Phase three: screw *everybody* and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.
Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.
That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on *inside* the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?
27/
That mechanism is called *twiddling*. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.
Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.
28/
Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use you data to predict when a user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.
And of course, as the prophet @GreatDismal warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices *2,000 times per day*.
29/
Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.
The law professor @veenadubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.
30/
Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one - not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video - will see it.
Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.
Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.
31/
Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.
Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things *better* for end users or business customers.
32/
For example, Emily Baker-White from *Forbes* revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”
When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.
33/
Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.
34/
Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has *ever* gotten five balls to stay in that basket.
That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just *one* ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."
35/
That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.
Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.
Except you can’t.
36/
Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.
That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"
37/
The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.
But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.
38/
Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were *rolling* in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a *steal*.
Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.
39/
Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take *all* the value for themselves.
40/
That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.
So now we know *what* is happening, and *how* it is happening, all that’s left is *why* it’s happening.
41/
Now, on the one hand, the *why* is obvious. The less value end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.
That’s *why*, but it doesn’t tell you *why now*. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got *treated* like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.
42/
Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re *gone*.
And there’s the clue: It *used* to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.
Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?
43/
There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.
If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving
Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is *whether there is anywhere to go*.
44/
Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for *Insta*. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.
But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.
[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]
45/
That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.
So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he *put in writing* in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta.
46/
So even if they quit Facebook (*the platform*), they would still be captured *Facebook* (*the company*).
Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.
But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: *he put it in writing*.
47/
But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage
Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has *encouraged* monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”
48/
If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to *punish* them for making the best product?
But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best.
49/
They did it by paying bribes. More than *20 billion* per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.
Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior.
50/
Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, tey’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts *specifically prohibited* by existing antitrust law.
51/
Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be *too big to care*.
Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.
Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?
51/
Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.
52/
It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist - to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.
53/
It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem.Then these dickheads convinced us rats were good for us and we stopped putting down poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? *Maybe* it was that we stopped putting down poison, but *maybe* it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"
54/
Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they *pushed it*.
And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the *second* force that disciplines companies. Regulation *is* possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.
55/
That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on *all* the lawyers fighting *every* antitrust case in the entire USA?
56/
IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.
It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they *compete*.
57/
They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.
It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on *anything*. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on *anything*.
58/
The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it... ..
59/
.or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”
“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”
60/
100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.
But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a *cartel*.
61/
It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.
You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.
62/
The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.
63/
The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was *not* the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.
Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.
64/
Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.
Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.
Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.
And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.
65/
Once we killed competition - stopped putting down rat poison - we got cartels - the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators - the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.
So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.
But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines.
66/
That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.
Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.
When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.
67/
Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”
This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.
68/
But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up - someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"
69/
I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to *zero*, forever.
[Any guesses why?]
Because *no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'*
Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is *gone*, *forever*.
70/
Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines - that is a serious check on enshittification.
The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the *majority* of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.
71/
But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an *app*. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.
72/
And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).
Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.
All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."
73/
So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the *app* 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”
And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"
74/
Because it *doesn't matter* if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: *you can't.* So YOLO, enshittify away.
“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”
75/
Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.
76/
To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise *never* to spy on you. Remember that?!
77/
Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.
78/
FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.
Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.
When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.
79/
Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against *you* when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.
Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.
80/
But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was *us*. Tech workers.
Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.
To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”
81/
They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.
They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.
This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”
82/
This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!
But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are *absolutely* gonna make your boss share.
83/
Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.
So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed
But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.
84/
You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.
That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.
85/
As far as our bosses have *always* been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.
Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.
86/
Cory Doctorow