Ask Lemmy

It's pretty much inevitable under capitalism, because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall

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.

(The meaning of) enshittification is being enshittified

Enshittified used to have a very specific meaning in the lifecycle of a product/service. These days it just means "getting worse". And yes, everything is getting worse all the time.

Yup I have. However, in a weird way I'm becoming more grateful for what I have, and my family/friends. I did realize I had become very dependent on new media and new things, and this is surprisingly making me a bit less materialistic.

Movies are shittier, so why am I spending money on them. New games are shittier, why am I paying day one prices? I can wait a few months for the new graphics card when it's cheaper, or any hardware. It's funny, I'm actually paying less now than I ever have, my budgets are low, and it's all thanks to them being so greedy and demanding.

I don't prescribe to the notion a lot of comments here have that "enshittification" has just one, specific meaning. Something that wasn't shit before but is slowly turning to shit--for any reason--fits the bill.

Whether you planned to rope customers in with the promise of something free or simple only to turn that around once you reach a certain saturation, or you just stop giving a fuck about quality because it's hurting your bottom line, the process of fucking up your product to make more money is still enshittification and it seems there nothing safe from this as long as capitalism rules.

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.

Your local restaurant has probably raised prices slightly but nowhere near as much as their costs have actually gone up.

Many of the big restaurant group-owned places near me have raised prices and enshittified service, but my trusty local places are holding ground.

Over time, cultural institutions (i.e., not just individual stores or game companies, but the shared processes of running such companies) evolve to perpetuate themselves as efficiently as possible. This results in an accumulation of corner-cutting techniques over time that degrades the quality of everything they produce in the process of self-perpetuation.

But “enshittification” is something more specific: as originally defined by Cory Doctorow, it’s when a company convinces its investors to pay for something that attracts users without immediate profit, with the promise of future profit extraction once a large-enough user base is captured; then destroys its user experience to extract this profit; and in the process usually loses its user base before the investors have seen the promised returns.

From my personal experience in American I do feel many aspects are becoming shittier.

Politics

The economy versus pay

Families letting go of simple traditions and culture for bland generalized capitalist consumerism.

Worse and worse flights and other public transportation.

It honestly shocks me that Americans are just okay with being treated this way. Republicans want to call back to an imagined golden era but I think looking at many other countries there should be a call for a golden future.

Yes. But it doesnt have to. Vote with your wallet to see real change.

For sure. Its a race to the bottom. I was only talking about this last night with my other half. I'm a tech nerd & I yearn for the pre internet days when stuff was fun & we weren't getting stiffed at every opportunity by "The Man"

We will be saved because eventually we will find a way to enshit the enshittification process. In our ability to enshittify we trust.

Sure fucking seems that way, doesn't it?

Yes.