everything gets worse
or, the enshittification of everything
When Cory Doctorow invented the term enshittification, he was only talking about the internet. And he’s absolutely correct that everything about online platforms is gradually getting worse.
Now that AI is being dumped into everything, from search engines to photo editing to your phone’s operating system, the internet and these platforms are becoming increasingly useless rather than just bad.
And I do think that, in a few years, the internet may very well be a swamp that is so aggravating to use that we’ll have to leave it behind unless you’re willing to pay for the useful internet.
Anyway, it’s not just the internet that’s getting worse but everything.
Consumer goods, appliances, cars, industrial machines—everything.
When my parents bought their house almost thirty years ago, it had two refrigerators. The one on the main floor was a new, fancy model. The one in the basement was original to the house, which is to say that it was already about twenty years old. On the main floor, they’ve gone through two refrigerators, but the basement refrigerator—now fifty-ish years old—keeps chugging along.
The refrigerator in the house we bought two years ago is from the 1980s or possibly early 1990s, which makes it at least thirty years old. It works just fine.
My wife’s phone—an iPhone X—barely functions now that it’s six or seven years old. Her cousin just bought a 2024 truck that started on fire while it sat in their driveway. This is, apparently, a known problem with the truck. We’ve all heard of Teslas catching fire as well.
Oops!
You can dig into some of the complications and dangers of various battery technologies as well. Of course, there are many new battery technologies that, allegedly, offer greater stability, charge, and without the risk of, well, exploding. But, for now, most industrial and commercial batteries are on the more dangerous side. Which is why you can’t ship them by plane, for example.
I have a job related to manufacturing and I can tell you that many manufacturers used to make machines that lasted decades. That is simply no longer the case for many, many of these manufacturers.
Part of this is because of the increased use of electronic components, which have a higher fail rate and shorter lifetime than something mechanically or hydraulically based. You may ask why someone would make these changes then and the answer is pretty simple: increased functionality.
Also, for the sake of transparency, it is worth noting that a brushless DC motor has a greater lifetime than traditionally brushed motors because the brushes wear out after 1,000 to 1,500ish hours of normal load. Of course, if you have replaceable brushes, the lifetime can be further extended and possibly compete with brushless motors.
If, for some reason, you want to know more about brushed and brushless motors, you can read about them here.
We could make the argument that all these manufacturers are making their products worse on purpose, but I don’t think that’s generally true. But I also don’t think it has to be true for this to occur.
A lot of this has to do with market consolidation across all sectors. I know I’ve mentioned him before, but
’s newsletter on monopolies and antitrust really should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand why America—and by extension the rest of the world—is the way it is.The simple fact is that when regulatory bodies either don’t exist, are toothless, or don’t enforce their own regulations, manufacturers also don’t have to abide by the laws. On top of that, when Amazon or GE or Toyota dictates your design and spec and the components you can use for the machines that you supply them, you have to follow the contract.
And while there exists an ecosystem of second and third tier suppliers to these massive corporations, if GE pulled their contract from these suppliers, most of them would go belly up almost immediately. This little bit of separation keeps GE from being considered a massive monopoly stretching across industries, but its market power and influence give it the shape and heft of the monopoly it effectively is.
And GE (and other such titans) wants you to buy a new refrigerator every five to ten years. Same thing for your dishwasher and oven and water heater and furnace. Apple wants you to get a new iPhone every year but they’ll put up with you getting a new one every five years. Same with your laptop.
They build garbage so we can fill our house with garbage that will eventually fill some massive hole in the ground.
IKEA cuts down entire forests (sometimes illegally) in poor countries so you can have a cheap desk that is a nightmare to put together and will last just a few years at a time until you need to fill your house with more temporary garbage.
Your shirts and pants fall apart while you wear them, but you barely care because the shirt cost $5 and so you go to one of the many fast fashion empires operating on literal slave labor and pick up another 10 $5 shirts that will last you a year or so. Or, if you’re the type addicted to microtrends of fashion, you can update your wardrobe every six weeks just to keep up.
What’s worse, though, is when you buy a $400 jacket and it becomes just as tattered and worn after a few years as the one you bout for $35. Of course, you might be lucky enough to find a real wool coat or real bomber jacket at a thrift store that was made twenty or thirty years ago that looks as good as the day it was sold.
I suppose here is where I usually offer some kind of something for you to do, but I don’t really think there is anything that can be done individually or even collectively. Not really.
I mean, besides agitating for better regulations or enforcement of existing regulations or the dismantling of the monopolies destroying the world, but we probably can’t do a whole lot about any of that either.
Some would tell you to stop consuming. To buy handcrafted products or whatever. And while that is good advice and the kind I’d hope for you to aspire to, I doubt many of you reading this can afford a $5,000 table.
And so I suppose I’m just rubbing our faces in the shit. It’s everywhere and it stinks and it’s life.
You're right, and another insidious thing that Cory Doctorow often writes about is the ability to repair things, when components are electronically keyed to the item. Even if you can get the part and install it, either it won't work, or you have to pay the manufacturer to code it in for you.
He wrote a novella about it - "unauthorized bread"
Wow is this excellent piece sobering. A related issue is repairs. Back in the day, regular people who were good with their hands could repair old cars and appliances with no special training. I know because my dad kept every piece of machinery inside and outside of the house—cars, mowers, the washer and dryer, dishwasher, fridge, blow dryer, you name it—in good working order. He would scour the classified ads for cheap parts and was able to keep our household running for basically pennies. (And secretly he loved doing it; mechanical repairs were a kind of hobby for him.) Nowadays, this is totally impossible. We need trained experts to fix our stuff, which is why most of the time we just throw broken stuff away and buy a new replacement. So wasteful.
I’m reminded of Barbara Kingsolver’s point in Demon Copperhead, that Appalachian people have a strong independent streak and have throughout their history been self-sufficient, but that that self-sufficiency is no longer possible. The economic system won’t allow it. That is a loss.