Enshittification Nation

A century of national policy in one word

You might think I made up the word in the title. I did not. It was first coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022 and then widely circulated by a Wired article in January 2023. It didn’t quite land the top spot for Webster’s Word of The Year, though it probably should have, given its widespread adoption and cultural impact. It’s an important word to me because it’s one of those neologisms that does so much with so little; it describes something very specific while also functioning as a grand gesture. It’s lightly jargon-y but completely unpretentious. It’s both mechanical and organic at once.

In the word’s original usage, it referred to platforms—digital platforms in particular. And whether this is the first you’re hearing it or you’ve already read a dozen think pieces about the phenomenon, you’ve certainly felt the effects of Enshittification.

Basically, it describes the almost universal formula behind the rise and fall of tech apps. First, they offer a valuable service to their users. It might be music streaming, a novel way to connect to your friends, or frictionless access to a marketplace of all the world’s products with same-day shipping. Whatever it is, they make themselves irresistible to the widest-possible user base and create a relatively enjoyable experience for them. This is almost always funded by an unlimited flow of low-interest venture capital which nullifies traditional rules of business and makes failure virtually impossible. Once the company accrues a safe margin of marketshare, they move onto Step Two.

Step Two is when the company starts to focus their attention on their business partnerships rather than their end users. They open more doors for vendors, advertisers, data miners and the like. They make it a no-brainer for anyone in the space to jump aboard and take part in the action. Becoming a seller will be seamless and commissions will be cheap. Lucrative packages will be offered to creators to make content exclusive to the platform. Adspots and sponsored content are so effective that you’d be a fool not to shape your entire marketing strategy to fit the platform. The user experience starts to degrade but not terribly so. It’s still an enjoyable—or at least tolerable—place to be. Because of the aggressive growth strategies (operating at a loss, buying out competitors, etc.) the platform is still certainly the best option among few alternatives.

The final stage of Enshittification is the true downfall. This is when the platform has total marketshare dominance among users and business partners. It has become impossible to operate without them. The platform sets all the rules, and its strategy then shifts from serving its stated goals to serving its actual goals—which are tied exclusively to paying back its shareholders. This is when the mask comes off. Whatever pleasant user experience that may have attracted patrons in the first place gets hollowed out entirely and all cost-savings are then funneled back to investors. Spotify was never about sharing music, it was a tool harmonize a dispersed market and generate a chorus of wealth for its funders. UberEats was never about food delivery, it was a tool for delivering wealth to its funders. Google was never about creating a perfect search engine, it was a tool in the search for the perfect way to extract from and manipulate its participants...

The end of the process is the wilted flower. The unoccupied marble tower on the hill. The remnant of a thing which may have contained wonder and promise at one point, but is now just a ruptured memory. The platform has lost all its luster and loyalty, but it doesn’t need these things to live on. So it persists as a zombie, at least for a while.

But the beautiful truth about Enshittification is that it self-terminates. Like so many GMO seeds of the capitalist age, it cannot continue indefinitely. In fact, it ensures its own demise.

The Enshittification of A Nation

The reason this formula feels so straightforward and common and universal… is because it’s not just some modern invention that only applies to the apps that live on your phone. It accurately describes the trajectory we’ve been following as a country. Enshittification is not something that only happens to tech startups when they get wrapped up in private equity. This is the uniform path being charted by all Western nations as we speak.

A few days ago, I was listening to a computer scientist being interviewed on a podcast. And despite his immediate criticisms and distrust for the current governmental regime of The United States, he repeatedly acknowledged that, as an immigrant, this is the place that one had to come to truly excel in his field. I’ve heard a similar sentiment from many immigrant voices over the years. The USA has long been the shining city on the hill, representing freedom and excellence on the world stage. The place that dreams could not only be freely dreamt, but could manifest into reality. This is why so many have risked life and limb to get here. Why so many around the world have attempted to replicate and expand on what we’ve done as a nation. They’ve seen the conquerous outcomes when colonialism meets indigineity, and they want to be on the side of the winners.

That is what characterized Step 1 in America’s three-step evolution. This was a country of unlimited potential, a treasure which drew the masses like moths to a golden bulb on a warm July night. Much like the Uber’s and Amazon’s and Airbnb’s of the last decade, The United States was built on insurmountable debt and promises that simply could not be kept. If you were an early adopter in this novel experiment, you were graciously rewarded. For several generations, our nation was able to provide relative stability, affordability, and comfort not seen anywhere on earth (or, at least that was the tale that it meticulously told through two and a half centuries of gaslighting and intensive propaganda campaigns. The reality was that many pre-industrial civilizations around the world offered its inhabitants more free time and comfort than the average modern American enjoys, with substantially less subscription fees. Also, in order for these comforts to exist in the US, we had to scrape them from other corners of the earth).

America: The Tech Startup In The Shape of a Continent

Enshittification cycles tend to take 10-15 years at tech companies. But how long does it take to run its course at an enormous country? Well, we actually do have data on this, and as history tends to bear out, most empires expire around their 250 year mark. Which is… very interesting, considering where we happen to be in the United States’ existential rollercoaster ride (249 years as of today). Probably just an eerie coincidence.

Here’s a good essay on this if you want it

Remember the three main steps in Enshittification? The Public Buy-In, the Business Buy-In, the Big Sell-Off? We were in Step 1 for quite some time, maybe a hundred years or so. The roads got built, medical research flourished, food was abundant, and boomers got to buy lakefront property for a handful of nickels saved up from their summer jobs. Business was sensibly regulated but free to develop. Man, things were looking good. We made it impossible to ignore. English was the lingua franca. Every country who wanted to do trade had to use the petrodollar. Not only that, but they had to buy our bonds and loan us trillions so we could keep telling them what to do.

Today, we find ourselves firmly in the middle of Steps 2 and 3. This is when most of the business relationships are being sacrificed for the true shareholders. And remember how in Step 3, the true nature of the plan gets revealed? That’s what’s happening right now. That’s why every time you open your news feed it’s public land sell-offs and judges being arrested and alligator concentration camps. The mask is slipping all the way off. The whole “Land of the Free” thing was never the goal. All the original characteristics that made this place desirable were just loss leaders to get you in the door. And now that the people have bought into the ruse and have nowhere else to go, those pleasantries are being subverted and exchanged to make way for the all-seeing surveillance state which will enforce an open-air zoo of civilians too placated and scared to do anything but work and pay rent to three giant corporations in a trench coat. Or at least, that’s the plan.

Depressing, I know. But I want to draw special attention to the very important fact I mentioned earlier... Enshittification is self-terminating. It’s a model that purposefully, intrinsically, ritualistically kills itself. And since we happen to be oh-so-coincidentally talking about this here on the eve of the USA’s 250th birthday, we can delight in the fact that this whole thing must end somewhere. It won’t be immediate, and it might not even feel like some big ceremonial finale. But it definitely can’t sustain much longer. The shareholders are taking what they can, and at a certain point, the contraction that you and I are feeling is going to have a response, and it’s going to open into a new breath of creation. What emerges on the other side will be ours to decide.