Something about technology that doesn’t work properly just sets me off. I know I’m overreacting, but that doesn’t stop me. I can fume about it for hours, and even for days if it’s not resolved. I just expect things to work, or to be simple to correct when they don’t. When you buy something, I’ve always believed, there’s an implicit contract that says you should get what you paid for, no delays, and no questions asked.
What’s worse, I know that it’s (usually) unfair to blame people and companies for these failings. Of course they’re trying to maximize profit, but they know that (unless there’s no competition) they can’t continue to provide shoddy products and crappy service and expect to stay in business. But that just makes it more maddening when things don’t work properly.
This is what Dave Pollard had to say in a post written several months ago for his blog, How to Save the World. He was talking about web stores mostly, especially Amazon and its Marketplace scams, though in terms that covered most of our gadgetry and “technology” generally. When I first read the post, I jotted down this quote and some notes and then sat on it for a long time. Because it just didn’t fit my experience of the world. And, I really don’t believe it fits his either. I think he is fantasizing some golden age of the internet that never existed. I know things are getting worse as this socioeconomic system spirals into senescence, but I don’t ever remember a time when technology “worked properly”. That is, a time when it did what you thought it should do and did not instantly fall apart. Nor do I remember a time when there weren’t constant “updates” that always make any tech thing orders of magnitude more frustrating to use. In my experience you are never getting what you paid for. Ever. You are getting what you bought. These are entirely different things.
The goal of technology is not to satiate your want. The sale itself it the goal. That transaction is what you bought, not the goods or services that enticed you to part with your money. The goal of all business is to make you spend money. That’s it. That project ends at the monetary exchange, at which point a functioning thing becomes dead weight, bogging down the system, inhibiting spending. The sooner the thing fails, the sooner you are forced to spend more money. This is how this system thrives, how it is designed to work, how it has always worked. This system is a conveyor belt, churning your want into monetary wealth for other people. That’s all it is. It must keep you wanting. It can’t fulfill any needs such as functioning properly. It is designed to take real world goods and turn them into waste as efficiently as possible so as to maximize your dissatisfaction and the dollars you will spend to ameliorate that state.
Parting you from your money (money that you earned from doing labor for the very people who are taking your money, by the way) without incurring a single cost — no product, no service, no transportation and delivery, no labor and acquisition of space for same — is the perfection of our socioeconomic system. This perfection is only achievable in the world of internet technology, defined in the limited sense as these electronic gadgets that we buy and maintain so that data miners can reach directly into our homes at any hour of the day, at no cost to them whatsoever. When a marketing bot on Amazon sells you nothing but the opportunity to believe that you’d just found a great deal, then that perfect circle is closed. That is the goal. That is what you bought.
Of course they can expect to stay in business if they sell shoddy shit. That is entirely the point, and it always has been.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, business would dump chalk, gypsum, talc, even rat poison if it was freely available, into flour because that was cheaper than paying for grain. Recently, I am hearing that spice manufacturers are stuffing so much dirt into their tins that most test several orders of magnitude above legal lead limits. (Apparently, it is Detroit dirt… Or maybe any abandoned lot near a road.) This is what our economic system does. It takes the cheapest inputs and labor it can find and sells the output as dearly as it can, leaving society to pay far more costs than a tin of contaminated “cinnamon” or a loaf of dubious “bread”.
