"Enshittification": Page 3

Posted 23 July, 2024

The main point of explaining these forces is to make it clear that executives and management have always wanted to maximise profit for themselves using the lowest-quality product that they could get away with. They didn't use to be better, they simply used to be more constrained by their competition, regulations, the interoperability of the Internet, and their highly powerful and opinionated workforce – and now those constraints have been undone, one after the other. So after all of this, what is the cure to enshittification? And what's currently being done? The simplest answer is to re-strengthen those enshittification constraints -- and the good news is that re-strengthening work is being done.

There has been more anti-trust action in the last four years than in the previous forty, and a good portion of credit for that goes to Lina Khan, the Commissioner of the US Federal Trade Commission. She has done a considerable amount of work to block monstrous mergers and ban predatory pricing. The business press is vocally against it -- the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has published a bizarre number of critical op-eds about her -- but in the US and EU, there has truly been a revitalisation of competition law (see: the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act). In addition, decentralised platforms and right-to-repair laws are gaining in popularity. While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is still alive and well, states like Oregon are passing strong legislation to re-empower consumers (Author's note: one example of this is Oregon's legislation banning 'parts pairing', where devices such as iPhones have some functions automatically disabled by Apple if repaired with an unauthorised part).

Another notable area being strengthened is consumer privacy legislation. Enshittification is heavily dependent on aggregating invasive amounts of user data in order to keep the users on the platform and entice business customers (again, see: Cambridge Analytica). Although individual privacy in the US has historically been undermined by the exploitative PATRIOT Act, at least significant efforts are being made by American legislators to protect the privacy of users on enshittified platforms. According to Stein's Law, everything that cannot go on forever eventually stops, and enshittification is no exception to this. The fact is, abusing users like this is grossly offensive, and the only people who like it are those who head these monopolies -- legislators and users alike have had enough.

Beyond end users and lawmakers, people in tech are also waking up. No longer do engineers readily believe that they are 'founders-in-waiting': they now know that they, too, are workers. For proof of this, you only need to look at how engineers at the Amazon headquarters in Seattle, not just delivery drivers or warehouse workers, have walked out from their jobs. This particular anti-enshittification force does require more work to regain its previous effectiveness, but it would be blatantly ignorant not to acknowledge how tech workers' perceptions of their companies have changed since the 2021 mass layoffs began.

Ultimately, there is still plenty of work to be done, especially with regards to changing the culture in tech and repealing the over-constrictive measures of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Unfortunately, executives will always want to maximise profits at the cost of the wellbeing of their end users, business customers and employees – it's not really accurate to say "if the product you're consuming is free, you're the product", because companies will always make consumers into a product if they can manage it. But through regulation, competition, and the strength of workers, companies can be forced to pretend that they care about you, and we can fix the Internet. Thank you.

Okay, that concludes my writeup of all my notes from Cory Doctorow's HOPE XV keynote! I know that 2600 Magazine is going to release videos of the talks soon, so when they do, I'll re-watch the talk and make sure all these notes are accurate. I'll edit anything that I feel doesn't accurately represent Cory’s words. Thanks for reading!