Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

We do need a word for reduction in quality for the purpose of increasing profits. For liquids and foodstuffs, the terms are "denatured" or "adulterated", and for solid materials "ersatz". None of those are applicable to services.

"Enshittification" captures the concept of reducing quality to increase profits not by reducing product cost, but by degrading the user experience to make the product more profitable. It's not the same as "quality fade", where the product keeps getting worse and the seller hopes no one will notice for a while.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification

I don't like the word enshittification. People glom onto it because they like shaking sticks more than solving problems, and Corey Doctorow is excellent at exploiting that desire. It's annoying how he enables that sense of defeatism when he's obviously aware of resilient and game-changing alternative software (like FOSS) that has revolutionized the world in his lifetime. Putting pearls before swine makes for nice fiction, but it's a bad tool for explaining real life phenomena like this.

"Enshittification" is a very fun and usable thesis. It also obfuscates the problem and fetishizes it's own victimhood instead of enabling users to resist lock-in.