Enshittification

= "the predictable trajectory from serving users to serving advertisers to serving shareholders." [1]

Description

Cory Doctorow:

"“First, they 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.”

(https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/)

Characteristics

Kaliya Young:

"Three stages. (A fourth, collapse, is implicit, what happens when the extraction breaks the system.) Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Uber, Airbnb, every platform that started as a useful service and ended as an extraction machine ran the same playbook.

Doctorow’s point is that this is not a story about bad people. It is a story about structure. Platforms mediate two-sided markets, can reallocate value between sides at zero cost, and once both sides are locked in, the platform’s incentives shift from serving either of them to extracting from both. “Every successful platform becomes a betrayal vehicle.” The diverging of platform interests from user interests is not a failure of the platform. It is the business model.

“We just need a better platform” is not a strategy. A better platform built on the same architecture will follow the same lifecycle. The clock just resets."

(https://identitywoman.net/enshittification-arises-from-enclosure-open-protocols-refuse-both/)

Discussion

Enshittification is the result of prior Enclosure

< " Enshittification is what enclosure feels like once you can’t leave. " >

Kaliya Young:

"Enshittification is the symptom. To run the playbook, a platform first has to have something to extract from. It has to have captured something. That capture has an older name.

Enshittification is what enclosure feels like once you can’t leave The word for taking something that was held in common and making it private property is enclosure.

Between roughly 1500 and 1850, the English commons — land used collectively by villagers for grazing, firewood, foraging, water — was enclosed. Fenced off. Granted by Acts of Parliament to landowners who could “improve” it for their own profit. The peasants who had used the commons for generations were dispossessed into wage labor. The new private property generated returns for the few who held it. The commons that had fed villages for centuries was gone.

Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation that enclosure was not a natural evolution. It was a political project, sustained by law and violence, that converted a shared substrate of life into private capital. The commons did not vanish because it was inefficient. It was taken. The taking was the act.

The same logic ran through the digital substrate. The things that should have been held as commons — identity, the social graph, group memberships, collective memory, trust relationships — had no protocol layer to hold them. The platforms of the early 2000s emerged into that gap and enclosed them. Each one drew a fence around the part of our social life it mediated and claimed property rights to what was inside. The fences went up because there was nothing to stop them.

Enclosure came first. Enshittification followed. It is only possible to extract from people who have already been captured. The platforms that have enshittified most aggressively are the ones that hold the most of the captured commons. That is not a coincidence. The enclosure is the source of the lock-in. The lock-in is the source of the extraction.

Enshittification is what enclosure feels like once you can’t leave."

(https://identitywoman.net/enshittification-arises-from-enclosure-open-protocols-refuse-both/)