Will the internet get better, or worse? Or both?
It's not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They're all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck.
This is infuriating. It's frustrating. And, depending on how important those services are to you, it's terrifying. I've been an internet activist for a quarter of a century, working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital human rights group that more or less invented the whole idea of digital human rights. I've been a United Nations observer and helped draft internet treaties; I've lobbied legislatures and agencies in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom. I've been through street protests and virtual blackouts.
I've never seen anything like this.
In 2022, after decades of striving to get people fired up about the esoteric world of internet policy, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: en-shittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. It's a funny, naughty word, and it's funny and naughty to say, and I'm proud of that. But that's not why the American Dialect Society named it its word of the year in 2023, nor why Australia's Macquarie Dictionary named it its word of the year for 2024, nor why millions of people have used it to describe the inescapable online dumpster fire that's roasting them alive.
The reason for enshittification's popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and what we should do about it.
Because enshittification isn't just a way to say "Something got worse."* It's an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that's causing everything to get worse, all at once.
You see, this moment were living through, this Great En-shittening? It's not a mystery. It's not the Great Forces of History bearing down on our moment, decreeing that we must all suffer through the end of services that once met our needs. It's a material phenomenon, much like a disease.
Like a disease, it has symptoms, a mechanism, and an epidemiology. The first part of this book will explain these components of enshittification.
But the point of this analysis isn't to merely give you a more technically informed way to feel demoralized and furious about the state of the digital world-I wrote this book to propose a cure. That's the second part of the book.
This era, the Enshittocene, is the result of specific policy decisions, made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us.
We can make a new, good internet, one that's fit for human thriving. We can create the digital nervous system we need to connect and coordinate us through a twenty-first century haunted by climate collapse, genocide, authoritarianism, and economic chaos. We can create enshittification-resistant infrastructure for a new, good world.
_________* Though it's fine with me if you want to use it that way! One of the glories of English is its malleability. English words mean whatever English speakers say they mean. Go nuts. You have my blessing.
There’s an old business maxim dating to the California gold rush: it’s easier to make money selling picks and shovels to aspiring miners than to strike it rich finding gold. Artificial intelligence is in a picks-and-shovels phase right now. If gold, in this metaphor, is artificial general intelligence—a machine smarter than a human—or some version of a digital god, then tech companies are snapping up the tools to create one, including graphics-processing units, data centers, and trained A.I. models. That scramble is why Mark Zuckerberg is paying a twenty-four-year-old A.I. researcher two hundred and fifty million dollars to work at Meta, and why Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, recently said that the company would spend “trillions of dollars” building infrastructure. It’s why Google spent nearly two and a half billion dollars to hire some of the leaders and research staff of Windsurf, an A.I. coding tool, and to license its technology. Insiders have described San Francisco as being in a new state of A.I.-gold-rush fervor, but the true gold has yet to be found; all of the major generative artificial-intelligence businesses are unprofitable. The race is on to find something, anything, that works …
In some ways, the A.I. bubble is not unlike that of the dot-com era, but, as a recent piece in Forbes put it, this time “the numbers seem to be 10 times bigger, and the burn is faster.” ChatGPT and its ilk have hundreds of millions of users, and the A.I. industry is already meaningfully affecting the U.S. economy. In the second quarter of this year, G.D.P. grew by three per cent; A.I. capital expenditures may have accounted for nearly half of that, and spending on the construction of data centers is on track to outpace that of building offices. Some kind of market correction is inevitable, as even A.I.’s boosters have acknowledged, and the current round of consolidation could be a sign of contraction. One or two of the crop of A.I. startups will become the new Apple or Google; the rest will likely disappear without a trace. “We’re about to enter a winter of companies shutting down,” Miller said. Regarding the A.I.-browser market, of which Dia is a part, he added, “The winner is going to be decided in the next twelve months.” …
Surveying the current A.I. landscape inspires a strange sort of whiplash. Some professions have already been disrupted by the technology. Coding, in particular, has become more automated. We everyday users are playing with ChatGPT and being bombarded by marketing messages from companies that advertise revolutionary functions but rarely deliver, as with Apple’s 2024 début of the iPhone 16, which was meant to deploy A.I. across the device but has been widely deemed a failure. Meanwhile, more picks and shovels are being sold all the time … [New Yorker]
Interesting.
I came into digital computing in the mid-1980s, prior to the WWW. My online world was dial-up, first via Compuserve (1200 baud), and then AOL (2400 baud). Mine was a MSDOS 2.0. 2.1 PC space. Within a few years I morphed into a "'Mac Snob" and pretty much never looked back. I will continue to follow current-day web tech development closely, notwithstanding now being a retired old coot nearing the age of 80. Among other things, I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT 5 lately, “Carbon based LLM” that I am.
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