. I just don’t think they care about that as much as making money. Myevidence is that they aren’t idiots. They know AI as it is today isn’t going to replace humans. But saying it will boosts thier stock price.
I just don’t think they care about that as much as making money.
:-/
If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders. Shareholders only make money if the stock price goes up, which requires people to buy it at the higher price.
Blue chips used to be a big deal. Not so much anymore. They still exist, but compared to growth stocks, they don’t see as much interest.
It won’t stop until stocks are no longer a thing.
Honestly it seems like a bad idea to have stocks in the first place
Like a loan shark you can never get rid of.
Why does this even exist ?
I remember learning about the stock market in grade school and I thought it was stupid then and I think it’s stupid now.
It’s harmful in pretty much every way.
stock are great for the rich who don’t have to lift a finger to pay a broker to put 1 mil into a stock and let it get to 2 mil in a couple years. With zero labor involved.
This is the race to the bottom I mentioned. If one country doesn’t allow stock in their companies to be bought, the companies can’t make as much money. So they don’t form as often or move. Then that country goes into a recession. Overall, it is the lack of a world wide coordinated effort to prevent the incentives to mortgage the future for gains today.
Stocks aren’t necessarily a bad thing since they in theory represent abstract ownership of a thing. Perfectly fine when privately held, it becomes an increasingly problematic thing when. Traded on an open market though.
I think whenever stocks exist, regardless if private or public, the goal of the company becomes focused on increasingly profits instead of sustainability.
Not that non-traded companies don’t want profits too. But the goal of “forever-increases” in profits will ultimately be destructive to a company as it will lead to lower quality, more exploitation, and intense focus on monopolizing their industry as that will be the only way to retain customers.
I think investing in companies is not really a bad thing. But it should be more like a set contract with an end date and/or amount.
More like a loan with interest. From a bank. Or how some contracts are made with movie actors and such.
A percentage of profits over a 10 year period or something.
Idk. There has to be a better way to do this.
The stock market has too much influence on the economy without bringing a benefit that surpasses the damage it does.
The nature of non-traded and private stocks can be debated for days, especially when you get into the minutiae of stuff like mining stocks for example where it can represent the payout to workers, investors, and owners at the end of a season. But what has made itself evident is that the stock market should not be allowed to exist as it is. Maybe it can be devolved back into resource stocks but that’s just getting into your contract loan/payout idea.
It can change, but it’ll require a large number of people seeing it as a problem worth addressing. Companies currently don’t value customer experience very well and haven’t for a long time, witness how phone customer service has become loaded with automated services standing between users and a small phone support staff. But if that were change, if stockholders were to come to see how much users hate that, and more importantly if users were to base their habits on that decision, it might cause things to improve. Money people, despite their near-legendary density, tend to be very nervous about trends. It might be possible to spook them.
Well, I think it could happen. I’ve been wrong before.
It’s tough, the companies can’t change unless the people do. Meaning customers refusing to do business with companies that have bad customer service or refusing to buy stocks in such companies. But there will always be people who see that they can make money off of other people doing that. And it doesn’t work if some people get rich bucking the trend.
Companies very well can change. Nothing forces them to enshittify their customer service for what amounts to virtual pennies per user. It’s entirely a case of narrative capture among business people, the conventional wisdom that they have to do this stupid thing. That’s it.
Unfortunately, that just isn’t true. The board of directors have a legal fiduciary responsibility to the share holders. And they hire or fire the ceo. If they don’t chase that virtual pennies, the shareholder can, and do sue them.
And as I said, if they don’t do things that at least make it appear they are attempting to increase profits, shareholder will sell, and they will go out of business.
It’s a race to the bottom. And the system is to blame. The system has rewarded people who enshitify products, and thus it has shapped who gets hired to make those decisions.
It’s because those shareholders are captive to that same narrative. These practices do carry a real cost, but executives have made themselves blind to it. There are people who’s job it is to judge the value of customer satisfaction and loyalty and to measure it against the cost of providing good service, and they think the former is less valuable than the latter. My premise is these people are not doing their job well.
This view of the purpose of a company, to ruthlessly extract every cent of value from a company or else face the wrath of shareholders, it’s a fairly recent view. Shareholders selling doesn’t cause a company to go out of business, failing at that business does. Stock price falling is a different issue, it matters because company success has come to mean the success of its shares more than the amount of customer goodwill. But that matters.
I sense though that we really aren’t on different sides. I wouldn’t say you’re absolutely wrong, nor that I’m absolutely right. We both have profound dissatisfaction with this world that all these rapacious companies have build around us. The next generation of business people, if we’re privileged to even have one, will have to figure out some things for themselves all over again.
Funny, just today I found out my subscription to addy.io, the email alias company, was somehow deactivated, and I reactivated it today. Unfortunately, any emails or email metadata sent to deactivated aliases are not kept on their servers, which is fantastic for privacy, but then I start thinking, “what if these were important emails I couldn’t get because my subscription was fucked with?”, or "what happens if the email alias service goes down and I can’t get any emails I was expecting?”. Now I’m at a crossroads as to whether or not I should continue primarily using my aliases for my emails, or just provide my true email for important services and leave potential spam/junk to the aliases.
Sidenote, the reason I wanted to use my aliases as my primary email contact was because of breaches I discovered via Have I Been Pwned. I think I did go a bit too far in the opposite direction, so now I need to find that middle ground. Definitely gonna make some changes over the next few days with my email addresses on my accounts.
or "what happens if the email alias service goes down and I can’t get any emails I was expecting?”
mail servers are generally supposed to try for a few days when delivery fails
Exactly why I only use email aliases for newsletters and stuff
I have one primary email and one that goes to a «not important» folder that I check irregularly.
Seems a good middleground, don’t have to create a new alias for each service
Hmm maybe i’ll do something similar. I was thinking recently of using a new alias when doing purchases online but haven’t decided yet. Kinda don’t want to over-complicate things you know?
Works for me. Mail there gets auto «read» too so I don’t have notifications or indicators of new mail :p
Here’s the video, it’s funny cause it’s infuriatingly true.
You’d need to make better humans first. oops
More of this plz
Why is the thumbnail Zach Galifianakis?
It’s a screenshot from the ad on Norwegian tv.
Always good to check the article before commenting.
It was a joke due to the resemblance
Someone call Richard Hendricks
The problem is upload speeds are too low on consumer ISP, and monopolies like Microsoft that Norwegian countries many times break their own procurement laws to use.
