Team Partners Telecommunications

Enshittification

Posted on Dec 19, 2024

Sometimes the various ‘words of the year’ chosen by publications as not only being the latest, most prominent new word but also to represent the current spirit of the times as they see it, can resonate in a way that makes those words stick. To no-one’s great surprise ‘Covid’ hit that height in 2020, given that honour by the American Dialect Society, the original word chooser (since 1990) and least commercially motivated amongst the world’s word choosers.

2023’s word was unpleasant in a different way. It was ‘enshittification’, and to quote the person who originated that word (Cory Doctorow, a British-Canadian) it describes how, ”the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it”, going on to explain that those internet based things that most matter to us, the work and social networking platforms we spend our hours on, are “turning into giant piles of shit.”

He sees this enshittification as a three part process; it goes like this:

In the first instance, platforms 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, there is a fourth stage: they die.  His example is Facebook. Facebook grew from being US college based to launching publicly in 2006. It aimed at capturing the market from MySpace, a billionaire owned data farming site, put crudely, by promising to never spy on its subscribers…no, not subscribers, because it was free, its members. There was lots of investment money about, so Facebook used it to offer a great platform and tie us all to its service. We loved it. All our friends were there so we signed up. Then others signed up because we were there. Here’s the thing, and those who have recently left Twitter to join Bluesky will recognise this, having joined Facebook, the cost of leaving was huge, after all, it was your community, your online home. No-one could leave. That was enshittification part one.

Part Two started with Facebook turning its back on its now captive users and offering these captives to advertisers and publishers as a sea of potential customers whose data they were, suddenly, not so concerned about protecting. Equally suddenly, Facebook users were confronted with advertisements linking them to websites we never wanted to see. Suddenly, too we saw less from our friends and more from advertisers. And it worked so well for the advertisers that they were captivated too.

Enter Part Three. With both users and advertisers/publishers captive, it was time to reap the reward for the shareholders. How Facebook has continued to handle both advertisers and publishers so that it maximises profit is a story in itself, but suffice to say that it continues to tread a thin line between “I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit,” and “Why did I wait so long to quit?” And again, as Twitter is seeing, once there’s a move to leave, and your friends leave, then it’s time to go. It’s called ‘pivoting’ and the rationale behind the Twitter exodus may be different, but the outcome remains the same. It’s enshittification.

There’s more to this whole story, not least what can be done about it, because if we don’t then all we need or love in platforms both social and otherwise (think Google and Microsoft) will take over completely and run the world their way. We’ll look at this next month.