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Gilles Lambert/ZUMA
From the 90's to Musk
The company that has undergone the most fluctuations of this kind is Twitter, or X, or whatever Elon Musk's social network will be called tomorrow. The platform changes every day based on the whims of its owner. Shortly after acquiring it for $44 billion, Musk changed the logo from the famous blue bird to a picture of a dog. In the name of freedom, he removed the already inadequate anti-bullying filters. For a moment, the content on the platform ceased to be public: only users with an account could read the messages. Musk also decreed that there'd now be a price for profile verification.
Every day, he invents something new in his unstoppable tumble toward enshittification.
In an article titled Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Stuff: Three Decades of Survival in the Social Media Desert, writer Catherynne M. Valente explains that from its early days in the 90s, the internet has always followed this degenerative trend.
The first step towards enshittification is to eliminate competition and get tight control over the market.
"Prodigy, geocities, collegeclub.com, MySpace, Friendster, Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter. More besides. More next," writes Valente. Social media platforms will eventually pervert their original purpose, inundate your feed with advertising, ask for money, sell your data, become mouthpieces for fascism, and so on. "If one were to get big enough, like Facebook, this cycle doesn’t stop, it just sort of happens all at the same time without interruptions in service," Velente adds.
The idea of business, of course, has always been to make money. However, the current desperation to rake in more and more profits is bringing our internet experience dangerously close to collapse. According to Doctorow, in a perhaps too drastic (or optimistic, depending on your perspective) prediction, the logical end of this capitalist decay is the death of the platforms in question.
Here is how #platforms die: first, they 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, they die. 1/ pic.twitter.com/Gm92Xph8VO
— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr (@doctorow) January 21, 2023
The three steps to enshittification
Recently, in a conference, Doctorow explained the three steps necessary for. The first is to eliminate competition and get tight control over the market.
For example, Jeff Bezos once took it as a personal crusade to kill a website that sold diapers online. This company, Diapers.com, was doing well, and it initially rejected the offers of partnership made by Amazon. The latter then started selling diapers at ridiculously low prices, compromising the viability of Diapers.com, which eventually sold out.
This was also Google's usual strategy: "Google made one good product 25 years ago. A really amazingly great search engine, and that amazingly great search engine opened a conduit to the capital markets. And that gave Google an effectively blank check to buy out competitors. So it didn't matter that virtually everything Google developed in house was a failure: videos, social media, Wi-Fi balloons, smart cities... They couldn't even keep an RSS reader running. It didn't matter because they could buy other people's companies," explains Doctorow.
The second step in enshittification occurs when big tech companies, thanks to their monopoly position and influence in shaping laws, can change the terms of use of their service whenever they want. They can do this because they are not bound by any commitment and can torpedo the rules of the game whenever they please, without explanations, without transparency. This affects everything: from privacy laws to search algorithms, and even the price they pay to creators.
The third and final step involves using technological legislation against rebellious users. For example, against those who promote interoperability (something all these companies did in their early days: that's how Facebook drained MySpace and took its members). "When these three factors come into play, enshittification becomes inevitable," says Doctorow.
Share...like...buy...WOO
Nobody is safe
Is there any internet giant that escapes unscathed? It seems not.
YouTube has declared war on ad blockers. Instagram has changed its algorithm to promote business accounts and insert more advertising. Amazon Prime will also start displaying ads, and its customers, who already pay for the subscription, can only skip them by paying even more. Disney+ has already raised its prices in many countries.
In a Forbes article, Emily Baker-White reports on how TikTok tricks users with its "For You" button. It's a practice called "heating," where TikTok injects videos which aren't necessarily tailored to you into your feed in order to inflate their views. It's part of the platforms efforts to "court" influencers and brands. All of this, of course, happens without any indication that you are seeing sponsored content.
Once trapped, users will have no choice but to accept negative changes.
Once TikTok has hooked those influencers and brands, it will stop boosting their videos. Now the plan is to squeeze them for the investors. Many people have had a similar experience on Twitter: accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers have seen their views plummet. What do they have to do to be heard again? Allegedly, pay the 8 euros a month for Twitter Blue.
In summary, enshittification begins with a user-friendly platform that fosters user loyalty. Once trapped, users will have no choice but to accept negative changes. Who hasn't thought about deleting WhatsApp at some point? But very few people actually do it. All their contacts are there, and they don't want to lose a vital communication channel. The same, in some way, applies to Amazon. By the time the conglomerate's reality came to light, it was already too late: buyers can't find products on other sites because those sites have closed (thanks to Amazon). It's the same for sellers: they can no longer sell their products except through Amazon, which extracts a huge commission for them.
To stop this drift and return to something resembling the good old internet, we need strong laws against monopolies. Otherwise, enshittification will continue to swallow tech platforms whole.
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