I have written something like this in a comment in this community and I think it's worth making a post, even though people certainly have came up with similar ideas.
I would like to argue that enshittification is broader than just adding intrusive monetisation into an online product. The online product itself is also part of the story.
In my observation, all tech companies rising after 2000 follow the same lifecycle. They start out as an idea to solve a real world problem marginally better than the traditional approach. Then they make fancy narratives, usually scifi stories, to attract investors and also convince governments that they should be exempt from regulations. Once investor money starts pouring in, they sell products or services at a significantly subsidized price in order to destroy the traditional industry that works perfectly well, and also to destroy competitors that have the same idea as they do. At this stage people usually enjoy their goods or services and believe that they managed achieve the low price through innovation. After they gain a significant market share, often achieving a cooperative duopoly with the biggest competitor, they start pushing monetisations into their products.
What we usually call enshittification is the last episode of the story. However, it is inevitable given the previous developments. The once "good" product was in fact too good to be true. It was a dream built upon investor craze and, more importantly, a lack of regulations.
Sadly the governments and investors around the world still see the tech industry as the future, and see innovation as a race that they have to win. They're now willing to deplete the resources on planet Earth just so that their insanely inefficient plagiarizing machines can be marginally better than their competitors'. The cold hard truth is, innovation in the tech landscape has slowed down drastically now compared to the late 1900s. Humanity seems to be collectively in denial of this simple fact.
They only way we can get out of enshittification is to regain democratic control over our governments and impose appropriate regulations on the tech industry, whether the big established players or the new startups.
Edit: let me add more rant to the last paragraph. We need to make sure no company can sell a product at loss. We need to update antitrust to also target small, cooperating groups of market leaders. We need to break each one of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, OpenAI, Tesla, Nvidia into a million pieces right now. Do the math to see how much market value each of the pieces will have before questioning whether the number 1 million is reasonable.
Greed
Corporations are legally required to make as much $$$$$ as possible for their shareholders
Jack Welch
Billionaires are out of touch with the 99%
$$$ = power
Inflation
High interest rates (meaning tech companies get less money from investors)
Tech has become a basic necessity (accelerated exponentially in the 2020s), so now companies are using it to control us. They didn't have that type of power over us before, because they knew we could leave.
Company founders leaving or passing away (e.g. Apple, Microsoft). The new CEO doesn't care about the original mission. They care about $$$.
It's just greed greed greed. Say Mark Zuckerberg would have been happy just having 300 million and not hundreds of billions in personal wealth. Think about how good Facebook would still be if he and all these bastards weren't ass hats.
I once did research about how incredibly little the top 8 oligarchs give to charities. The only charity Musk gives to is his kid's school - so this one tiny school for 20 rich kids gets hundreds of millions of dollars.
Greed wrecks all the social media platforms. LinkedIN - you can't do anything with the free version. As they say in marketing, the way to sell the paid upgrade is to make the cheaper version intolerable.
(by kathryn dusoma.org)
Greed of the consumer refusing to boycott enshittified products.
Financialization. Period.
For example, Boeing (like every shittifying company) went from being an engineer-led organization to a finance-led organization. The finance team squeezed. They squeezed salaries, hiring, and costs… and they found cheaper overseas help, and outsourced large parts of the supply chain… to MAKE MORE MONEY. Cause they’re finance guys. They don’t make shit, they don’t build shit, they have no ideas, and their only contributions come from zero-sum parasitic methods of Net Present Value calculations. And then planes fall out of the sky… and the finance guys never pay a cent towards the loss of accountability. It’s quite literally become equivalent to murder, and no one ever gets their hands cut off… even tho they should.
It’s finance. It all stems from finance. They privatize wins and socialize the losses.
There is no way to "get out of it" once investors money enters the picture... They need return on their investment
Self Organized Criticality, and Multipolar Traps. You can thank Moloch for that...
Unchecked capitalism and complete lack of consequences for everything except being poor.
"I would like to argue that enshittification is broader than just adding intrusive monetisation into an online product. The online product itself is also part of the story."
I know a lot of people only apply the term enshittification to the virtual world, but this has been going on a VERY long time in real life and applies to EVERYTHING.
Food. Housing. Appliances. Clothing. TVs. Radios. Phones. Shoes. EVERYTHING.
