‘Enshittification’: how we got the internet no one asked for

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:10Today, why does the internet feel like it's getting worse? And what could you do about it?

0:24Let's try an experiment together. get your phone open instagram start scrolling okay i'm doing it now

0:37so first up i've got a post from mikaela cole instagram says i might be interested in it's one thing when you see pictures i don't go to fashion shows a lot so for me to see this in 3D. Okay, I'm not following her. I probably should be. Now there's six suggested reels Instagram says I might like. Five of them are food-related, by the way. One is about renovating a tiny apartment. I'm sorry, but I'm taking title of queen of maximising space. Because this girlie fit a fully functioning en suite into a 1.8 by 1 metre cupboard. Sponsored post from a brand I've never heard of. Sponsored post from a ticketing company.

1:14Reel from an influencer I don't follow. Suggestion that I follow Bernie Sanders. We need your help. Big time. Sure, fair enough. I think David Arbour is innocent. Her being transgender is not. I'm going to get up to last night in Blackpool. Puked in a slushy machine. Boy, good morning, my spicy sausage. Another ad from an underwear company. More food reels. Another interior person. When you walk into Lidl. You're going to live with me now. I'm just going to say it. Don't have them calling you a rose when you the whole damn garden. Okay, finally. The first post from an actual real-life friend that I follow and love.

1:49followed by a deeply annoying A-list celebrity, a fitness post, and so on and so forth. As if it wasn't abundantly clear, Instagram as it is now isn't the thing I originally signed up for, which was, way back when, a way to follow my friends, some acquaintances, a sprinkling of enemies, and share a single photo diary of what we were all up to. I get it. Companies evolve. Audiences change. But with every tweaked iteration, it doesn't seem to be improving. In fact, it feels infinitely more rubbish. With Instagram burying what you want under an avalanche of content you didn't ask for or need. And according to one theory, it's not just Instagram.

2:36It's pretty much every major internet platform that has embedded in our lives. Google, Spotify, Amazon, Uber. It turns out it's not just you or me. It really is them. Do you ever get the feeling that the quality of everything you used to love on the internet is declining? Yes. Well, you're not alone and there's a word for it. Enshittification has been named Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2024. From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, the slow death of the good internet.

3:16Corey, Dr. O, you're a long-time authority on the internet, a prolific blogger back when that was a thing, lecturer and author. And we're here to talk about your new book and shittification, why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. And it opens with this quote, I will never forgive them for what they did to the computer. Corey, can you talk to me about that, who it's addressed to and why? So that's a quote from my friend Ed Zitron. And the thing I like about that quote is that he's really pinning the blame not on us for making bad consumption choices, nor is he limiting his criticism to the kind of Zucker Muskean failures who are running our legacy services.

4:02But I take that quote as a statement about the policymakers who created the environment in which the worst people doing the worst things make the most money, all but guaranteeing that we would always have people like Musk and Zuckerberg sitting at the top. And it also implies that the answer to this is not replacing or disciplining those particular terrible men. If Musk tonight pops his clogs, there'll be a succession battle and whoever emerges victorious will be indistinguishable from Elon Musk. And so what we have to do is change the environment so that people like Musk are unimportant rather than trying to find a better person than Musk to be where he sits.

4:45Which, Corey, I guess brings us to inshittification, which is a word you first coined in a blog post in 2022. Put in the simplest terms, what does it mean? Inshittification is both an observation about how platforms go bad and a theory about why it's happening now. So, Corey, you outline in this book three key stages, which is a journey that you've identified that companies like Amazon or Uber and so on have been on. can you walk me through that thinking so when amazon launched it was in stage one of incentivization it was being good to its users so they had a ton of money from the capital markets and they sold goods below cost they were literally losing money on the things they sold to us and we piled into the platform and we got locked into the platform through things like prime but also they locked us in through things like the Kindle and through Audible so that, you know, if you have your Audible subscription, you've already bought your audio book this month.

5:48Why would you buy your audio book at Libro.fm or Downpour or any of these other stores? But they also lock us in with this stuff called digital rights management, which is a form of encryption, which means that if you leave Amazon, you can't take your books and video and audio books with you. They stay on Amazon's platform. So that's what economists would call the switching cost, It's a high cost to bear to leave. Okay, so that's stage one. As the customer, you've been locked in by a platform with these deals making it so easy to be there. And there's no incentive to leave because it's all there and it's so much effort to get off it, even if you wanted to.

