Do you remember when you were able to Google something and get the answer immediately, and not have to scroll past ads, sponsored results, and a not-totally-reliable answer hallucinated by an AI? You aren’t the only one. This trend of gradually declining quality in the products and services we all rely on has a very specific, descriptive name that efficiently captures what is happening to tech while also making all our feelings about it exceptionally clear.
In 2022, technology critic and author Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification.” The term was named the Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society in 2023, even beating out “AI.” It has proved so resonant that its use has expanded beyond social media platforms to include hardware, software, and technology in general.
Let’s explore how enshittification works, and how it eventually comes around to bite almost everyone.
Examining the Death Spiral that Leads to Enshittification
As Doctorow summarized in a December episode of The Daily Show, the term is one he came up with to describe—as he puts it—”how platforms go bad.” According to Doctorow, the process of enshittification has three distinct phases, as follows:
- Be Good to Your Users – This is the stage where a technology—platform, application, whatever it may be—needs to build and enrapture a user base. As such, the value to these end users needs to be above and beyond.
Think about what Facebook, Amazon’s Alexa, and even Google offered in their early days. Facebook was clean, Alexa prioritized utility, and Google’s search function simply returned the most relevant websites for the query. TikTok’s algorithm was once eerily prescient about a user’s interests. Instagram and Twitter/X used to default to chronological order where competitors frustratingly used an algorithm. Most of the few existing subscription-based offerings were accessible and affordable… and again, a subscription wasn’t the norm. Netflix was effectively a mail-order DVD rental service, with its streaming option debuting 10 years after it launched. Simple, even elegant, and most importantly, effective.
This efficacy is what leads to user buy-in, and gradually makes using these technologies a part of the culture itself.
- Be Good to Businesses – Once users are good and truly hooked, the next phase is introduced: getting businesses addicted to the technology. Features are added that make things as appealing to businesses as possible. This is why Amazon results are so imbued with sponsored results outranking ones with higher ratings, and why there are so many ads and slop in our Facebook feeds. Meanwhile, the users experience a severe plunge in quality as features are rolled back and prices are raised… not to mention their data being sold to advertisers for businesses to use.
- Be Good to Shareholders – This is the final stage, where true enshittification sets in and the platform draws away all value. Features are severely depreciated while prices skyrocket across the board for private and business users alike. For example, there has been some evidence that all this ad money businesses pay to Facebook don’t actually get the results Facebook claims, or how Amazon is scraping money off both the buyer and the seller that isn’t proportional to the benefits.
Enshittification Can Easily Impact Business Tech
There are a few examples that are fairly easy to identify, such as:
- Software as a Service – While we tout SaaS and other as-a-Service offerings for their business benefits, it is important that we acknowledge that this pay-as-you-go model is vulnerable to some of enshittification’s shortcomings. If prices rise without any value being added to the tool (or features that were once included suddenly require an extra fee on top of the subscription) you might be experiencing this shift.
- Hardware Obsolescence – It isn’t uncommon for people to look back and reminisce about how long machines used to last, including those used for business purposes. Nowadays, these same devices are reliant on software that is stuffed with unoptimized updates before being abandoned and replaced far faster. Unfortunately, it is important to make these upgrades for the sake of your cybersecurity, but that doesn’t change the fact that printers are now being built that require firmware updates to function properly and only take proprietary ink cartridges that can only be purchased via a subscription.
- Compatibility Loss – Let’s say you’ve committed to a certain solution stack because it all plays nicely together, despite coming from different providers. What happens if your customer relationship management platform stops working with your accounting software, and you suddenly have to choose between adding steps to your process or switching to a new toolset that doesn’t work as well?
Why Enshittification Needs to Be Avoided
While it should be obvious at this point, a degrading technology will ultimately become more of a hurdle than a benefit to your business operations. First and foremost, bad tools take more time out of your day to use, and as the old saying goes, time is money.
Second, one aspect of technology that enshittifies quietly is often the security surrounding these tools, or the support that is offered. As a result, it both becomes more difficult to try and make a tool work for you (and more than likely harder to cancel) and a bigger and bigger risk to keep using it.
Third, it is incredibly unlikely that a platform, service, or technology will reverse course and return to its former quality in the future. As such, continuing to work with that tool means you are paying more of your money for something that will only get worse. Is that something you anticipated budgeting for? Is remaining loyal to a given provider really worth all the costs?
Frankly, we think that continuing to use any kind of technology that is experiencing enshittification is futile at best. The preferable—and only viable—option is to identify and migrate to an alternative, as frustrating as that prospect may be.
We’re Here to Help You Fight Enshittification
As a technology partner for Grand Rapids businesses, we want to make sure that the tools and services you use are the right ones for your needs. As such, we actively work to help you avoid the ramifications of enshittification.
How? Simple.
First off, we do our best to evaluate your needs and fulfill them through providers who generally have the best track record in terms of supporting their offering. While it may seem that no technology is truly immune to enshittification nowadays, we put forth our best efforts to sift out the optimum option. This consulting is meant to help you use your tech as efficiently as possible in every sense: from how productive you can be while using it to how viably it fits into your budget.
We also keep an eye on the trajectory of these tools as we help you plan for the future. If one of your tools starts showing the early signs of enshittification, we jump into action and make a plan before your finances are impacted.
The role of technology in any workplace is to make the work easier for you. If it doesn’t, it is time for a change. We’re here to help you make that change.
Learn more about what we can do by giving us a call at (616) 828-5360.