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.
Artificial scarcity is its own driver of revenue. At that point, you’re not competing for space on the screen, you’re competing for number of people who see your content. “Do you want 5000 views or 50,000? Do you want them to see this once? Ten times in a month? Daily? That’ll cost you extra.”
The value of an ad has diminishing returns. One billboard on the side of the road attracts your eye. Ten in a big messy cluster get ignored.
Facebook could have leveraged this to command higher rates for their ad content, rather than trying to engage on sheer volume. Now the website is down the same rabbit hole as Yahoo.
The Founders trade out shares to partners who then occupy the board. Normally, one of the Founders is the original CEO, because they have a controlling stack in the firm. New board members are introduced by the founders and often have a personal relationship with them. And with stock swaps, the CEO of one company can sit on the board of another. Michael Dell sits on Broadcomm’s board for this very reason.
Tesla’s board is a classic example of this incestuous back-scratching. Robyn Denholm moved from CFO of Juniper Networks - a major supplier for Tesla - to the audit committee chair of Tesla (and yehaw, what a job that must have been, given their shady business practices). She also is an operating partner at Blackbird Ventures, a venture capital firm which is a major investor in xAI, another of Musk’s pet startups.
Once you climb to the top of these hierarchies (or you start getting into seriously investing in any of them) you start noticing these circular networks of leadership and trade. The Oracle / OpenAI / Nvidia circuit is another great example.
The very real and explicit and demonstrated belief among these tech billionaires is that they can automate away the need for humans - both as labor and as clients. They’re building (or, at least, trying to build) a financial closed loop.
I agree with you about the circular networks of leadership on boards. But they do still have to answer to the hedge funds and such that have large stakes in the company, and can tank the stock price by selling suddenly. And they also have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, who can and do sue. But my point was that the boards chose CEOs that favor the short term. And because of that, more people who want to be ceos try to follow that pattern.
As for the replacing humans. I just don’t think they care about that as much as making money. Myevidence is that they aren’t idiots. They know AI as it is today isn’t going to replace humans. But saying it will boosts thier stock price.
:-/