Not a day goes by without any of us being reminded of Córy Doctorow's "Enshittification" concept. The long story short, you start using something and it's good. You're captured, as the cost of moving away is deemed too high in some form of the other. That's when the Enshittification starts.
Norway's Consumer Council put together this excellent video to show us how it works:
There's such a colossal amount of Enshittification currently, and the YouTube video accurately points a number of them.
Subscriptions for any software instead of buying it outright is a good example. It invariably leads to users suffering steady price hikes and sometimes being served ads even though you're stumping up with a monthly charge for the privilege. Amazon Prime, I'm looking at you and many others.
Having a single product "segmented" into multiple ones is another, so you get a degraded version of the full one, to make it look like you're saving money. Sometimes this is lauded, like a recent story about paying too much for fibre broadband. It actually costs an internet provider more to slow down fibre broadband from the full native speed, and the slower service is worse quality than the full one. But, enshittified as it is, the slower version is sold for less.
Enshittification is not new, which is why we have words like "adulteration" and "sophistication", but as the Norwegian Consumer Council notes, technology makes it way easier, at an enormous scale too.
Read our review of Enshittification.
(H/T: Patrick Herd.)
8 Comments
Goes hand in hand with the commandeering, privatisation and rentier-ing off, the greater Commons.
Exponential growth is an impossible taskmaster.
You have to consume ever-more, ever-faster.
Even if it kills off your species.
And I'm asking, when a few rentiers will own everything, all jobs will be replaced by AI/robots and the populace is given an universal income, then what?
If the UBI is high enough, then maybe the human equivalent of the Mouse Utopia?
Here's a link if you want to know more: Behavioral sink - Wikipedia
Then providing for that populace will be deemed environmentally damaging and unnecessary and they will be abandoned (at best)
The nutters who witter on about a UBI, forget that it, like money, is an arrogant assumption that there will be real stuff for it to be exchanged for.
No guarantees on that
Hilarious clip, and too true. I feel the sentiment is slowly changing back to consumers wanting a product that they own, that works, and they have unlimited use of. Even the youth can see many of the old goods still holding up and last vs the crappy new things made today.
Take a 1960's toaster for example made with superior materials, and better engineering than cheap mass manufactured ones today.
Great to see Juha's extrapolating on this theme. AI is the next frontier of enshittifcation.
- Generative‑AI providers are removing model choice, limiting capabilities on lower tiers, and pushing users into more expensive plans under the guise of “smart routing” and “best model for the job.”
- GPT‑5 has two default options (e.g., a “standard” and “thinking” model), deprecating multiple earlier models and workflows, while free users are silently shifted to cheaper, weaker back‑end models and get fewer image generations.
- Users report feeling that the product got slower and “dumber” while the UI became more aggressive about upselling premium tiers and add‑ons they did not initially want.
The sad thing about much enshittification is that it's founded in groups within organisations who are thrashing around trying to demonstrate they are doing something to justify their existence, when the mature technology doesn't have any real scope for improvement.
Example: the agencies that test vehicles for safety are about to start docking safety points on cars that have done away with physical buttons to do basics like turn on a heater or radio, as tests rate trying to use digital controls while driving as more imparing than being well over the drink driving limit.
"Don't attribute to malign intent that which can be explained by stupidity."
"If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it."
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