Not just websites and online services but games, stores, restaurants, etc are they? Have you noticed significant quality reduction with nearly matching price increases?
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The term that Doctrow coined, “enshittification”, doesn’t mean “something I don’t like”. It’s not a synonym for “bad”. It specifically referred to online service companies transitioning from a growth phase to a monetization phase.
Many of these companies have relatively high fixed costs, like paying engineers, and relatively low variable costs, like server time. It doesn’t matter how many customers using your online service there are – you still have to pay the engineers to go write the software behind the thing. But each additional customer likely uses only a tiny amount of server resources. The result is that it’s really, really bad for one of these companies to have a small customer count. They want to grow as quickly as possible, to get out of the period where they don’t have many customers. So the norm is for them to offer as favorable terms as possible, accept losing money, to try to grow their customer base as quickly as possible. When they get it to be fairly large, then they worry about being profitable; that’ll normally be doing something that makes them less-desirable to users than they had been, since they’re less-worried about attracting users at that point. That transition, when they become less-desirable, is what Doctrow was talking about.
So, for example, when interest rates went up a while back and capital became more expensive for many companies at the same time, losing money for extended periods of time became a problem, and many had to shift to a monetization phase at about the same time.
But the term doesn’t refer to just anything being undesirable.
Most companies don’t do the kind of degree of growth-phase-to-monetization-phase shift that online companies do, because they don’t have as much weight on fixed costs. There are some economies of scale to restaurants – McDonalds can more-easily afford to do R&D relative to a mom-and-pop – but a lot of their costs are tied to the amount of product they’re selling. Ingredients, labor of people at the restaurant, buildings.
I agree that this term was meant for online businesses but we can see the same concept happening with brands as well.
You build your image around a good product/service (ex. Fast food being cheap, tasty, and a source of calories) but then once your brand is an established go-to (i.e. McDonald’s, Oreo, Apple, whatever) you do the work to make that product cheaper to produce, even if it means a marginal decrease in quality, and prop it up behind the facade of the brand.
What we are reaching now is the point where companies are trying to toe that line of not losing customers but still making sales. But customers are starting to see that drop in quality, and with their purchasing power being squeezed, they’re taking notice. So we have a couple words for it that are becoming more popular. Shrinkflation is an example, but overall I think it still ties back to the concept of what enshittification meant. Build a brand, get the customers, cut your expenses, hope most of them don’t notice.
There are a lot of people saying “but enshittification means websites” but the fact is, it describes a business model that a lot of companies are following that ends up in a shitty product. It may not be what the word exactly meant but unless someone gets another term that fits popularized, it still fits and it’s not inaccurate to use.
It’s usually more specifically user hostile monetization based on their dominant market position from taking losses for so long that their competitors couldn’t compete.
So I think the term “enshittification” has been latched onto and goatse’d by the community at large to the point people are now using it to mean “things getting worse because business.”
I am pretty sure everything is getting worse because business.
That’s exactly what enshittification means. That’s the name we’ll call this stage of capitalism.
It’s not really. Sure, the end result is “things getting worse because of business”, but enshittification specifically refers to the practice of hoarding users with a quality product, to then extract maximum profit from them while shedding any semblance of quality.
The meanings of words changes over time
Yes.
Enshittification, as Doctorow defined it, is really just a particular version of a much broader dynamic, and it happens, and is happening, to nearly everything on which a profit can be made. And if you expand the definition even more, it actually happens and is happening to nearly everything by which one is rewarded for providing value to others.
Broadly, what happens is that self-serving scumbags gravitate to and come to hold positions of authority in organizations, then arrange things to maximize benefit to themselves. They do that in two general ways - by shaping the organization so that self-serving scumbags like them can prosper, and by chipping away at everything of value that’s offered by the organization while running up prices as much as possible, in order to maximize the benefit to themselves.
Just as it happens, as Doctorow noted, with social media, they depend on market dominance, name recognition, political patronage, regulatory capture and the like to ensure that they can retain their market share even as they offer consistently less value for more money, so they can pocket more themselves. And since the organization is shaped to allow them to get away with that (they deliberately move away from likely earlier held virtues like focusing on quality, value, integrity, and the like - the things for which the organization was rewarded back when they were starting out), steadily more and more self-serving scumbags come to hold positions of authority, and the broad dynamic gets ever more entrenched.
