The Enshittification of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

I think it was being forced to install an app and provide my email address, phone number, and CC info just to pay for 50 cents worth of curb parking that broke me.

Or it may have been Menchie’s requiring me to install their app in order to accrue rewards points and discounts. Because for some reason providing my phone number is too much to ask nowadays? When frozen yogurt is a food group in your family (I have two teenagers), rewards points matter.

Or maybe what finally broke me was discovering a paywall between me and watching the Olympics. For those like me raised without wi-fi, we still remember this glorious utopia where it was possible to watch every major sporting event - including the entire Olympics - for free.

Or maybe it’s the self-checkout lanes provided for my convenience that are so useless I have to wait for the one attendant monitoring eight stations to provide their employee code just so I can weigh my goddamn bananas.

Or maybe it’s every SaaS product I use to run my education business doubling their prices while simultaneously removing half the features I require.

Or maybe it’s that “social” media isn’t social anymore but instead everyone’s bots generating disposable slop so everyone else’s bots can comment on their bot-generated slop.

Or maybe it’s every streaming service requiring me to pay twice as much for content that’s twice as shitty (I’m specifically looking at you, Netflix).

Nope...I think what finally broke me was Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise for killing Jeffrey Epstein, not because I think AI slop (even at its absolute best) will wholesale replace high quality, long form narrative storytelling (it won’t), but because our society has devolved to such a level of idiocracy we’re honestly afraid this is a realistic possibility.

Ultimately, what has really broken me is not any of the above individually but instead the enshittification of everything, everywhere, all at once.

/en-ˌshit-ə-fɪ-ˈkā-shən/

An informal word used to criticize the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms over time, due to an increase in advertisements, costs, or features. It can also refer more generally to any state of deterioration, especially in politics or society. Similar forms include enshittify and enshittified.

The term ‘enshittifcation’ was coined by author, journalist, and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow back in 2022. It was then named the Word of the Year in 2023 by The American Dialect Society, and then the Macquarie Dictionary followed suit in 2024. It has since been listed as an official word by both Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com².

As Cory outlines in his book by the same name, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, the enshittification process is as follows:

1. First, platforms are good to their users.

2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.

3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.

So how did we end up here? Simple → the endless pursuit of optimization under the guise of making the world a better place.

Hey Big Tech, here’s a thought...

At this risk of this becoming another in my rapidly expanding collection of “old man yells at clouds” essays, I think it’s safe to say we’ve passed the point of no return.

Big Tech: You’re not making shit better. You’re making everything worse.

Sure, the evolution from no internet to the internet was revolutionary and truly changed the world in ways we couldn’t have even imagined back in the 1990’s. But the endless pursuit of optimization over the last 30 years has made the current iteration of the internet all but unusable today.

And yes, the evolution from flip phones to smart phones changed everything about the way we manage our work and our lives. But the latest iPhone update to liquid freakin’ glass? Yeah, nobody asked for that shit Apple. NOBODY. Your constant need to endlessly iterate has only emboldened me to ditch my iPhone 13 for a flip phone as soon as it dies (which is undoubtedly only an update or two away given your past experience with “Batterygate”³).

I remember how revolutionary it felt shortly after I purchased my Tesla Model 3 (in 2019 before we knew Elon was fucking nuts) when after the first update, my car literally got faster. But then they changed the touch screen interface. And then they moved the speedometer. And then they made it harder to find the windshield wiper button (which should NOT be a button on a touch screen in the first place!!!). I eventually got so irritated by the car getting measurably worse with every update (not to mention the most horrendous customer service experience known to man), I traded it in for a good, old-fashioned truck with an analog speedometer that couldn’t be moved, a physical key that can’t be hacked, and an actual shifter for an actual transmission (none of this turning the tiny little digital wheel bullshit for me). And most importantly, my vehicle doesn’t require updates nor can it be controlled remotely at the whims of a soulless corporation looking to squeeze me with a monthly subscription for heated seats or “self-driving” capabilities that don’t actually work.

I get it Big Tech, you need to justify your existence.

There’s no longer a world in which you believe making a high quality product that will last for years or even decades can sustain your insatiable need to feed the venture capitalists and please the shareholders. But in your latest pursuit to make the world a better place, if you try to sell me this line of BS one more time, my head will explode:

Artificial intelligence will make us more productive.

Bullshit.

Mark my words, the enshittification of AI is coming, and it’s coming fast.

AI is undoubtedly going to increase “productivity,” i.e. help employers squeeze more blood from the few overworked employees who are left after all the massive layoffs, but don’t even try to convince me that the pursuit to streamline everything with AI is leading us anywhere other than the further enshittification of everything, everywhere at speeds we can’t even comprehend.

First of all, we’re already discovering that AI is having the opposite effect it was supposed to, according to recent research at UC Berkeley.

Secondly, I don’t need research to tell me these latest astronomical leaps forwards in AI will do anything other than lead us to burnout faster and more often (if we’re even “lucky enough” to still have jobs).

How do I know?

Washing machines.

Ask yourself how much free time you’ve had lately to meditate, journal, take up yoga, learn to cook, get a massage, sleep or do anything else beneficial for your well-being because you didn’t spend hours this week beating your clothes against a rock down by the river.

It always comes down to Parkinson’s Law:

The work will expand or contract to the time we allow for it.

As rapid advancements in AI makes us massively more “productive” at work, budgets will continue to shrink, calendars will further contract, and we’ll once again be trapped on the endless hamster wheel where today’s miracle becomes tomorrow’s expectation. And in our personal lives we will undoubtedly still find other ways to fill our time doomscrolling staying “busy” with meaningless things that allow us to avoid the painful fact we’re not only wasting our time but quite possibly also wasting our lives.

I too fell for the productivity myth hook, line, and sinker and believed back in 2015 that streamlining my life with Trello, Omnifocus, and the other 500 apps we need to “zap” together with digital duct tape would buy me more time to focus on things that mattered. Unfortunately, every single workflow and productivity tool that has cornered the knowledge worker market in the last five years has become deeply, unequivocally, and utterly enshittified. (Mark my words, the day is coming when you’ll have to pay a fee per Trello card).

Say what you will, but this is not an old man ranting about the march of progress. Because this isn’t fucking progress.

To be clear: I am not anti-AI.

I am deeply interested in where I can insert artificial intelligence into any area of my work and life to make the mundane and repeatable more efficient or the time consuming less time consuming. Ultimately, however, I draw the line at delegating wholesale creation to the bots. Outsourcing your creativity to AI is like outsourcing weightlifting to your personal trainer. To see the results, you have to do the hard work.

Don’t buy into the latest generative AI hype or any other life-changing promises this technology is making about the future of work. You are being fooled about AI, and you will soon feel really stupid.

“The people selling you the apocalypse and the utopia are often the same people selling you the product.” - David William Silva

Rest assured, every LLM, AI chatbot, AI agent, Clawdbot Moltbot OpenClaw or otherwise will eventually enshittify, they will enshittify hard, and this enshittification will cost us. The more we’ve built our digital lives around this technology, the more this pending enshittification will hurt our wallets. And if you’ve outsourced to AI the most important parts of yourself that make you uniquely human, the pending enshittification may also cost you your creative soul.

Which now begs the question…

^{1 https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/enshittification
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate}

What enshittifications in your work and life frustrate you the most?

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