At The Overspill this week, veteran UK technology journalist Charles Arthur highlighted a blog posting at the venture capital firm A16Z by cyberethnographer and NYU adjunct professor Ruby Thelot claiming that “enshittification isn’t real”.
Thelot’s main argument: “Simply put, more people use Instagram every year, they use it on average longer every day, year over year and, finally, their reported satisfaction has also grown over time, indicating no decrease in overall satisfaction, stated or revealed.” I immediately imagined a survey like this about the London railway node Clapham Junction.
Thelot uses Instagram as an exemplar. No matter how much users complain, he says, surveys show they continue to spend more time on the site and indicate greater satisfaction. To him, swapping out chronological feeds for algorithms is just part of natural evolution as platform adapt to their evolving user base. Enshittification, he concludes, provides “absolution” for “platform narcissists” who need to forgive themselves for remaining on the platforms. They’re not *really* trapped.
Some of this is fair. People *don’t* like change, particularly when it removes or alters features they’re used to. It’s also true that the generation who began our online lives pre-Internet and embraced email and the open web early on are often the most loudly disaffected with the current state of things.
Thelot is also undoubtedly correct that tech moguls have learned they can ignore complaints because people will go on using their products. This is a lesson they learned years ago, when they growing explosively – and differently designed. Today, the oligopoly of competitors all behave roughly the same to promote engagement. The courts continue to repeatedly agree that these companies are abusive.
He also ignores the various forms of lock-in and network effects. These are not just individual choices. People want to be where their friends are, and it’s non-trivial to persuade all those school groups, clubs, and communities of interest to move. In fact, research from the University of New South Wales in April shows that platforms don’t have to “addict” users; they merely have to raise the cost of leaving, measured in the loss of their connections and businesses.
But Doctorow was not just talking about social media or just about users. Amazon is a great example; its product search has become broken. So is Google, a three-time monopolist whose change in behavior Doctorow blames on tech workers’ loss of power.
Enshittification is about power and its abuse. Saying it isn’t real rejects the widespread decades-old understanding that, “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product”, generally attributed to Andrew Lewis. As every business tries to expand its revenue streams, sometimes now you’re the product even when you *are* paying – which is exactly what enshittifies the customer experience. Just this week, Uber said it will start playing ads during Uber journeys even while drivers in multiple countries are suing it over using its algorithms to squeeze every last penny out of both riders and drivers. TV manufacturers are showing their own advertising, and Hyundai will charge extra for the “instrument cluster” that provides detail about what your car is doing. Whichof these moves doesn’t make life objectively worse (and/or less safe) for customers?
Enshittification became the word of the year in 2024 because it resonates with so many frustrated, angry people. Pretending they don’t really care is denial.
Concern over the US’s pole position in Internet governance – as in the recent case of a Texas county court ordering ICANN to lock a domain worldwide – continues to grow. Last month, the Trump administration placed Austici/Inventati on a terrorism watchlist, as Matthew Petti reports at Reason. This is an Italian provider of free encrypted email and web hosting to about 20,000 activist organizations around the world. The consequence has been to crippling. Not only does the designation put the use of US-based payment systems such as PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa out of reach immediately, but it has also losr its website worldwide, since the registry for its domain – austici.org – is also US-based.
Legacy design means that a lot of other Internet infrastructure is also US-based, such as Let’s Encrypt, used to secure connections to more than 700 million websites worldwide (says Wikipedia), more than 23 million of them in Europe.
Blocking via payment systems is not new. In 2010, the US government told PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa that Wikileaks’ activities were illegal in the US, choking donations until the organization could find alternative routes. That kind of blockade still happens; a friend pointed at the story of a Cuban sandwich shop in Belfast. which can’t get paid by Deliveroo because the latter’s bank is American and won’t pay anyone or anything associated with Cuba.
But implementing sanctions via US-based Internet governance nodes is relatively new – see last year’s sanctions against the International Criminal Court and other examples – and is harder to counter. Whatever the rights or wrongs of any one particular site or service, that one country’s leader can selectively shut down any organization in the world any time they like is alarming.
What used to be soft power is an attack vector.
Illustrations: Clapham Junction railway station, in 2002 (via Wikimedia.)
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