It happens with all consumer goods and services sooner or later, from television to cars to breakfast cereal.
Notably, it also happens wth organizations like charities, advocacy groups and unions - as they become more influential, they can and do shift from providing a service for which they’re rewarded to rewarding themselves ever more by providing ever less actual value.
And though Lemmy won’t like this, it’s not unique to capitalism, since it happens with any hierarchical system from which value is expected and can be derived. In fact, it’s the heart of the reason that state communism so consistently fails - because state communism provides a particularly easy method by which self-serving scumbags can maximize the benefit to themselves by offering as little benefit as possible to those they’re meant to serve and relying on market dominance to ensure that they continue to hold their positions in spite of their general failure to provide anything of value to anyone else.
Broadly, yes - it’s happening to pretty much everything, and has been happening to pretty much everything to which it could happen for all of history, and will continue to. The only way I can see to avoid it is to somehow eliminate self-serving scumbags entirely, so that all that’s left are people who have the necessary integrity to hold to a virtue of providing value to others and only rewarding themselves as they genuinely deserve, and I don’t see that happening any time soon, if ever.
This should be a manifesto. Well written!
It’salways the self serving parasites without empathy that destroys everything.
Are they good for anything at all? Do they push innovation or productivity? Like would a company without these people be crushed by companies with such people (not counting on them using dirty tricks) like Marx iron law (IIRC)?
I’d love to read more about this, but all I can find is always always tainted either by some status quo idea or basing everything on capitalism or dream thinking like communism or anarchism which just doesn’t work because of these kind if people.
Can we detect non-empatic people and not allow them to manage people? Would that be a good first step?
Are they good for anything at all?
No.
They’re a part of the system, so it seems like they need to be a part of the system, but actually it’s that the system has been warped to accommodate them.
Do they push innovation or productivity?
They specifically push it, but if and only if there’s an angle by which they can parasitize off of it. They don’t originate anything. Ever.
Like would a company without these people be crushed by companies with such people…?
Probably.
I figured out long ago that that’s the case on a personal level. The specific way it works:
People competing for a position in a hierarchy have to make decisions that will impact their chances.
People with integrity, morals, ethics, empathy, principles, etc. will have some number of potential options that they simply will not choose. People with none of those things are not so constrained - they’re able to do absolutely whatever it takes to get what they want, entirely regardless of any other condiderations. So all other things being more or less equal, amoral, unprincipled, dishonest, sociopathic pieces of shit actuyallt have a competitive advantage in hierarchies.
I hadn’t before considered whether that’s the case between businesses, but I would assume so.
I’d love to read more about this, but all I can find is always always tainted either by some status quo idea or basing everything on capitalism or dream thinking like communism or anarchism which just doesn’t work because of these kind if people.
I’m actually an anarchist in large part because of all of this, but my anarchism is very much an ideal. There’s absolutely no way that current humanity could manage it on any sort of scale, so when I advocate for it, I’m really just trying to promote the mindset that will make it possible sometime in the future.
I actually think that anarchism will not only one day be possible, but, if humanity survives, it will be inevitable. It’s vessentiallybthe adulthood of society - the point at which collectively - not just situationally and individually - we’ll be able to live without mommy and daddy state making sure we behave.
Can we detect non-empatic people and not allow them to manage people? Would that be a good first step?
I’ve actually said before that if I could leave a message for the people who will end up trying to rebuild civilization out of the rubble we leave behind, it would be, “Whatever you do, don’t let psychopaths gain power.”
I think there’s no single thing that anyone could do to improve literally everything that would be more effective than to somehow implement an international effort to identify and isolate sociopaths and psychopaths - that they do more harm to the planet and its people than anything else, and by a considerable margin.
But I don’t see any way it could happen, if for no other reason than that the psychopaths and sociopaths in the relevant positions would prevent it.
Which is exactly why I thought of leaving a message for our heirs, in the hope that they’ll do a better job of it from the start. Which I think is the only real chance humanity has.
I’m not criticising anything, you’re the person I’d love have a coffee with and discuss.
I guess socialism, communism or anarchism are all something society would tend to if there weren’t all those people living off of the abuse of others.
I’m an absurdist myself (so I do good as I can), I hope the world won’t come to a stupid end and that we can figure out billions of $ is not what a good life needs, and incidentally cure aging so that we can be there for the ride a bit longer!
Cheers