6:22How does stage two work? So they start to make things better for business customers, right? They bring in those business customers. They offer them all kinds of logistics. They let them buy their way to the top of the search results. at this point, Amazon's search result business, which they call an advertising business, it's not really advertising, it's pay for placement. It's over$50 billion. When I wrote the book, it was in the$30 billion range. And in the last 18 months, it's grown to over$50 billion. Okay. So stage two is luring in the third party businesses selling on Amazon and then requiring them to aggressively compete for these paid placements to get their products at the top of your search results.

7:02Yeah. They let the merchants who've got the deepest pockets by the first search result, irrespective of whether they're a good match for your search. The top link on an Amazon search is often 29 % more expensive than the best result for your search. Right. So like recently, if I was looking at it and I'm trying to think of what I need, I need a fabric shaver. So if I'm going to buy a fabric shaver and the results that come up at the top, they're not the best ones. They're the ones who've paid to be there. Paid the most. The best match for your search is usually about 17 places down on the second screen.

7:32Unfortunately, it's not exactly 17 places down. You can't just count to 17 and click that link. So as those merchants pile in, it becomes harder for us to leave because the things that we need are on the platform and often nowhere else. You see high streets falling apart. And Amazon now has those merchants dependent on us, right? Let me just say that is actually definitely a reality of like trying to find things. I mean, I boycotted Amazon and I also moved house and had a baby. So I can tell you from experience, it's very hard to go and just find like a mop in a regular shop. And so it feels like the inshittification of the internet has absolutely, obviously, in some ways, decimated our high streets and our local experiences in the offline world.

8:18Well, yeah, Amazon has done to retail what Uber did to minicabs, right? They were able to tap the capital markets, extract preferential terms from wholesalers, and use anti-competitive techniques. And so the sellers become locked into Amazon. They become very dependent. And what Amazon starts to do is pile up junk fees on them. At this point, 45 to 51 % of every pound that a merchant brings in on Amazon, they have to hand to Amazon in junk fees. Wait, 55 pence of every pound? 45 to 51p in every pound. Has to go to Amazon. Yeah. So that's logistics fees, that's search fees, that's fulfillment by Prime.

9:02That is bonkers. So I guess this is what you describe as stage three of the in-chitification cycle. Because according to your three steps, the consumers and sellers, they're locked into this platform, into Amazon in this case, and everyone's getting a worse experience. While tech giants, again, like Amazon, have all the power, all the profit.

9:30Well, talk to me about how that looks for the person listening to this podcast now, understanding the impact on their life in terms of services that they use. I mean, let's look at Google, for example. How has Google completely dominated the market? So Google, you know, acquires a 90 % search market share, and they do that by buying all the shelf space. Every browser, every mobile operating system, most desktop operating systems, every carrier, they all come with Google as standard for your search engine. So no one's really capitalizing rival search engines. They've got this 90 % market share because every search box is wired into their servers.

10:06And so in 2020, Google hit a wall. And that wall was that they couldn't grow their search anymore because they had a 90 % market share. And Wall Street doesn't like it. Oh no. Yeah. Yeah. We dominate. And Wall Street doesn't like it when your firm stops growing. They get very nervous that maybe decline is on the horizon. Maybe someone else is about to grow into your niche. And so Google has this crisis. And there are ways that they could goose their user base, like they could raise a billion humans to maturity and make them Google users. They call that product Google Classroom, but it's not something that turns around very quickly.

10:43And meanwhile, they had to get some other growth in there. And that is to make search worse. Corey, I have to slow things down. Why would they be making search worse? Well, if you have to search more than once to find what you're looking for, they get to show you ads more than once. That is growth, right? Right. That is growth. With you. And so this illustrates the way that firms that are too big to fail are also too big to care. I've known plenty of people who've worked at Google over the years, including some people who, if they came over to my house, I'd count the spoons when they left. So it's not that Google like suddenly...

11:17Not friends then. Not friends, right? And so it's not that Google suddenly acquired a bunch of terrible people. The terrible people who'd always been at Google started winning the argument. And that is the result of the policy environment. If you've noticed that when you search Google, you have five ads that are indistinguishable from links marked off only by the word ad in 6.80 % gray on white type, followed by an absurd and horribly wrong AI summary, followed by 10 pieces of SEO slop that Google is no longer policing and that are now floating to the top of their results. This is why, right? It wasn't an accident.

11:59It wasn't the great forces of history. It wasn't iron laws of economics. It was policy choices taken in living memory by named people who were warned at the time that this was the likely outcome and who then produced the enxietogenic environment and win the argument.

