The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
The problem here is - in my opinion - caused by:
- the need to chase unlimited growth (by definition impossible)
- lacking regulations
- monopolies and such
- price fixing
- weak worker rights
The right always chasing “deregulation”? Well, here is the result. High profits, high prices, shitty products and services.
And the people suffer.
Also the mental disease which is known as “wanting to be a billionaire”. Everything in the world is structured around making that status the ultimate goal. It is like endorsing sociopathy.
A few days ago I tried to find the best frame of the video to turn into a meme. This is what I came up with.
For me it’s a tale about loss of ownership in a dematerialised world. No one is going to cut a piece of my dining table because I own it and physically have it entirely at my side.
I’ll never own (my locally installed) Spotify nor the songs I listen to. Though for the later I have vinyl alternatives which no one is touching.
If you want a specific variety of a plant that’s patented by, say, Monsanto, you don’t own the seeds you get but rather their permission to plant them.
If you re-plant seeds in your own field produced by the crops of the previous year on that same field they can sue you and they will win (see Bowman v. Monsanto Co.)
Not sure I agree with the statement that we wouldnt accept enshittification in our analog lives… ovens and refrigerators with screens and becoming unrepairable, cars are only sold with onboard computers and power windows with no other price point, materials for most household items becoming plastic / single use / or deliberately designed with a failure lifetime. I recently started buying clothing with no synthetics and they are unfathomably better performing in terms of breathing, odor, comfort and warmth. We’ve forgotten what physical products used to be like, in 20 years we will have similarly forgotten what un-enshittified internet / tech was like.
I think, and perhaps it’s scarier than anyone wants to admit, we’ve already gotten accustomed to or given up fighting against enshittification of the analog world.
The common thread is capital and financialization, and there can be never be progress until the ideas in “how to win friends and influence people” are called out as demonic and unhuman.
Why is the thumbnail Zach Galifianakis?
As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue. It is a race to the bottom.
How do you fix that without massive upheaval for the people you are trying to help. I don’t know.
Companies used to have a smaller reach, meaning less total and potential customers. So they had to balance what what was good for the shareholders qith what was good for the customers or risk losing both. But products are often global now, especially digital ones. There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose. And investors don’t care as much about the long term since they can trade stocks so quickly. Maybe the solution is required holding periods for stocks or something. Higher short term capital gains taxes, and better incentives for long term gains.
