Enshittification everywhere - a rant

Things, appliances, companies, services, climate, people and AIs, hell, even presidents. Everything seems to become worse. Or does it? Let's dive a bit into enshittification and if things really get worse. Beware, though; it's still a highly opinionated rant piece!

TLDR: Nope, not everything gets worse. In fact, many things got better in the past, overall. But, and this is real, enshittification is a thing. And it hurts a lot of people. And, you guessed it, for American presidents it's definitely true, anyway.

Enshittification ftw

Ok, which one is it here, for ftw? I think we could go for both, 'for the win' is as appropriate as 'fuck the world' in that case. Some definitely do win. Many don't. So, depending on your view, it might be all of 'fuck the world'.

Enshittification in daily life

As a human being with a life, I experience enshittification almost everywhere. Many online shops and services went for optimizing for money instead of customer value. You get a lot of annoying advertisements, bad or no customer service at all. I mean, have you tried getting an issue resolved with Google? Products sold on Amazon are getting worse in quality, prices often are, let's say, 'dynamic'...

Banks and other traditional brick and mortar shops kind of do not want any more customers, anyway, if there's a 'store' left, at all.

When I was young (guess I'm that old now, oh my...), there was a rule of thumb: If it's expensive, it's probably quite good with high durability. Today you can get expensive junk everywhere.

Have I mentioned the cost of living? Renting or buying a house, even outside big cities, more and more seems to be aimed at millionaires. Basic stuff like food, water, electricity/energy used to be relatively cheap in the past. Not anymore. Overall food quality might have gotten better, at least here. But service did not, and there still is a lot of junk. I must admit, that's not directly enshittification, but a huge part of it came due to stupid dictators playing war and therefore driving prices aka inflation. While in total, there do not seem to be more wars, the impact on not directly involved countries got worse.

Job market, anyone? Ghosting candidates, ghosting recruiters or companies. Recruiters, that are just scraping for data, to name a few.

And then, there's AI. Everybody and their mom now offer some AI-related services (or at least claim to) or at least use it.

Here's the catch: AI can be fine, AI can even help with (automating) a lot of things.

But right now, it mainly seems to be an accelerant. For airheads getting their junk out. Lies spreading even faster on already enshittificated (sorry, I made that word up!) social networks (ads and tracking everywhere). Presenting lies way more credibly than ever before. Which leads to spreading even more hate and splitting society. For some kinds of entrepreneurs creating pressure on their employees by threatening with AI replacements. For some lightheaded people seeing the solution for everything there (like they did with crypto, before).

I'd call that enshittification, too.

Enshittification in Software Development

As a Software Engineer it's everywhere, too. Software gone bad because we didn't (or weren't allowed) to take the time needed to make it right. Google's services, once a name for good quality software, changing constantly, getting tied up with ads and tracking. Search results are becoming worse, and AI summaries are often just obviously wrong. Management taking decisions where seemingly nobody involved talked to each other.

Not to speak of Microsoft, especially Windows. To me, it was always one of the worst companies around. And they managed to get even worse by now. I call myself lucky to only be tangentially involved in that ecosystem. And it's still too much!

Then, there's the daily work. Solving problems and pouring those solutions into high-quality code. Mixing logic with creativity. That's the fun part of creating software. Which often involves a lot of talking to other people. Which can be fun, too. At least with the right people...

What makes it exhausting is all the surrounding bookkeeping. Maintaining documentation, nobody's going to read (because either they don't find it, they don't care or, well, it's out of date). Explaining your work to managers. Endless meetings about a simple feature. Discussing features that are not necessarily needed and would increase complexity by a lot, but somebody wants it now. Navigating through politics that do not provide any value but drain people's energy. Changing priorities like overnight.

And guess what part of those topics AI is aiming to solve? You're right, the fun part! Making things worse, now people vibe code the sh** out of their brains ending with unmaintainable code, if it works at all, now claiming that everything is easy and can be done in a few minutes. I'd call that enshittification, too.

What's the reason for enshittification?

Imho, in short, it's money. Companies went from solving a customer issue (or many) and giving value to making money. Don't get me wrong, I get that. And I think it's ok to make money. At least, if you're providing some value for what you sell.

So, if I lose every bit of privacy or pay a lot of money for something that will break in a few weeks, that's not providing value.

Making products more expensive while reducing the overall quality, that's not providing value.

If I can't get a problem solved or my app breaks every few days because someone decided to change the service without proper versioning, that's not providing value.

You search for information, and half you get is some AI-generated nonsense sounding legit, but half-true at best... That's not providing value. Having to sip through chunks of data and validating every bit on whether it could be true or not can be quite stressful. Not only does it make experiences worse, it also drains a lot of time and energy.

At last, there's politics. Many people keep bloating themselves and what they work for, and some (still too many) somehow do whatever it takes to stay atop of others. No matter the costs, socially and financially.

Letting people or the ecosystem suffer to create cheap products might even provide some product value. But it's morally wrong and contributes to the overall enshittification of the planet.

My take on a solution?

Don't be a Microsoft or $INSERT_NAME_HERE (that's a placeholder for you, I haven't forgotten to replace that!)! Be decent, take care of your family, friends and customers, provide value and strive to make things better and last but not least, fix things. Also, keep things fixable. Don't do things only for money.

And yes, I'm fully aware that I'm writing this in a warm home, in a pretty based country with high standards and overall good quality of life.

So, why am I writing this? I guess I'm fed with all that nonsense and slow degradation of standards, products and morality. We, as a society or even humanity, can do better and we should!

Guess what, I'm not the only one, Cory Doctorow even wrote a book about it.

And even some more.

Attribution

Main image source: https://imgflip.com/i/abslj7