Team Partners Telecommunications

More enshittification!

Posted on Jan 27, 2025

In last month’s blog we introduced you to one of 2023’s ‘words on the year’, that word being ‘enshittification’, a slightly tongue-in-cheek descriptor for a process recognised and described by the word’s creator, that of the growth, flourishing and then decline of internet platforms, both work based and social. This month we’ll try and unpick why it matters or, perhaps more to the point, why it should matter to us.

All of us use IOS or Microsoft, you could say we’re enslaved to them and to Google too, and the truth is that their job is not to purely provide systems that allow us to function, but to maximise the return for their investors. They are not benevolent and altruistic entities. Nor, it has to be understood, do they exist for the benefit of their employees, much as they may have once tried to persuade them otherwise. They are, at heart, slave masters, slave masters kept in some sort of check by only four things, competition, regulation, self-help and their workers.

How do these act in the enshittification process? Well competition means that as a slave you can still chose to be enslaved by Microsoft rather than Apple, or vice versa, so even slaves have some power. Regulation causes a company to work out the cost/benefit ratio between cheating and the fine for doing so. Self-help is our power to help ourselves, so we employ no-ad software to disarm the ads that the platforms are paid to put in front of us, and finally the workers, once cossetted and allowed to believe they were an irreplaceable asset to their company as they found new ways to perfect the lives of their employer’s clients, now increasingly disenchanted and hung out to dry at their employer’s whim.

And how have these four forces made a difference? They haven’t, not really. One by one they have buckled to circumstances, and it’s this buckling that has allowed enshittification to take place. Competition laws, for example, used to be treated as anti-trust protections, but then ‘consumer welfare’ started to tell us that big was big because it was beautiful and the best and of course it never cheated, so big companies joined big companies to become bigger companies as governments looked on trustingly. Now we have just a handful of conglomerates that control just about everything and heaven help any small company that raises its head. It will be either flayed alive or gobbled up. Amazon spent $100m undercutting Diapers.com until it went bust and they bought what was left for peanuts.

If that’s competition, how about regulation?  Well, the bigger the conglomerate, the more power it wealds, Or, to put it differently, the harder it is to pin down. GPDR led to many small tech companies having to close, which was a good thing because they were cheating. It led to Google and Facebook basing themselves in the digital haven of Eire, a country that competes with Cyprus, Malta and Luxembourg to attract those wishing to avoid close inspection. Not only that, but they also hide behind an app, which is not a good thing…

And self-help? Apparently more than half of us use as-blockers, but you can’t block ads on an app and apps are everywhere. Do you remember we mentioned MySpace last time? What Facebook did was introduce a kindly bot that helped you to drain your MySpace data and transfer it seamlessly to Facebook. At the time we all thought it was an example of interoperable progress. Then Microsoft refused to make Office work on Macs, so Apple reverse engineered and created IWorks, which could read everything in the Office suite. All to say that this interoperability was fine done by the tech giants, but try and make an Android program that will run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple’s media stores and, well, don’t, it won’t end well.

Tech has another ploy that hinders self-help. The law. Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive prohibits the removal of encryption that protects any copyrighted work. Jailbreaking a phone or ripping DVDs can, theoretically, land you in jail for five years. If, as an author, I produce and pay for my book to be available on Amazon’s Audible, where 90% of audiobooks are to be found, and then want to move it to another site, I can’t. Anyone supplying me with the software to remove Audible’s encryption would fall foul of Article 6 and we know where that leads.

Let’s end this month with the fourth of our considerations, the workers. There was the time they worked to improve things; techno-nerds were the chosen and held sway over their bosses. They held enshittification at bay, doing what was right, holding the moral high ground as much as they could. Until they couldn’t, and they became…workers, hired and fired like the rest, doing what they’re told, or else.

It's a depressing state of affairs, but as sure as there’s enshittification there’s deshittification, and we’ll look at that next month.