(I do have to wonder what Dave thinks of the motivation behind slave labor… or slums… or insurance… screen-based shenanigans got nothing on that scam…)
Dave has recently latched on to the idea of enshitification to explain what he sees as a decline in service, a fall from grace in the tech world and beyond. Enshitification can be thought of as the intentional degradation of the infrastructure of our lives, coupled with an arrogant refusal to make good on promises — or to make good on anything, really. We live in an economy that is turning the world into shit and handing us a shovel. Or telling us to improvise. Or worse… telling us that it’s our imagination. Much has been written about enshitification in the very few years since Cory Doctorow invented the term, but it still falls under the radar for most people. This is because it’s another pervasive thing that we are constantly normalizing so that we don’t fully see it. In fact, we are kept from seeing it by messaging and belief systems. Further, we don’t want to see it because it represents the antithesis to our culture and our values and is evidence that our culture and our values are breaking down, taking us with them. Still, when it comes to such frippery as social media, something that we do to kill time, we can’t help but subconsciously note the new restrictions, the disabled or vanished features, and always the increasing clunkiness, resulting in more and more of our time spent on these machines, an unreasonably large chunk of it just waiting for them to do something. You should tally up all the hours you spend each month just on logging in. (I started doing that a couple years ago… COVID hobbies, you know…)
Here’s a calculation: it takes about 20 seconds to enter a strong password into a desktop workstation and have that verified. If you walk away from your machine 50 times a day, probably a conservative estimate for people like me who have to run to the copier with every task, often several times for each task — which copier also takes a swiped-card log-in with every use — then you are spending fifteen minutes every day just to resume work when you sit back down. Now, add in the initial start-up log-ins for the computer, for websites and for core applications. I use five main programs, plus a web-based time card. Each takes upwards of thirty seconds to load. One takes a full minute to get going, though I can leave it on all day. Several require a full application restart with every new transaction. So there is another 3-5 minutes just to start work. Add in personal computer startup, opening email clients, and personal web-use at home and it’s another 3-5 minutes. So taking the middle of that range, we waste about 30 minutes every day just waiting to start any given screen-based task. That comes to about 15 hours each month. I don’t know about you, but I find that number intolerable…
Now that we increasingly need 2-factor authentication for everything, this rough estimate is probably doubling. Again. And why do we need to spend all this time on logging in? Because we live in the age of exponential enshitification.
(Irksome non sequitur… why is it so often authenti-fi-cation? Like using “literally” for “reality”…)
WordPress decided to enshitify last week. It changed its entire editing platform. It did not notify its users or ask our opinions on same. It just took away the former toolkit and replaced it with this other thing that does not work as well. The new site is less intuitive and harder to learn, involving things like hidden menus and buttons with labels that do not match what they actually do. For example, to approve a comment now, I am taken to a screen with the comment in full HTML code (so I can’t actually read it), and I have to click on a button that says “update” which to my mind is not approving, but changing the comment text. This new system is harder to search. It is slower to use. I have to constantly reset the sorting just to keep the posts I am currently working on at the top of the list. And it’s just ugly. This is a largely voluntary platform. We are, essentially, paying WordPress to be a vanity press. It is not necessary. Ugliness is going to be a factor in people dropping it. Why voluntarily expose yourself to that — and pay for it!
Because we do… and WordPress can be quite smugly confident that we will keep paying for its increasingly shitty product… because we will… there is not even an explanation, never mind an apology. (Or an option to go back to the thing that worked… sort of…)
I think much of this renovation is done so that WordPress can focus more of its server energies on tracking information and selling it. The platform has been steadily (exponentially) increasing its push for statistics and web-based advertising. It is restricting use and features to those of us who refuse to buy its advertising packages. I have also noticed that my image storage capacity has been halved. It once was double digits. Now, it is 6 gigabytes. Which is still more than I will probably ever use, even if I continue to use this platform for years, but it has definitely shortened that time frame. I will have to find some other server to house the older posts, or just delete them in order to make space for new images. Which sort of seems the opposite of the idea behind publishing. You want to think that it will be available to the world for a long time, or why bother. Just use a photo album… or share ephemera on social media… which is itself an exponentially enshitifying enterprise. And also because it is focusing its server space on raping your personal data for its own private gain.
Another thing that has become a constant enshitified annoyance is the content blocking that happens when you install an adblocker on your browser. (Or if you use Safari, which is itself an impenetrable firewall because it is so old it doesn’t speak the language anymore…) Can I point out something? Adblockers do not block actual ads. If your business does the work of marketing — creating graphics, selling advertising to local entities (or at least something your web-readers would find interesting and useful), and putting those ads onto your website, using your own web-programmers — then those ads are embedded in your web code. The images, audio and movie clips are just HTML tags looking at files on your own perfectly private and secure server. The links are just HTML tags looking at the websites of your advertisers, with little to no interaction between your computers and theirs.
This is all perfectly normal web code that an adblocker would never see. What an adblocker blocks is third party involvement, ads placed into your business website by some other source, always accompanied by tracking code to see how many views and clicks an ad gets and where those views and clicks are coming from. This is not advertisement. It is information gathering, and not by the website that sells its space for ads nor by the businesses that buy the advertising space, but by the ad-placing service — which is really not an advertising service but an information-gathering enterprise. This is incredibly invasive and somewhat morally questionable. But it is also incredibly insecure. And that insecurity is why I block ads.
