Writing
Enshittification & The Current State of Everything
Over the last few years, the concept of Enshittification has taken the world by storm. If you've ever felt like something is broken with the Internet, this meme of a word explains how we got here.
Over the last few years, the concept of Enshittification, an irreverent term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the decline of large tech platforms, has taken the world by storm. If you've ever felt like something is broken with the Internet, this meme of a word helps explain how we got here.
But we can build better. Whether you're a designer, product manager, developer, or just an informed citizen of the Internet — it's up to all of us to push back on this insidious trend.
Shaniece MacNeil
Q&A
What exactly is enshittification?
Enshittification is a word that describes the doom-spiral pattern by which large tech platforms decline in quality and serve over time. In essence, they become so large that they're no longer incentivized to be good to their users.
Cory Doctorow describes the three stages to diagnose this systemic problem:
- First the company is good to users in order to win them over to their products and services. They do this while sowing the seeds of lock-in in the form of network effects, personal data collection, legal protections such as the DMCA, and many others.
- Next, they trade some of the value previously offered to those users in order to win over larger, more profitable business customers such as publishers, advertisers, enterprise, etc.
- Finally, in the ultimate power move of late-stage capitalism, they extract value from the system for themselves. Corporate entities have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders and continuous growth is hard (if not impossible), so this becomes inevitable at scale.
Enshittification describes a breakdown of market forces wherein platforms become so large that they become disconnected from the needs of their customers. It's more than a word to describe "designs you don't like," but a description of specific market conditions with very large, and very powerful companies.
Do you have any examples of enshittification in action?
Many of our largest technology companies are in this stage of decline.
Facebook started out with a mission to connect the world. The company has come a long way from their college campus days. Yet with a market capitalization hovering around $1.7 trillion, they've essentially transformed into the world's largest misinformation empire.
It's a competitive category, but Amazon is the undisputed market leader in enshittification. Amazon started on a promising trajectory, delivering unprecedented value and transforming ecommerce as we know it with a relentless focus on the customer experience.
These days, ecommerce obviously still a significant part of Amazon's business, but few know that they're the world's third largest advertising platform at $50B of revenue per year — and growing at 20% year over year. Amazon is a pay to play king, charging vendors higher and higher fees for placement in it's search results (which surpassed Google as the first place customers turn to for product searches around 2018).
There are some signs of regulatory silver linings, however. Amazon recently completed a $2.5B settlement with the FTC for it's 4 page, 6 click, 15 option cancellation process internally dubbed as “the Iliad flow” — one of the largest settlements in FTC history (Amazon admitted no fault in the matter).
What can we do as individuals to help put enshittification back in the box?
It's going to take a collective effort that includes UXers product managers, engineering leaders, concerned citizens, journalists, and more. When hiring markets were tighter, tech employees were able to hold the line based on their values and principles but that restraint has been relaxed by round after round of layoffs. The current environment has many product teams feeling pressured to deliver short term gains rather than long term, sustainable, value-creating growth — it will take time for the market cycle to change course, but it will eventually.
Some of the changes are likely regulatory and political (i.e. anti-monopoly rules and enforcement). So even just sharing the concept and helping people put language to it can be helpful in building a broader coalition and anti-enshittification movement.
What’s next for you with this subject?
Based on the reception, you might say that this talk has found product-market fit. So the UX & Product team at Evans Hunt cast about for ideas to dial it up a notch, and I think we came up with a banger of an idea...
We're designing, writing and printing a children's board book (yes, you read that right) called E is for Enshittification.
A is for Amazon, B is for Billionaire... X is for Twitter (RIP sweet bird), and Z is for Zuckerberg.
Coming soon, from the UX & Product team at Evans Hunt
Thanks
My thanks to Calgary UX, ProductBC, SocialWest, Marketing News Canada, and Evans Hunt for the opportunity to share this talk.
Special thanks to Sarah Murphy for help designing the slides, and of course, Cory Doctorow for coining the term.