Enshittification

The Industrial Revolution transformed feudalism into capitalism. In order to produce the wool demanded by the capitalists’ textile mills, land that had been given over to agricultural commons had to be ‘enclosed’ – fenced off and used for sheep grazing.

Peasants were turned off the land, which was good news for the capitalists, because those landless peasants no longer had any way to feed themselves, meaning that they were willing to provide wage labor for the textile mills.

When ex-peasant labour became too expensive, capitalists invested in new, more automated machines that were ‘so easy, a child could use them’, which was also good news for them, since the mill owners had taken to kidnapping Napoleonic War orphans from London and indenturing them to a decade’s service. These children were used to displace the organised guilds of textile workers who operated the older machines.

Those workers were unable to get help from Parliament, so they formed guerrilla armies and propagated the half-joking myth that they were led by a giant called Ned Ludd (or sometimes King or General Ludd). They called themselves Luddites. Never let anyone tell you that the Luddites were afraid of technology or angry about ‘progress’. That’s a lie propagated by history’s winners, whose great fortunes required oceans of blood from child laborers, murdered protesters, and enslaved Africans in the ‘New World’ who provided the cotton for their machines.

The old good internet was full of intermediaries that tried as hard as they could to be useful and good. When they fell short (or talked themselves into abandoning this approach), they were supplanted by better services.

The old, good internet, in other words, was a place where enshittification had consequences. Competition, regulation, interoperability, and the moral sensibilities of tech workers all combined to keep tech honest, and to punish tech that wasn’t.

That’s what we need from our intermediaries: the discipline that comes from real consequences that arise when they wreck the things we use, rely on, and love.

The old, good internet was a place where people with a large dollop of technical knowledge, or a burning desire to acquire it, could meet with one another, conduct dialogues with one another, inspire and frustrate one another, sell things and buy things from one another, and take action together – without needing permission from a handful of tech giants.

The enshitternet that succeeded the old, good internet was also a place where people could do all those things, but only at the sufferance of unaccountable multinational tech firms that are largely or wholly insulated from any repercussions when they are malevolent, negligent, or just plain wrong. These firms grew steadily worse over time, abetting genocide and siding with fascists.

But the enshitternet had one key advantage over the old, good internet: It was a lot easier to use! That meant that a lot of people joined, and many of those people improved the lives of those geeky early adopters with their presence. Those newcomers’ lives were, in turn, improved by the community and fellowship of their geeky pals.

Lowering the barriers to entry for participation in digital life is an unalloyed good. ‘People who are good at using complicated technology’ are – at best – a subset of ‘people whose ideas, support, companionship, and friendship you would value.’

Interoperability is a way for users of technology to help themselves, either while they wait for a regulator to take action or as a backstop in the event that no regulator wants to champion their causes.

There are a lot of different actors that can get in on the reverse engineering and modification game. Fix-it shops are an inherently local phenomenon because no one wants to send their phone or laptop away for repair – to say nothing of their cars, refrigerators, or solar panels. A neighbourhood fix-it shop is a source of jobs (landfilling a ton of e-waste creates one job, while fixing that e-waste creates two hundred good, local jobs), is good for the environment (diverting e-waste from a landfill isn’t merely about jobs, after all, and lets you and your friends spend less on gadgets and get more value out of the stuff you buy.

Repair is a big part of the interoperability story. So is adaptation. Digital services and gadgets are overwhelmingly designed by young, able-bodied, well-educated people living in one of a small number of large coastal cities. Even when these designers try hard to imagine all the situations their users will find themselves in and try to accommodate them, they will necessarily fall short.