"Enshittification": Page 2

Posted 23 July, 2024

The first major force against enshittification was the presence of competition. Given appropriate competition, companies are incentivised to avoid user abuse and instead give their users the best possible experience. Over the past forty years, though, American companies have been allowed to merge and acquire other companies with minimal interference. So if your competitor is stealing away your user base by giving them a better user experience? If you're Meta, Google or Amazon, your knee-jerk reaction will be to acquire them. And if that smaller competitor refuses to sell, the sheer breadth and profits of these companies allow them to operate the same services far below cost until their competitor is forced to fold. Society has thus generally accepted the neoliberalist consumer welfare standard: if a company is powerful enough to become a monopolist, they aren’t considered to be cheating; they’re just successful.

The second force was regulation, i.e. the duty of a government to ensure that there is a price for cheating/abuse of antitrust laws. The issue here actually stems in part from the lack of competition. Hundreds of small- to medium-sized businesses will struggle to find any consensus against regulators, but a few large companies in a sector (or even one particularly large one) can far more easily provide a united front against potential legislation, mobilising consensus and turning it into law. Instead of companies being too big to fail, they are now too big to go to jail.

These two anti-enshittification forces are industry-agnostic, but two more are specific to tech companies: self-help/interoperability and the 'vocational awe' of the tech workforce.

Hearing about the first two forces, some might say, 'why wait for regulators? Ad blockers and scripting exist, so de-shittify your web experience by yourself!' This is the core tenet of interoperability: if you don't like a platform, go to another one; if you want to gain the benefits of a platform without the shittiness, you can code that into existence. Unfortunately, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 prevents exactly that. Through the DMCA, the reverse-engineering of apps to access copyrighted work became a felony. This means that anyone who creates an alternative client for Reddit or Facebook could be imprisoned for up to five years, would no longer be able to vote, and could be fined up to five hundred thousand dollars. That's a very influential reason why platforms pressure you so intensely to use their app, and why their web clients tend to be so awful. Another example of interoperability's slow death is Amazon's acquisition of Audible, which has cornered over 90% of the audiobook market. If you purchase an audiobook off of Audible, it is actually stored in an encrypted form that can only be processed by Amazon apps. Good luck trying to 'code quality into existence' when companies do everything they can to prevent you from modifying their set user experience.

The fourth and final force that has historically prevented enshittification was the culture and scarcity of workers in tech. For decades, the demand for tech workers far outpaced the supply, allowing them to hold a lot of power. At the same time, the culture of tech workers has always been heavily steeped in 'vocational awe': a term referring to a person's deep identification of themselves with their work as if it were a sacred calling, even at the cost of their health and wellbeing. While tech workers may seem pampered in some ways, the culture of prioritising your life outside of work (e.g. by refusing overtime) just wasn't widespread -- especially at startups. Notably, Elon Musk has exploited workers using this approach, but he just calls it 'being extremely hardcore'.

Between having higher-than-average power and being intensely devoted to their work, tech workers experienced profound moral injury from the idea of enshittifying the products to which they had devoted their lives. These engineers would simply refuse to execute any requests to do so, because what would their bosses do-- call their bluff? If they did, the engineers could just start returning all those cold calls from tech recruiters and move to a company where they felt enshittification wasn't creeping in (Author's note: you could argue that Big Tech companies were overhiring engineers and that there was only a perceived scarcity of skilled tech labour, but that perception clearly still affected how companies treated their workers). This changed most obviously in 2021, when mass tech layoffs began. Suddenly workers were perceived as far less valuable, and could no longer be a check on their bosses' worst impulses. Between that and the huge amount of labour that has flooded the sector in recent years, engineers have become far less picky about accepting the work that is available to them.