That third party involvement, and especially the open communication required for data tracking, is a weak spot in any firewall. Any marginally proficient hacker can steal the data as it is being transferred. Most can also insert viral code into the breach that will keep that breach open to them forever (or until you pay someone else to have it removed, unless you are competent at such things). I have one computer, and I am not going to open it up to damages for the sake of advertising. It doesn’t matter that I am completely uninterested in web ads, nor that they are annoyingly intrusive and often insulting, nor that they slow down whatever use I am making of a website. It’s not only that I don’t want information about my computer use tracked by people I don’t know and mostly do not like. It’s that those ads are vehicles for harm. And they are designed in such a way that it is increasingly difficult to avoid engaging them without blocking them. When an ad opens a pop-up window that follows you down the screen while you read, that ad vendor is able to see what your machine is seeing, at least to the extent that it knows where to place the ad in the content you are scrolling through. And any hack code that has been inserted into that ad can also penetrate into your machine. It’s like allowing remote-viewing cameras to be installed in your child’s bedroom, knowing the viewer is a pedophile.
Moreover, business owners, that third party ad-provider that is “saving” you so much in marketing effort and expense?… is also opening up your own machines to abuse and damage. All these security breaches that happen every day these days? Have you not noticed that this trend has gone hockey-stick ubiquitous at the very same time that third party ad services have become same? Google Ads makes more money off of you than you will ever make off of the ads it places on your website. That is a given. Otherwise, Google Ads wouldn’t be profitable. But third party advertising services are also taking information from your servers. This is a transaction that they are not paying you for. Further, those third parties are opening up your servers to fourth, fifth and infinite other parties that are also taking information from you and compromising your business in the process. You should thank the adblockers. You should also pay attention to who is using those blocks. It is generally people who know quite a lot about server security. There is a lesson in that…
Also, business owners who are buying Google Ad space to be placed on other websites, few people are ever going to buy anything from you on the basis of a Google Ad. Those ads are irrelevant and irritating, completely the opposite of enticing or creating want — except a strong desire to make the ad go away. And if they do buy from you once, they will never do so again. Once your ad is clicked, it is immediately replaced by one (or ten) for “similar” product from other advertisers. This is so that ad vendors can sell more ads, which is the goal of advertising vendors, not that you sell more product or services. Once the ad is replaced, ad-shoppers may never be able to find their way back to your business. You are wasting your money. And again, Google Ads is getting far more out of you than you will ever get out of it in terms of compensation or service. Each one of those views and clicks, intentional or accidental, is data it can sell back to you. It doesn’t care that you never sell anything. It is in the business of getting you to pay them — often twice, coming and going — for the privilege of providing them with free product. Enshitification.
And that is the thing I most object to about all this enshitification. It is all designed to give information about me to some entity that is going to sell that information dearly to as many bidders as possible, no matter the use made of that information. All this breakdown in service and interruption in use is happening merely to reap yet a few more cost-free sales from my existence, and most particularly from my desire to know what is happening. Which is the chief use of screens. Not to shop. Not to connect. It is to find out what we can’t experience or comprehend directly.
I am not at all convinced that this should be a marketable product. While I fully support the idea that creators should be compensated for their work, I do not believe that this is a for-profit enterprise. Ads on media websites are not supporting the content created by writers, editors and photographers or filmmakers. Those ads are generating profit for the media corporation. (Maybe… probably not much profit if they are third-party ads… but that’s the idea behind ads anyway.) If a media website requires nominal subscription fees for access, I sort of understand that this is how they pay their employees to create the content, but in media like print and television, ad revenues go far beyond the pittance wages paid to the creators. Those revenues are how media businesses become conglomerates and get their stock traded on Wall Street. (I am not at all convinced that web advertising is generating similar levels of profit for media businesses.) Ads are profit-seeking, rent-seeking, completely superfluous expense so that people who have not done the work can take money from that creative labor.