Sadly, a lot of this is our fault for putting up with it. Next time you get caught by an enshittified product, if you can return it, return it. Contact the maker (applies to food too) and tell them, you, a lifelong customer are switching due to enshitifficiation (cheaper ingredients/different taste, smaller package at a higher price etc or maybe it's a product that used to be good that now sucks). They must pay a price and they must know WHY they are paying the price.
This is similar to the shrinkflation in retail, but this is tech
Join us over on r/collapse where we realize that everything getting shittier is part of a collapsing society.
But what is the root cause of collapse? It's Turtles, all the way down....
It's just capitalism
In capitalism consumers choose not to buy enshittified products. In western socialism (there are no capitalist western nations) consumers keep buying and just complain hoping some higher power will change things for them.
The root cause is rent seeking.
There's another way out of it - build a new internet.
By that I mean that the whole concept of a "cloud" doesn't exclude everyone's devices being nodes of it, and when you do that the running costs become part of the cost of running your devices.
Every single service that runs off apps can be replaced with an open source equivalent that will be crowd-served rather than cloud-served.
Imagine Uber that's just some guy down the road, no middleman. Food delivery with zero skimmed off from both the restaurant and customer. Social media that is based on your own trusted face to face contacts.
A lot of it already exists, we probably just need some protocol that we can install on our devices that can run and load-balance all this stuff.
You're overthinking it.
Capitalism means all companies, in particular those that are publicly owned, must be on a constant path to more profit. This has to be shown in an increasing financial take from the year just gone and in projections for the year to come.
Put simply, that results in ever more desperate methods. Something that might not be considered reasonable one year, will then be perfectly acceptable the next. This spiral heads ever more downwards as time progresses.
Not it obviously doesn't
In capitalism consumers choose not to buy enshittified products. In western socialism (there are no capitalist western nations) consumers keep buying and just complain hoping some higher power will change things for them.
The CCP invented a magnificent concept called socialist market economy. What happens in the West is the opposite: capitalist planned economy. The Fucking 7 now have enough power to effectively make economic plans to their liking.
Victor Hugo said "There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come". My addendum would be "There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, except a bad idea whose time has come". Enshittification is the latest bad idea whose time has come. It's only the latest in a long chain of terrible ideas pushed by MBAs, much like leveraged buyouts, offshoring, and outsourcing. It's a one-size fits all template, that can be applied to almost any company in the US, regardless of whether or not it makes sense for anyone other than the shareholders trying to squeeze any last penny out of the company and it's customers this quarter, even if it tanks sales or even destroys the company in the next quarter.
I think it’s just the most effective business model for generating guaranteed long term profits. Create a useful product and make it cheap and easy to use, squeeze out the competition by any means necessary, lock everyone into your ecosystem, and construct massive walls to trap everyone inside. Bonus if you’re able to become large enough to become immune to government regulators.
Know what else is great for long term profits? Not eating your consumer base via wage suppression. None of that other shit even matters if you jack the floor up so high people have to take out loans to play.
Yeah that’s a good caveat. By every tech business seemingly extracting all of the value out, they’re going to collapse the entire economy.
Greed and short term extractive capitalism.
There's a whole network of other things that help to promote it, including loosely regulated industries, regulatory capture, private equity, VC funding, and activist shareholders, but the root cause remains greed.
And it's accelerated over the past couple of decades because the model of tech companies has become "lets come up with a neat idea and give it away for as long as the VCs will allow, and then figure out how to aggressively monetize it once we build up a captive audience"
Switching costs and the advertising-fed models are why that audience doesn't instantly leave at the beginning of the monetization phase - it's a slow build up to see how much the users will tolerate for how long, and only when that starts to dry up do services try to explore other models, if at all.
I like how Cory Doctorow goes through it in The Internet Con. While the root cause is greed and capitalism, a huge effective cause is intentional non-interoperability. Any tech project is inherently interoperable, provided someone puts in the effort, but most capitalist organizations deliberately make it difficult. Analogous to unnecessarily using proprietary hardware in machinery. There's nuanced conversations to be had about trade secrets and free market, but ultimately if a user wants to move to a different service, it should be as easily as possible to transfer their data - as in, that should be a right of the user. Doctorow argues that these intentional blocks to interop provide leverage for companies to entrap their users and exploit them, and that forcing interop with regulations would quickly evaporate that leverage - giving companies much less capacity for enshittifying their services. (This probably applies to some services like social media much more than some other tech or non-tech services).