12:21We've talked about businesses monopolizing, dominating the space, becoming worse, and then becoming too big to care, and there's nothing you can do about it. What about platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which aren't necessarily extracting money from their users, but, you know, as one scrolls and keeps scrolling, there is this niggling sense that it's just getting worse and worse. Yeah, sure. You just don't understand why. Well, let's look at Facebook, right? Phase one, Facebook is good to its end users, but finds a way to lock them in. So in 2006, when Facebook opened up to the general public and not just American university students, they said, we know you've got an account on MySpace, but did you know that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire, immortal vampire named Rupert Murdoch?

13:05What an intro. I think that, sorry, I'll legal that for you, in my opinion. So they said, Facebook, it's not owned by an evil billionaire. And also we don't spy on our users. We just show them the things they ask to see, the things posted by the people they follow. So users pile in and they get locked in by what economists call the collective action problem, which, you know, you can think of as you love your friends, but they're a pain. You can't even agree on what pub you're going to this Friday, much less when you're all leaving Facebook. And so, so long as you love your friends more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg, you'll stay.

13:36And so Mark Zuckerberg, he goes to advertisers and he says, do you remember when we told these Muppets that we weren't going to spy on them. Obviously, we're spying on them. Give us remarkably small amounts of money and we'll target ads to them. And because we're such proud craftsmen, we have a whole building full of engineers that will make sure there's no fraud. So when you give us a pound to show an ad to a user, that user is going to get that ad stuffed right in their face. And publishers are made a similar offer. Remember when we told these fools that we weren't going to show them anything except the things they asked to see?

14:03Obviously, that was a lie too. If you give us excerpts of the content on your website, we'll cram that into their eyeballs. Some of them will click the links and you'll get free traffic. And then these two sets of business customers get locked in because they become dependent on the platform. And contra what you might've heard, even if you're paying for the product, you are the product. Because these people are putting a lot of money and value into Facebook and yet things get worse for them too. And so you have Facebook harvesting all this value from everyone and leaving behind a kind kind of homeopathic residue of value that's calculated to be enough to keep us locked to each other and the businesses locked to us.

14:38And in the final stage of inshittification, this brittle equilibrium kind of swings back and forth, right? Because the difference between, I hate Facebook, but I can't seem to stop using it. Who's still saying that? Heaps of people. People who are there because they have the same rare disease as the people that they meet with there. People who are there because that's how they stay in touch with the family they left behind when they emigrated. People whose customers or audiences are there. just people who organize the carpool for their kids, you know, five-a-side league, right? They find it hard to leave.

15:08And it's not because they're weak-willed, right? It's because those things are important and Facebook has engineered it so that you can't move those things off the platform gracefully. So it's very expensive to move it off. So Facebook will periodically have whistleblowers, they'll have privacy scandals, they'll have live stream mass shootings, and some group of users will decide, okay, it's too much and I'm leaving. And when that happens, The city gets very nervous. Facebook stock takes a beating and Facebook panics being tech people. They have a technical term. They call that pivoting. And so one day, you know, Mark Zuckerberg arises from his sarcophagus and says, hearken to me, brothers and sisters.

15:46I've had a vision. I know I told you that your future lay in arguing with your most racist uncle using the primitive text interface I designed in my Harvard dorm room. However, the real future is that I'm going to transform you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, heavily surveilled cartoon character and imprison you in a virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel that I call the metaverse. Right? And that is the final stage of inshittification. The platform is a giant pile of shit.

16:16Coming up, can we get the good old internet back?

16:31Corey, not to sound like my grandmother, for the rest of her soul, but is the problem here just the internet, the over-digitization of everything? And I'm thinking about, you know, stuff like your fridge being online, your TV spying on you, you know, you can't even buy a watch unless it's sort of in service to Apple and it's million updates and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Can we just opt out and stop? So I don't think we can opt out and stop. Look, I've just bought an analog watch. I've opted out. Good for you. I am wearing an analog watch as well. But look, I was raised in a radical household and I've been involved in radical politics my whole life.

17:09And I cut my teeth as a young Torontonian riding a bicycle in sub-zero weather around the streets with a bucket of wheat paste and a stack of handbills to try and get people out to protest. And if you think we're going to organize the international mass movements we need to resist and survive genocide, the climate emergency, authoritarianism, and fascism without digital tools. I'd like you to spend a couple of sub-zero nights with a bucket of wheat paste and then tell me how you think. So I don't think this is intrinsic to digitization. How realistic is it for individuals to use their minimal power, spending power and so on, to make a difference to their own lives?