But more fundamentally and philosophically, I don’t believe that information should be marketed. And the more vital the information the less it should be subject to fees that keep it out of the hands of people who have little money. Entertainment is one thing, and of course creators should be able to benefit from their creations. (Which mostly does not actually happen in our socioeconomic system…) But news? Should be free and easily accessible for it to be at all relevant. And in fact, this has been the case for most of human history. News was a public good, and efforts to gain and produce it were always publicly supported. At most, trade of information was in the form of feeding and sheltering a bard or a far-traveler, perhaps buying goods in exchange for fireside tales. For more necessary things like weather forecasting, a service every human needs, there were public works projects to keep track of time and village sages to note the patterns necessary to prediction. Everybody paid into these services. Everybody put their voluntary labor into building the silicate clocks and calendars, and everybody gave what sustenance they could to the local weather expert so that she could focus her own time on forecasting.
Enshitification is a word coined by author, Cory Doctorow, to describe the steady degradation of internet content — particularly social media — that is driven by the ever-more-blatant centralizing of data mining, that is, preying upon our innate human curiosity and drive to learn new things in order to gain access to our thoughts and tendencies and wants so that that information about us can be sold. Social media don’t exist to connect people or entertain people or even deliver information to people. Social media, as a thing, does not care about content or your experience in using it. It exists, it was invented to gather information about you that it could sell to other parties, mostly in the form of marketing, but also in less savory ways such as selling information to surveillance entities or even delivering data to actual criminals. I would argue that this isn’t enshitification, but merely exposure to the cesspit. It was always shitty. It used to do a better job hiding that fact when there were more dollars flowing around to pay for its adjunct project of providing content, being media.
As such, enshitification is a symptom of collapse, to the extent that many people, like Dave, immediately seized upon the word and applied it to everything. Because everything is less useful, less durable, more annoying, and more ugly because it is more, and ever-more-blatantly, rent-seeking, taking money and labor from our lives in exchange for nothing more than nebulous notions of entitlement. (I own this building. You must pay me to make it your home.) Doctorow himself has expressed the opinion that perhaps everything is being enshitified. (He also admitted that this is probably going to earn himself a poop emoji on his gravestone…) But again, I would argue that this isn’t enshitification. Our socioeconomic system was always shitty. It is designed to be exactly thus — a giant shit-generator. It used to be better hidden. Or at least the stink was segregated away, foisted on far-distant and/or inferior lands and bodies, never sniffed by the people who used it to meet their needs. Or, more accurately, used it to attempt to assuage their wants.
Because this system is also not about meeting needs. It is not about content or product. It does not care about your experience or your life. That is not the goal. The sale is the goal. This system is designed to create want that is never met. If you are satisfied, you are not buying. If you are not buying, you are not laboring on behalf of others for wages. If you are not laboring, then nothing is being done; there is nothing to sell, no products or services to create want. This is a positive feedback loop that is extremely sensitive to your level of dissatisfaction. If you are satisfied, then it spirals quickly into stasis. If you are unhappy, it will expand outwards until there is nothing left to feed into it. Which is approximately where we are now. Nothing to feed into it. The spiral is faltering because resources are dwindling and the labor necessary to turn those resources into product is increasingly costly, because there is more of it needed in an ever more globalized and complexified system. And all this shit, all this harm done to you and the entire world, this is all predicated on not meeting your needs. Ever.
Perhaps that is the real definition of enshitification. Our wants are revealed as superfluous to and largely aspirational within this system that is taking our lives — and our real needs are never met. We are always hungry and unsheltered. I think maybe it’s that more and more of us get to live in the shit that formerly was shipped off elsewhere. People who were formerly privileged enough to live within the sparkly spiraling activity are now being thrown out of the loop and experiencing the constant rain of shit that used to fall only on Other bodies.
These same formerly privileged people are also enculturated to want, to unending want — and they still want. Only there is no object. Time was when they could expect some wants to be met, while there was always an endless churning of the world into more and more new wants to tempt them into doing the work and spending the money that fed into the system. That is no longer true. Now, fewer wants are met and fewer temptations exist. (Who wants Facebook…) But even privileged people, former and current, have never had their actual needs met through the system. No… that essential labor, those necessary things like food and shelter and companionship, even entertainment, that was all provided mostly for free by the people who care for us. Much like internet content creation, the work of meeting our needs is the largely unremunerated, intensely undervalued, and mostly unseen labor of love.
