On Enshittification

A century ago we would have been living through the Roaring Twenties. Well, in fact "we" wouldn't, unless you could be confident you'd be an American, and even then the roaring would be geographically patchy. As William Gibson noted much later, "The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed", and that applies to the past as well. The 1920s might have been a decade of remarkable growth bookended by depression in the USA, but they were years of warlordism and foreign occupation in a still semi-feudal China. If there is a notable difference to be drawn between then and now it is the extent to which experience has become globally more homogenised. For all the ostensible political and cultural differences of the USA and China today, everyday life is remarkably similar in the two countries. Contra Gibson, the future is increasingly evenly distributed. 

This is most evident in technological commodities such as the smartphone whose utility, and that of the apps it gives access to, ultimately depends on general adoption. But while the penetration rate of the smartphone has been spectacular, what's also notable is the geographic distribution, which actually reflected the failure of earlier technologies, specifically fixed-line telephony and Internet access, to spread extensively in less developed regions of the world. It is the smartphone, on the back of the GSM network, that has delivered the Internet to most of the global population, and crucial to this has been the commercial model in which users pay a rental fee, allowing the less well-off access on a roughly equvalent basis to the rich. While you can still find social conservatives in the UK and elsewhere who will harrumph at the very idea that a family on benefits should have a flatscreen TV, few would seriously suggest that a smartphone is not a social necessity in this day and age. We have already reached the stage in developed countries where the lack of one is a severe hindrance. 

The rapid decline in the use of cash in the UK in the last few years is less the product of the ubiquity of bank cards, which have been around for decades, than of the evolution of the smartphone into a secure payment device. Similarly, the closure of bank branches owes less to Internet banking, which has also existed for decades, than the spread of banking apps on phones. While the "cashless society" provides an easy story for shallow journalism, it still remains remarkable that a technology as systemically important as physical money might be about to disappear from common use. The impact of the smartphone is not just limited to money, of course. As the centrality of social media to "the news" indicates, the very warp and weft of society is increasingly embedded in our phones. I raise this point not to marvel at how society has been changed by this one tool (technological determinism) but to wonder about the impact that general adoption has had on the technology itself (feedback). 

Cory Doctorow has popularised the term "enshittification" to describe the process by which popular Internet platforms (he specifically uses the example of TikTok) get worse due to the strategy of owners. In brief: "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." There's a lot of self-evident truth in this, but it's also worth thinking about whether this may be driven by circumstance as well as a coherent commercial strategy. In other words, how much of this is down to the manner in which society has employed the platform rather than to capitalist imperatives. For example, Doctorow notes the same process at Facebook, Twitter and Google, but does this mean that all three companies independently alighted upon the same "monetisation" strategy or are they simply following the path of least resistance? 

Central to Doctorow's critique is the idea that the platforms will push you content that suits their commercial interests, rather than what you actually want. But, to pick one example, this is easy to avoid on Twitter. The point is that most users don't bother to change their feed from the algorithmically-curated "For you" to the user-curated "Following" because they are perfectly happy with the former. The snobbish view is that most users are dumb and do not realise what they are getting, and if they enjoy the content provided then they are being brainwashed. The liberal critique of social media platforms in particular emphasises this latter point, with liberal old media falling over themselves to publicise any evidence, however tenuous, of manipulation or addiction, while avoiding any admission of their own censorship and flagrant bias. This snobbishness is also evident among the tech-literate (who may not be liberal), a recent example being the "Why I'm off to Mastodon" genre of perfomative flouncing.

Many of the complaints about the decline of the platforms come from early adopters and expert users. In other words, the people who were required to popularise the platforms so they could reach a critical mass. Once that mass was achieved, their interests became less of a priority for the platforms as the "common user" became the focus. This has led to a degree of nostalgia for "frontier life", the heady days when technology seemed an endless cornucopia of the novel and useful but also displayed an integrity in its fruits (i.e. ad-free and unbiased, which obviously ignored the structural and social biases inherent in the technology). It has also produced the meme of the Internet's decline, of which enshittification is a specific form. Consider this claim: "Tech hasn’t improved most people’s lives in a noteworthy way in over a decade, and has made an awful lot of people’s much worse." It's easy to ridicule this by pointing to the experience of people in Africa who only got access to the Internet in the last ten years, but you could as easily just remember how often you used to go to an ATM in the US or UK a decade ago. 

The theme of the Internet's decline has fed into a wider pessimism about politics and society: the idea that democracy is failing because of bad actors or that there is insufficient public will to arrest climate change. Where once it was common to imagine that technology would both improve democracy, by enabling the deliberative commons, and accelerate the greening of industry, that belief is now limited to incorrigible techno-optimists like Kevin Kelly. But one useful distinction Kelly makes is that between the growth of stuff (everyone getting a smartphone) and betterment (our utility improving through more useful smartphone apps). There's an obvious thread here back to Benthamite Utilitarianism but there's also a hint of the older philosophical idea of refinement, or what the Greeks called arete: the pursuit of excellence. Ironically, it is the elitist conception of excellence that underpins the Californian ideology: that excellence is to be attained by the heroic individual not by society's collective efforts. 

All technologies exhibit early variety followed by commodification, standardisation and then continuous tweaking. Invariably, that standardisation encourages monopolies or cartels, while the tweaking encourages a culture of lament ("It's not as good as it used to be", "It liked it better when it was called Marathon"). What we're seeing with enshittification is both that maturation process and that cultural response. How might this play out? Well history would suggest a combination of market design (e.g. trust-busting or breaking up monopolies) and regulation, with the latter inevitably being heavily influenced by industry incumbents. In the case of the Internet platforms, there is limited scope for market design because of their supra-national nature and because the formal barriers to entry remain low. Regulation seems more likely, but the way that early initiatives like GDPR have been implemented suggests that this will be more of a burden for users than for the platform. 

You don't have to buy into Kevin Kelly's idea of the "technium" to see that technology has become more globalised over the last century, by which I mean both that its geographical spread has become greater and that its settled form has come to reflect a blended global public. Advanced medical devices are to be found in almost every country, even if in many they are the exclusive preserve of the rich. The recent Oscars were dominated by Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film that employed the multiverse setting of superhero films and featured a mainly Asian cast, indicating how Hollywood is reconciling itself to that global public. The greater (and faster) geographical spread of technology is partly down to the ease of replication, particularly in the case of digital goods, but its is also a reflection of the cumulative impact of prior technologies on that global public. Absent language and cultural differences, our societies are becoming more homogenised and that is having a profound effect on the design and adoption of technology.