Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and what we can do about it
Now, you may have noticed that Amazon’s prices aren’t any higher than the prices that you pay elsewhere. There’s a good reason for that: when merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores.
This alone tells you how much the system has been messed up to favor massive corporations in America. I live in Europe and we don’t have laws like that here. Amazon is still a major player (and they’re just as evil), but I have the option to buy my goods elsewhere for a lower price. And I regularly do.
Just this month I needed new air filters for a Sony projector. They’re 60€ on amazon, so I bought the same filters for 20€ in a dedicated air filter shop in the Netherlands. Even with shipping, it was half the price.
The only way to win, is not to play. Cancel your prime, shop elsewhere and you ‘WILL’ get better deals, for those of you in the UK and EU, ALWAYS use a credit card for online purchases, as that gives you even better protections.
Shop locally, support businesses in your community, because the money you spend there, gets spent there over and over again. When you spend it in chain stores and online, that money is sucked out of your community.
I get it though… some people only care about the convenience of the deal, and that’s the real cause of enshitification… the peoples failure to care about the effort they put into things… In effect it’s a form of laziness and conditioning, people value their convenience above and beyond anything else. We see it in everything, social media is amongst the very worst of it, with friends complaining that they can’t keep in touch because ‘you’re not on (insert SM name here)’… because the effort of stepping outside the bubble they’ve been sucked into is far too inconvenient for them, and you get to find out that these people are not really your friends… they never were, because they’re convenience was always more important than your existence to them.
As for amazon, brands have woken up… do a search for something and you’ll rarely find anything from those branded manufacturers… only 3rd party sellers and cheap crappy chinese knock-offs. Items that don;t even meant safety standards in the country they being sold in. Electrical goods that are a fire hazard and have caused loss of life… and amazon keeps getting away with it because ‘3rd party sellers’ not them.
The only way to win is not to play… cancel your subscriptions, stop using their services, stop buying digital goods that can be taken away from you. Return to physical media that actually ends up being cheaper in the long run. You are the consumer, you have the power… hell… try going without a few times, you don’t actually need that cheap piece of plastic crap you just ordered to save yourself a few minutes of ‘prep’ time in the kitchen that will break after a couple of weeks or be consigned the back of a cupboard after a few uses and forgotten about.
You have the power… use it better.
But this is wrong. There are meaningful differences between the internet as it stands today – the enshitternet – and the old, good internet we once had. The enshitternet is a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love. The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet.
I’m a big fan of Doctorow, but I have to disagree with his view of the “old, good internet”, for a reason he recognizes with Amazon but doesn’t take to its logical conclusion (at least not in this excerpt).
In step 1 of enshittification, a website is good to its users. Granted. But as the excerpt points out, Amazon was “good to its users” thanks to a massive pile of investor cash, which let them do consumer friendly (but anti-competitive) stuff like sell goods below cost, have a fair search system instead of making money off search placement fees, and not squeeze its suppliers.
But that couldn’t last. The money ran out. And Amazon transitioned to stage 2, and stage 3, squeezing its suppliers and customers, in order to pay back its investors and make a ton of money.
And this has been the life cycle for most of the internet. Google, Facebook, Twitter, pretty much every big web company started by using investor cash to give unsustainable benefits to consumers, and then either started squeezing them for profit when the cash ran out or transitioned to some other role (like becoming a propaganda outlet for the world’s richest man) because they couldn’t continue providing the customer-friendly internet we all enjoyed without going bankrupt.
What I’m getting at is, the old, good internet was inherently unsustainable, because most of the things we enjoyed about it were subsidized by investors. The Facebook that just showed you what your friends were doing? Made no money. The Twitter that the Occupy movement and Arab Spring ran on? Never made a profit. That good, effective Google search engine? Cost a lot more than ad revenue brought in. The entire modern Internet was built on the concept of locking users in with unsustainably cheap services and then squeezing them to repay investors. Enshittification was the plan from Day 1.
We can’t go back to the old, good internet. We don’t have angel investors willing to subsidize all the good stuff we enjoyed.
But we can go forward to the fediverse 😆
The whole point of Docotorow’s work on enshittification is that it wasn’t inevitable. Tech CEOs have always been pulling the profit lever as hard as they could, but there’s a reason why those levers begun moving when they weren’t before, due to a confluence of bad policies. If we decided to, we could enforce antitrust law, repeal DMCA 1201, mandate interoperability, ban surveillance advertising, and unionize tech companies. And if we did that, guess what? Those disciplinary forces would help keep the psychopaths who run tech companies afraid of their users, competitors, workers, and regulators. Make enshittifiers afraid again, and we can have a good new internet.
I get it, and I disagree.
See, I think the investors and funders behind Big Internet were not just pulling the profit lever - they were pulling political levers to achieve regulatory capture, to get that favorable regulatory environment they needed to make a ton of profit and regulate their competitors out of existence.
And they kept pumping funding into Big Internet while it was unprofitable because they believed eventually they’d win the political battle and have a free hand to extort profits. Which was a fair assumption given, you know, the history of regulation in general.
If the United States suddenly comes to its senses, passes good legislation, and starts enforcing its own regulations, and if we assume, in this utopia, Big Internet won’t be able to buy enough American politicians to counter that, I think one of two things will happen.
One, Big Internet moves overseas to more favorable regulatory environments, provides American consumers with a substandard product, and tells them it’s their own government’s fault in order to encourage us to change the laws in their favor.
Or, two, Big Internet has to operate at a loss again, can’t attract new funding on the promise of later profits, and goes bankrupt.
Because I don’t think Big Internet can afford to give its users the same experience it did ten or fifteen years ago. In order to give us the ad-free YouTube, unrigged Google search results, algorithms that show us what we want instead of what the Republican Party wants, websites without tracking cookies, and all the other things we enjoyed, it had to run at a loss.
The old, good internet was subsidized by investors who expected profits in the future. No expectation of profit? No subsidized internet services. At least not provided by the big centralized for-profit companies that have controlled the United States’ Internet experience for the last twenty years or so.
You seem to be assuming that the only two possibilities for a tech company’s bottom line are either a) grotesque monopoly profits or b) operating at a loss. But this is a false dilemma, since there’s a huge range of somewhat less profitable but still highly profitable business models in between those options! Doing a few billion less in stock buybacks every year while investing in better quality products or higher wages isn’t going to affect whether the tech giants are profitable. They just might have to compete a little more for those margins.