17:47Yeah, there's a reason rich people want you to vote with your wallet. It's because they have thicker wallets than you do. Agonizing about your consumption choices is a waste of time. By all means, if you don't like Twitter and you think your mental health would be better served on Mastodon or Blue Sky, go and join them. But don't kid yourself that you're making a difference here. If you want to shop at your corner bookshop, I applaud you for doing so. And my book is available in finer bookshops everywhere. But don't kid yourself that that's going to deprive Jeff Bezos of his next penis-shaped rocket launch, right?

18:18These are systemic problems, not individual choices, right? Trying to solve monopolies by shopping carefully is like trying to solve the climate emergency by recycling diligently. And so you need to be part of organized political movements. In the UK, I helped found an organization, a pressure group called the Open Rights Group, which you can find at openrightsgroup.org. And they work on these issues in a systemic and organized way with local chapters up and down the UK. And that's how I would get involved. Don't worry about where you buy the paper and the markers to make a sign to protest outside of Amazon.

18:51It's okay if you buy that from Amazon, especially if the alternative is driving around for two hours trying to find an artisanal marker shop and you miss the protest. Well, then if there is to be collective action, and you're saying, you know, there's very little individual autonomy in stopping the and shitification of everything. What should collectives be lobbying for? What are we asking Starmer to do? So the things that stopped companies from being terrible to their users were these external sources of discipline, things that punished them when they were bad. And the most important of those was competition.

19:27And historically, we had a pretty muscular competition regime from the end of the Second World War right up to the Thatcher era. And we viewed mergers with suspicion. We generally were hostile to the idea of accumulating power. And that's something that very much went by the wayside. Now, it was lately revived. We've had this revival of antitrust, but our current crop of leaders are doing everything they can to kill it. And I'm not just talking about Trump. Keir Starmer fired Marcus Boker, Inc., who was the head of the Competition and Markets Authority, who'd done an extraordinarily good job. Boker, Inc.

19:58is out, and Keir Starmer installed Doug Gurr. He used to run Amazon UK. This is a very Fox in the Henhouse moment. But that was the first thing that we lost. And when you lose competition, you also lose the power of regulators. Because when firms cartelize, when they have these incestuous mergers, that leaves them with so much money that they can boss around their regulators. Corey, what about the people working at these companies? Is there any sense that change at Uber, Apple, Spotify, wherever, that it could come from within? We should be unionizing our tech workers because tech workers are a uniquely constituted labor force, historically speaking.

20:37They were very powerful, but not very unionized. In fact, they were hardly unionized at all. The reason they were so powerful is that there weren't enough of them and they added an awful lot to the bottom line of their employers. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that Silicon Valley workers, tech workers added a million dollars a piece to their boss's bottom line. That's why you got the free kombucha and the massages and a surgeon who'd freeze your eggs so you could work through your fertile years. It wasn't because they liked you, right? It was because they were worried that you'd go across the street and get a job.

21:08Yeah. So, you know, the best time to unionize is when you're powerful and your boss is treating you well, but it can be hard to see the case for that. And so now after a half million tech worker layoffs in the US, tech workers are waking up and going, oh, wait, I know how my boss treats the workers he's not afraid of, right? That's the workers in Jeff Bezos's warehouses who are injured at three times the national rate or the drivers who have to pee in bottles. And if you don't want to end up there, you need to start thinking about unionizing. The best time to have done it would have been 10 years ago.

21:38And the second best time is now. Going back to that opening quote in your book about never forgiving them for what they did to the computer. I'm assuming that you think there is, or perhaps there was a version of the internet that could be a force for good. Has that entirely gone? Can it be clawed back? I think we can. I think we had an old good internet and we could have a new good internet. And I think that both tech giants and often their critics indulge in the sin of what I call vulgar Thatcherism. You'll recall that Thatcher's great motto was, there is no alternative. And that's what tech bosses want you to think.

22:13And what they want you to believe is that ease of use is somehow connected to these abusive practices. A new good internet is one that recovers this technological self-determination of the old good internet, but has the thoughtful design that allowed all our normie friends to join the party back when it was fun. And that's what we're going to need if we're going to have a digital nervous system for a planet that is in enormous peril. We're going to have to be able to organize transnational mass movements, and you need the internet for that. Corey, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.