Do you ever get the feeling that digitisation is simply leading to a diminished, down-graded and (to put it bluntly) crappier world?  Cory Doctorow (2024) has described this as the ‘enshittification’ of the digital – a term intended to describe how the defining digital platforms and systems in our lives are decaying in ways that drive the steady degradation of key services and our overall living conditions.

According to Doctorow, this happens primarily because of the dominant Silicon Valley business model over the past 20 years – establish an apparently ‘free’ service to draw in huge numbers of users, establish an economy of scale, and then steadily monetise and extract value from this platform to claw back value until the original essence of whatever made the service attractive to people has been hollowed out.

We have seen this happen to Facebook, which has evolved into an ever-more frustrating means of keeping in touch with family, friends and community. We have seen this happen to various online shopping platforms, local news websites, and university ‘learning management systems’. This feeling of ‘enshittification’ will be familiar to anyone who has tried to interface with their local restaurant, council services department or hospital through a customer service app. In all these cases, the digital allusion of convenience, flexibility and accessibility has come at the cost of degrading everything it purports to enhance.

Doctorow suggests that tech firms have been able to get away with this through a lack of regulation, competition, lack of employee power, and the shared sense of public powerlessness to do anything differently (i.e. switch platforms, install ad-blockers, or simply stop using their devices).

Regardless of how it is has happened, the digital landscape of the mid 2020s is certainly very different to Tim Berners-Lee’s 1990s utopian hope that “the goal of the web is to serve humanity”. Thirty years later we are living in a very different – and distinctly fractious – digital world. As Doctorow puts it: ‘The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crap gadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names and cryptocurrency scams’.

Reference

Cory Doctorow (2024). ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything. Financial Times, 8th February, https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5