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.
So currently we are on step 2: abusing their users. When they start abusing the business customers as you suggest, they will be on step 3 and one step closer to death.
Here’s the thing. Cory Doctorow is almost 100% spot on with the first 3 things. The last one, however, is pure copium. Those platforms died, yes, but they died in a very different era of the internet.
There was a time where people jumped ship with abandon and routinely visited cool, new websites every other week. This is the time that I like to call the “big liquid” internet. The internet was popular, yes, but every day people spent a little more time on it than on t.v. and other kinds of popular entertainment - in other words, popular but still growing. Websites like Digg, if they fucked up and just straight up ruined user experience, would die as a result of enshittification. The internet was cutthroat, and the quality of your service mattered. If people didn’t like your website, they were going to leave.
We don’t live in that era of the internet anymore. We’re in the era of the “big solid” internet. People don’t go to “new websites” anymore. They don’t jump platforms. They don’t abandon and adopt. If they’re kids, they go where their friends are - probably Twitter/X or TikTok. Maybe reddit. If they’re old users they’re on instagram and Facebook. It doesn’t really matter how bad those platforms get, because the quality of the service is not really important. It’s that they don’t have anywhere else to go or anything else to do.
There is no more exploration or adventure to the internet as we once understood it. That’s why Google has waited so fucking long to enshittify their most popular product: it’s because you’re locked in. There is no competition, because the competition died or was killed off a long time ago.
I agree with a slight caveat. You’re right that the internet of today is more forgiving of platforms that enshittify. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” -literally 1984, where the boot is advertising and the human face is consumers’ attention.
So we may be stuck at phase 3 for a while, where the consumers and the businesses are getting screwed over by internet platforms. But although the technological environment is changing more slowly, it’s still changing and “with strange aeons even death may die”. When the platforms inevitably die, enshittification will be part of the analysis why.
Of course in the meantime the internet platforms make money for one set of people, and other people’s lives are made crappier because of it.
According to the principle of enshittification:
So currently we are on step 2: abusing their users. When they start abusing the business customers as you suggest, they will be on step 3 and one step closer to death.
Here’s the thing. Cory Doctorow is almost 100% spot on with the first 3 things. The last one, however, is pure copium. Those platforms died, yes, but they died in a very different era of the internet.
There was a time where people jumped ship with abandon and routinely visited cool, new websites every other week. This is the time that I like to call the “big liquid” internet. The internet was popular, yes, but every day people spent a little more time on it than on t.v. and other kinds of popular entertainment - in other words, popular but still growing. Websites like Digg, if they fucked up and just straight up ruined user experience, would die as a result of enshittification. The internet was cutthroat, and the quality of your service mattered. If people didn’t like your website, they were going to leave.
We don’t live in that era of the internet anymore. We’re in the era of the “big solid” internet. People don’t go to “new websites” anymore. They don’t jump platforms. They don’t abandon and adopt. If they’re kids, they go where their friends are - probably Twitter/X or TikTok. Maybe reddit. If they’re old users they’re on instagram and Facebook. It doesn’t really matter how bad those platforms get, because the quality of the service is not really important. It’s that they don’t have anywhere else to go or anything else to do.
There is no more exploration or adventure to the internet as we once understood it. That’s why Google has waited so fucking long to enshittify their most popular product: it’s because you’re locked in. There is no competition, because the competition died or was killed off a long time ago.
I agree with a slight caveat. You’re right that the internet of today is more forgiving of platforms that enshittify. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” -literally 1984, where the boot is advertising and the human face is consumers’ attention.
So we may be stuck at phase 3 for a while, where the consumers and the businesses are getting screwed over by internet platforms. But although the technological environment is changing more slowly, it’s still changing and “with strange aeons even death may die”. When the platforms inevitably die, enshittification will be part of the analysis why.
Of course in the meantime the internet platforms make money for one set of people, and other people’s lives are made crappier because of it.