Pat PilcherWe’ve all been the victim of it, and many of us feel entrapped by it. PAT PILCHER names and shames some of the culprits of enshitification who make our lives worse rather than better.
I got into home computing back in the heyday of 8-bit machines. It was an exciting and heady time where anything seemed possible as innovation after innovation rolled out to the glee of excited geeks.
Now we have computers that can understand our speech, create photorealistic images and videos, and use AI, which until recently was the stuff of science fiction.
I should be super excited, right? But instead, I find myself becoming increasingly pissed off with big tech as they embrace enshitification.
According to Microsoft’s co-pilot AI (the irony is delicious), “Enshitification” is a slang term often used to describe how something, particularly a system or service, deteriorates in quality over time. This term is not officially recognised in most dictionaries. Still, it is widely used in informal contexts to express frustration or disappointment with the decline of something that was once good or useful.
There are so many examples of this when it comes to technology. The other day, I booted up my PC and fired up Outlook to check my email. Outlook had been updated and switched to the “new” Outlook. After a frustrating 5 minutes of searching and fuming, I realised the send/receive button was no longer a permanent fixture on the toolbar. It was hidden away in the view menu. I would have thought the whole point of an email app was to send and receive emails. Making matters worse, all incoming emails were headed up with an incredibly annoying AI summary option. After missing several important pieces of information from colleagues and friends, thanks to this brain-dead AI summary option, I switched to the “old” Outlook. Frustratingly, the next time I fired up Outlook, I got the new Outlook again.
The folks at Redmond have taken an email programme I’ve used for years and made it horrible. Given the sheer amount of usability testing that Microsoft puts its products through, you’ve got to wonder if their testers were smoking weed on the day they put the new Outlook through its paces.
Then there’s music. Back then, I’d buy a CD for $24 and play it as often as I liked. I could copy it onto cassette for use in my Walkman, too. The total cost was just the purchase price of the CD, and I had that music for as long as the CD lasted. Forty years later, if I want to listen to music, the most affordable option is $9 a month for Spotify to stream audio (which uses broadband or mobile data at an additional cost). Adding insult to injury, Spotify’s audio is markedly inferior to what I’d get from a CD and I’ve paid significantly more than the one-off $24 CD purchase price CD over the course of a year.
Subscription-based services warrant a special place in Enshitification Hell. Want Microsoft Office? You used to be able to buy a CD-ROM (or a large pile of floppy disks) in a box. It was a one-off cost. Now you’re handing over cash to Microsoft every month or MS-Office stops being usable. Movies? They used to require a trip down to the video store where you’d debate the merits of various movies with your friend/partner until you both settled on a title to rent for the night. Now you’re handing Netflix a pile of cash every month for the same deal, even if you don’t use the service. The subscription business model is vastly more profitable than one-off purchases and has the added benefit of locking the customer into that product/service. No wonder most corporates love this business model.
While shareholders and tech corporates might be rubbing their hands together with glee, the reality for Joe and Joanne Average is that they’re struggling under the groaning weight of subscriptions for products and services that used to be significantly cheaper as a one-off purchase. According to the latest Household Expenditure data from the Department of Statistics, the average annual household expenditure in New Zealand for subscriptions was a whopping $1598 for the year ending June 2023. This includes the internet, cell phone plans, recreation and culture (streaming services and other entertainment).
You’d think that paying repeatedly for something that is often a one-off cost would result in a better offering, but that’s so often not the case.
The list of products and services transformed/enshitified by the relentless push for profit is endless. Facebook was originally a platform for connecting with friends and family. Over time, it became more focused on monetising user data and a platform for increasingly annoying online adverts. Then there’s Amazon. It started out as a user-friendly online marketplace. Before long, they began prioritising their products over third-party sellers, and the once friendly marketplace became cluttered with adverts and sponsored products. Search results now display Amazon products first and foremost, requiring users to waste an eternity scrolling through often irrelevant search results. It isn’t just online services. Many Smart TVs have also fallen victim to enshitification. Early smart TVs focused on providing a seamless viewing experience between free-to-air and online content. Over time, they’ve become more invasive, tracking user data and even pushing ads, enshitificating the user’s experience.
So, what can you do to be free of enshitification? I downloaded and installed a free copy of Mozilla Thunderbird and removed Outlook from my computer. It is intuitive and simple to use, and I’m not handing a handful of cash each month for the privilege of using it. I buy CDs and rip them to the Flac format, storing the music on a NAS (network hard drive) and streaming it to Sonos streamers strategically located around my house. I avoid Amazon and look for local or offshore alternatives that have not been enshitified.
I also use SmartTube, an alternative YouTube client that intelligently blocks annoying adverts and does not hand over globs of your viewing data to Google. Sadly, finding other video streaming alternatives that have not been enshitified is difficult as our free-to-air broadcasters are clearly struggling, and this is reflected in their generally dire offerings.
Recent events have shown that corporate greed is effectively limitless. The upshot of this is that consumers will continue to bear the brunt of profit trumping usability. Our advice at Witchdoctor is simple. If you feel that you’ve fallen victim to enshitification, look for alternatives. If enough of us say “NO” to these greedy corporate rat bastards, they might change their tune. Here’s hoping.
Tell us about your experience with Enshitification in the comments!
