“No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet UnionPluralistic: Who Broke the Internet? Part II
“Who Broke the Internet? Part II (permalink) “Understood: Who Broke the Internet?” is my new podcast for CBC about the enshittogenic policy decisions that gave rise to enshittification. Episode two just dropped: “ctrl-ctrl-ctrl“: The thesis of the show is straightforward: the internet wasn’t killed by ideological failings like “greed,” nor by economic concepts like “network effects,” nor by some cyclic force of history that drives towards “re-intermediation.” Rather, all of these things were able to conquer the open, wild, creative internet because of policies that meant that companies that yielded to greed were able to harness network effects in order to re-intermediate the internet. My enshittification work starts with the symptomsof enshittification, the procession of pathological changes we can observe as platform users and sellers. Stage one: platforms are good to their end users while locking them in. Stage two: platforms worsen things for those captive users in order to tempt in business customers – who they alsolock in. Stage three: platforms squeeze those locked-in business customers (publishers, advertisers, performers, workers, drivers, etc), and leave behind only the smallest atoms of value that are needed to keep users and customers stuck to the system. All the value except for this mingy residue is funneled to shareholders and executives, and the system becomes a pile of shit.
- This pattern is immediately recognizable as the one we’ve all experienced and continue to experience, from eBay taking away your right to sue when you’re ripped off
- Or Duolingo replacing human language instructors with AI, even though by definition language learners are not capable of identifying and correcting errors in AI-generated language instruction (if you knew more about a language than the AI, you wouldn’t need Duolingo)
- I could cite examples all day long, from companies as central as Amazon
- To smarthome niche products like Sonos
- To professional tools like Photoshop
- To medical implants like artificial eyes
- To the entire nursing profession
- To the cars on our streets
- And the gig workers who drive them
- There is clearly an epidemic – a pandemic – of enshittification, and cataloging the symptoms is important to tracking the spread of the disease. But if we’re going to do something to stem the tide, we need to identify the contagion. What caused enshittification to take root, what allows it to spread, and who was patient zero? That’s where “Understood: Who Broke the Internet?” comes in: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor…