However, unlike internet content creation, people will die if this essential labor is not done. People are dying. And it is becoming apparent, even to the blindly privileged, that our socioeconomic system — this thing that gives them their privilege — does not and can not do the real and necessary work that keeps them alive. Moreover, it is increasingly getting in the way of getting that real work done, even outside the system — because the system is so gargantuan there is not much left outside. Needs are going unmet and people are suffering. Even idiots eventually connect their hunger pangs with the lack of real sustenance and start looking for reasons why the food isn’t forthcoming. Or why the waste is piling up all around them… fatal enshitification…
My town is having a problem with housing and panhandling. So far the Council is treating these as two separate problems. Solutions for the former are not forthcoming because that involves expense to property owners. Solutions to the latter are along the lines of “better lighting” for the downtown area, increased policing, and public conduct rules that impose fines on begging. I will say that the Councilors largely seem to get that slapping a fine on a person who is begging for food and shelter is probably not that much of a deterrent and yet will probably increase community costs in trying to enforce those rules and collect those fines. So… not much of a solution. Notably, the public conduct rules failed to pass.
What they are missing is that these are the same problem. More accurately, these are both effects of the same cause. And that cause is enshitification. Or in more genteel terms, that cause is the systemic collapse of the rent-seeking enterprise. I mean, these people are living in tents in Vermont in the winter — if they are lucky enough to have that much shelter. For them, finding food is a daily struggle. Of course, they are going to beg scraps from those who are whizzing around in their oversized and overheated SUVs. Of course, they are going to ask fat restaurant-goers for a dollar to buy bread. Or more like $5 to buy bread, because rent-seeking — attempting to wrest more monetary wealth from every transaction in the context of resource depletion and the increasing damages from pollution — is increasing the cost of everything. You can’t buy bread for a dollar anymore. (Arguably, you never could, but you used to be able to buy plastic-wrapped bread-like synthetic substitutions for about a dollar a loaf. Now, the plastic costs that much…)
You want to mitigate both problems? Make them go away? Then make the cause go away. You can’t block this problem from sight with the social-ills equivalent of a pop-up adblocker. The ills will flow around all your pathetic, pitiable efforts at remediation. This is not adblocking. This is Whack-a-Mole as far as you can see in all directions. To stop it, you have to remove the Mole, the thing that is creating the hunger and homelessness, which is nothing less than our socioeconomic system. Understand that this system is not recently enshitified. It isn’t recently broken. This brokenness is not even evidence that the system is failing. This is how the system is designed to work. It is working as intended. It is built to churn the world into waste, creating fleeting revenue streams for elites in that churning. But it is fleeting because we live in a finite world — and that is why it is failing. Not only are there physical resource limits, but there are biophysical system thresholds that can’t be crossed and still expect this planet to support life. And those are what we are treading these days. You want to back away from that cliff? Then ditch the system. Break the spiral. Stop turning everything into shit.
Here’s a solution to the housing and panhandling crisis. All those properties that are standing vacant? Condemn them to public domain and put people into them. Property owners that are expecting buy-outs from FEMA or other publicly-funded programs after all these disasters? Give them the money only if they turn over some useful property as well. For every dollar value commensurate to annual rent given to the property owner in an emergency buy-out, make that owner donate one apartment, permanently given, free and clear to one household. Give people places to live and there is no homelessness. You can’t rely on this system to shelter them because this system is designed to restrict shelter only to those people who have quite a lot of money. The money is the goal. Not shelter. Not needs.
Similarly, if you want to feed them, give them the means to feed themselves. Turn all these disaster properties into gardens and give permanent and mostly unqualified access to those gardens to people who will grow food. In my town’s case, we could raze the entire north end — which is currently mostly uninhabited and awaiting buy-outs… which will put money in the property owners’ pockets but will not do anything to create housing. So condemn and tear down that molding and rotting property. It is structurally worthless anyway. Make it a garden. With occasional flooding, it would be wildly fertile. (After clean-up of the industrial toxins, that is… which is itself a public works, job-creation project mostly involving planting willows…) Give that property to the community for free community gardens to be cultivated in support of a free food bank which has the one stipulation that you put in volunteer labor in exchange for food. Most people of privilege do that all the time, putting in as much time as we can, laboring in our own gardens in exchange for food or other needs. Or just to be out there in the garden… Give that to every body and no body will be wanting. Mole whacked. Problem solved.
Only… there will be no more sales as the goal… rent-seeking will collapse… the spiral will spin into stasis… because every body will be content… oh, what a world, what a world…
I say, you can have one or the other — shitty capitalism or met needs. There is no both. And there never has been. And the awareness of this central fact is what we now call enshitification.
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