IOW, if it were easy (or even possible) to transfer my Facebook account to another service without losing any access to my Facebook network, Facebook would have much more incentive to keep users satisfied. And there's no real technical reason why Facebook couldn't have an API to make this possible - it would be work of course, but it should be work they're required to do if the data I give them were truly mine.
I think it is simple. You can either sell something once and stop making money… Or become a scammer with the limits off. Why rock the industry boat by making effort to push boundaries when you can just bait and switch everything the customer wants with disposable, generic, psychologically manipulative, hollowed out, planned obsolescence and sell them the same thing again in a few months.
This is true but I don’t believe the companies are even trying to solve a real problem even at first it was just a monopoly play from day one. Take Facebook for example. Myspace and others all ready existed and people were pretty happy with it. I think facbook was expressly built to topple the existing social medias which were kinda just coexisting and it didn’t want to stop until they were all destroyed.
I would disagree, although from a subjective standpoint. I did not like MySpace and I honestly felt at the time that Facebook was an improvement. Same with Google, Altavista was pretty crappy and had little incentive to improve.
Maybe but I don’t think Facebook wasn’t trying to make a better product. I think it was a monopoly play from the start. I also don’t think they bought instagram with the goal of making it better or made marketplace with the goal of being better than Craigslist. They’re just trying to stamp out everything else as a goal in itself.
I absolutely agree with them becoming very aggressive later on, along with every one else. To me it seems like the pattern OP describes has gotten way worse over time.
The root cause is pretty straightforward. It derives from the business practice popularized in the 1980s of cutting costs to maximize profit. I'm not talking about being efficient; I'm talking about the practice of running a business into the ground pursuing unsustainable profit margins with no concern about its long term health.
Do you know how everyone complains about private equity buying a company and then killing it? (see newspapers, Red Lobster, etc) That is what enshittification derives from; the short-sighted prioritization of profits today over a business's long term health.
I think you might be over complicating it, I think it's just shareholders. When a company is publicly owned they're beholden to shareholders and legally obliged to prioritise creating returns for them. I think. The founders can even be ousted if they're not deemed to be doing what shareholders want.
The problem is they start with VC money, scale massively, run huge losses, then need a public sale to sustain the business till it's profitable, at least, that how I've seen it.
I don't understand much how investments work but your second paragraph seems to me a more correct way of saying "sell products at loss then profit off a duopoly". There isn't anything inherently wrong with a company's goal being profit. The problem is a lack of competition that occurs in a lack of regulations.
I was really badly trying to say that I they might well start off with noble goals and without shareholders a company could reach a point where they're happy with a certain profit margin if it's sustainable. Imo shareholders introduce a profit-at-all-costs mentality which can drive enshitification.
There are other businesses ownership structures that have survived the test of time but venture capital to market listing is well known to silicon valley and initially generates huge amounts of capital that can be reinvested.
There are thousands of publicly traded companies. Thing generally work well, except in tech industry.
It's late stage capitalism man. This was covered in books a hundred years ago and every day only vindicates the premise.
No it wasn’t. Even in your own narrative, it was true. They just got greedy and enshittified it at the end.
Yes it was. It was subsidized, never economically viable at the price (sometimes free).
So its price goes way up to recover the investment, or more subscription revenue or more ads.
Ads are a vicious cycle, especially as ad blockers come into play reducing the ads’ reach and effectiveness, thus requiring even more ads to make up the difference. The company spends trying to block the ad blockers, rather than improve, because people want to continue free. But those ad blockers become more important the more ads and longer ads are included. Until a new competitor arises that offers the same thing but now free or with unobtrusive ads again and the cycle starts anew.
I always thought the root cause was just greed…
It's certainly greed but more complicated than "we're greed so we put more ads on our website". If you ask YouTube to go back to 2 skippable ads per video or ask Uber to be affordable again, they'll simply tell you it's impossible and there's some truth in it. But it's their greed that brought the world into this shit state in the first place.
This. Tale as old as time.
It is. You are right. OP still has a few great points though.
The root cause of enshittification is the tendency for the rate of profit to decline over time. This is inevitable.
True and in addition, Wall Street expects profits to increase, like a straight line, every quarter. In practice, this is impossible, therefore the company tries increasingly shitty ways to grow profits.
Exactly! Folks, we would still have sawdust in our hotdogs if we left it up our corporate overlords to fix it!
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for those that need to catch-up.
There might be a book you should read (or cite)
As the tag says, it's a rant
ok
While some real-world occurrences fit your train of thought, many others don't.