The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
It’s tough, the companies can’t change unless the people do. Meaning customers refusing to do business with companies that have bad customer service or refusing to buy stocks in such companies. But there will always be people who see that they can make money off of other people doing that. And it doesn’t work if some people get rich bucking the trend.
Companies very well can change. Nothing forces them to enshittify their customer service for what amounts to virtual pennies per user. It’s entirely a case of narrative capture among business people, the conventional wisdom that they have to do this stupid thing. That’s it.
Unfortunately, that just isn’t true. The board of directors have a legal fiduciary responsibility to the share holders. And they hire or fire the ceo. If they don’t chase that virtual pennies, the shareholder can, and do sue them.
And as I said, if they don’t do things that at least make it appear they are attempting to increase profits, shareholder will sell, and they will go out of business.
It’s a race to the bottom. And the system is to blame. The system has rewarded people who enshitify products, and thus it has shapped who gets hired to make those decisions.
It’s because those shareholders are captive to that same narrative. These practices do carry a real cost, but executives have made themselves blind to it. There are people who’s job it is to judge the value of customer satisfaction and loyalty and to measure it against the cost of providing good service, and they think the former is less valuable than the latter. My premise is these people are not doing their job well.
This view of the purpose of a company, to ruthlessly extract every cent of value from a company or else face the wrath of shareholders, it’s a fairly recent view. Shareholders selling doesn’t cause a company to go out of business, failing at that business does. Stock price falling is a different issue, it matters because company success has come to mean the success of its shares more than the amount of customer goodwill. But that matters.
I sense though that we really aren’t on different sides. I wouldn’t say you’re absolutely wrong, nor that I’m absolutely right. We both have profound dissatisfaction with this world that all these rapacious companies have build around us. The next generation of business people, if we’re privileged to even have one, will have to figure out some things for themselves all over again.