"Flourishing is the opposite of enshittification." Generated using Microsoft Image Creator and Adobe Photoshop. | | | | | "Enshittification" is having a moment, and the widespread popularity of author and activist Cory Doctorow's term—which illustrates the ignominious ways that platforms deteriorate by prioritizing their profits at the expense of their customers and users—speaks volumes about the current wave of discontent with Big Tech. Next week, I'll be sitting down with Doctorow for a special O'Reilly event on enshittification and the future of AI , so we've decided to dedicate this issue to the topic. I hope to see you there! | | | | | Naming the problem and proposing a solution We've touched on enshittification before in Next Economy. But if you're looking for an in-depth primer, there's none better than Doctorow's own in the Financial Times—"'Enshittification' Is Coming for Absolutely Everything"—which takes Facebook as its case study. According to Doctorow, here's how the enshittification process unfolds: First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. So why has enshittification become so common? Doctorow stresses that businesses didn't become bad actors out of the blue. However, in the "pre-enshittification era," the "worst impulses" of companies and their leaders "were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power." If we're to solve the problem of enshittification, Doctorow argues, we'll need to "restore and strengthen" each of these constraints—and he's optimistic that we can, because it's an issue that affects us all: If everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification. Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive. It's unstoppable. At O'Reilly, we believe that disenshittification is good for the companies themselves as well, even if they aren't able to see that clearly yet. Because there's a final stage of the process: enshittified companies eventually lose out to companies that continue to equitably share the value that they cocreate with their users and their partner ecosystem. + Doctorow has been assiduously tracking enshittification on his blog, Pluralistic, covering everything from car companies selling telemetry data to walled-garden ecosystems to switching costs on social media platforms to the deterioration of the aviation and insurance industries and much more. + Doctorow gave this year's transmediale McLuhan Lecture, followed by a conversation with Frederike Kaltheuner and Helen Starr. You can watch it here. + And you can listen to him in conversation with Jesse Thorn on NPR's Bullseye. + In "Welcome to the Golden Age of User Hostility," The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel argues that "Doctorow's enshittification may transcend its original, digital meaning. Like doomscrolling, it gives language to an epochal ethos." | | | | | Enshittification isn't inevitable If you're a longtime reader, you know that Doctorow's theory of enshittification complements the work I and my colleagues have been doing for UCL IIPP's Algorithmic Attention Rents project. A major difference in our approach is that we use the language of economics to explain why enshittification happens, which helps to identify ways to combat it. Enshittification is not inevitable. A deeper understanding of how a company's flourishing is intertwined with the flourishing of its users and its ecosystem can help executives to make better choices. I love the value successful companies help to create, and I want them to keep driving the virtuous circle of their initial success. In my latest working paper for the Algorithmic Attention Rents project, I distinguish between "'rising tide rents' that benefit society as a whole. . .and 'robber baron rents' that disproportionately benefit those with power." (We shared the paper a few weeks ago; if you missed it, here's a shorter, more accessible version on O'Reilly.) I describe how in the "rising tide" period, companies work both to delight users and to build value for an ecosystem of suppliers (whether websites, app developers, creators, or ecommerce suppliers)—it's a period of mutual flourishing. It is only when growth slows that they are tempted to turn to extractive rents (i.e., enshittification). | | | | | How do we avoid the race to the bottom? As I mentioned above, Cory Doctorow will be joining me on the O'Reilly learning platform next Tuesday, May 14, at 9am PT / 12pm ET for a discussion on how enshittification might come to AI—and what that portends for the future of the industry. If you're an O'Reilly member, you can register here. If you're not a member, sign up for a free 10‑day trial (no credit card required) to save your seat and check out all the other great resources we offer on O'Reilly. Right now, AI is in the rising tide stage. Helping to define for AI what Jeff Bezos once described as the "flywheel" of success can help set the aspirations of the industry's new leaders. The stakes are already high—as I wrote in "AI Has an Uber Problem," the immense amounts of deployed capital and the race for monopoly may lead to rapid enshittification. | | | | | Fighting against the tide New reporting from Ed Zitron reveals the role that executives and their values play in making the choices that lead to or away from enshittification. In a recent issue of his newsletter, Where's Your Ed At?, Zitron combs through emails made public as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google to tell "the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it." You should read the article in full, but here are the basics: Zitron recounts the struggle between Ben Gomes, a longtime Google veteran and head of search at the time, and Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google's head of ads, over demands to grow search revenue. Gomes's loyalty was to the product and its users: in emails shared by Zitron, he argued in favor of building "compelling user experiences that make users want to come back" rather than implementing ill-considered short-term solutions. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. Google released a redesign that incorporated ads more fully into search results, Raghavan became head of search, and Gomes was given a new role elsewhere in the company. A product that much of the world depends on was made less useful in order to avoid a decline in its growth rate. This is a triumph of short-term thinking that will not end well for the company. As I noted in Rising Tide Rents and Robber Baron Rents, When the platform displaces organic results with paid results, . . .the ecosystem suffers a loss of incentive and reward for continuing to produce value. Eventually, this loss of value affects both users and the platform itself, and the whole virtuous circle of creation, aggregation, and curation breaks down. + You can read Google's response to Zitron's article here. And here's Zitron's rebuttal. + SEO spam is another sign of search's decay. 404 Media reports "Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find." And here's an independent company's perspective: "HouseFresh has virtually disappeared from Google Search results. Now what?" | | | | | A new start to the old web In his writings, Doctorow underscores how harmful enshittification has been for the web, transforming it from a space of connection to a "global, digital ghost mall" full of garbage. But he too believes we can reverse the damage done. And as Molly White reminds us in "We Can Have a Different Web," it may not be as burdensome as it seems: Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses. Here's one way forward: Technologists Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon contend that we should employ ecology as a framework to "rewild the internet"—increasing service choices, creating sustainable funding models, and creating "an abundance of ways to connect and relate to each other." Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It's a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built. + More from Doctorow: "The Disenshittified Internet Starts with Loyal 'User Agents'." + From The Atlantic: "It's the End of the Web as We Know It." + From 404 Media: "Facebook Is the ‘Zombie Internet’." + In his Disconnect newsletter, Paris Marx argues that we should "embrace the splinternet." | | | | | | —Tim O’Reilly and Peyton Joyce | | | |
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