Enshittification

Context: OnCapitalism, OnPlatforms, ShareCropping, PlatformCapitalism

CoryDoctorow's term for Capitalism's inescapable trajectory towards eating its own young and destroying society.

But it's particularly a theory of how platforms degenerate into trying abuse and exploit their users.

Remember when we said the internet would disintermediate everything?

It did.

And then it reintermediated everything.

Platforms are just intermediaries

Here is how a platform dies:

First, it is good to its users, then, it abuses its users to make things better for its business customers; finally, it abuses those business customers to claw back all the value for itself. Then, it dies.

We are living through mass, end-stage platform decay, the Great Enshittening.

(from https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604)

This whole essay is so good and so full of beautiful lines, I could quote the whole thing in GreatRhetoric

Another quote from a Wired article :

This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

...

TikTok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

Sad but interesting story of Ello, a YASNS for artists that failed in all its ideals because it took VentureCapital : https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

Compare TribeNet, YasnsBusinessModels

See also :

• AttentionEconomy