The Digital Decline: How the Internet Became 'Enshittified' and Paths to Restoration

Remember when Twitter was at its peak? Many would argue it reached its zenith around the first COVID lockdowns. During that time, users would ironically call it a "hellscape." Despite attracting some of humanity's worst elements, a well-curated Twitter feed provided immediate access to excellent journalism, cultural commentary, podcasts, comedy, film and book reviews, trends in various industries, public health information, and live reporting from significant events.

This digital environment created a sense of belonging and connection. It fulfilled the promise of a world where anyone could feel part of an in-crowd, connected and relevant.

Then came rumors that Elon Musk was planning to purchase the platform. Initially, many dismissed this as improbable, believing it would be a poor business decision and that influential users would abandon the site. However, Musk did acquire Twitter, rebranding it as X. Despite hopes that this venture might lead to his financial downfall, the platform instead experienced a deliberate degradation in quality.

Musk commercialized the blue verification checkmarks previously reserved for organically influential users, altered algorithms to reflect his perspectives, and dismissed moderators responsible for filtering misinformation and hate speech. Consequently, the platform became saturated with advertisements, inappropriate content, toxicity, AI-generated material, and various scams.

Surprisingly, despite these changes, users remained, possibly attached to their established audiences or afraid of missing out. Attempts to collectively migrate to alternative platforms largely failed.

This pattern seems to be repeating across all social media and the internet as a whole. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, Google, Apple, Uber, Spotify—all appear to be declining in quality while users find themselves unable to leave these digital ecosystems.

In 2022, Cory Doctorow, a Canadian journalist, novelist, and activist, coined the term "enshittification" to describe this internet degeneration. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Doctorow was highly regarded in tech circles, with his blog Boing Boing being essential reading for those interested in emerging technologies.

His 2003 novel "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" presciently depicted a dystopian world where traditional currency was replaced by "whuffie"—essentially a measure of social respect—just before social media introduced its economy of likes and followers.

Years later, Doctorow's book "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" attempts to explain how the internet's democratic potential and capacity for building communities devolved into what he describes as an "inhuman nightmare."

The internet initially promised connection and cooperation—an open-source environment offering instant, free access liberated from corporate and government control. Instead, we got a landscape dominated by monopolies and oligarchs controlling extensive surveillance systems that track our private behaviors, creating a population of disempowered consumers with no alternatives.

"Enshittification" isn't merely a complaint from an aging tech enthusiast; Doctorow developed it as a formal concept explaining how internet platforms transform from being user-loved to user-despised through three stages.

First, platforms provide genuine value to users, building communities without significant profit. Second, they monetize these communities by offering businesses access to markets through advertising or proprietary arrangements. Finally, they exploit both business customers and users to maximize their own value extraction.

Amazon exemplifies this process: initially providing fast, affordable product delivery, then attracting businesses with profit opportunities, before ultimately using its market dominance to extract excessive fees from these same businesses while having no incentive to improve service quality.

For Doctorow, the problem is that nearly all internet platforms follow this pattern. With the internet's omnipresence in daily life, especially through smartphones, our entire world has become "enshittified"—what he terms the "enshittoscene."

Doctorow rejects the neoliberal notion that "there is no alternative," pointing out that his generation remembers when the internet was genuinely beneficial. He proposes four strategies to recreate a better internet combining the autonomy of the old internet with the scale of the current one: competition, regulation, interoperability, and tech-worker empowerment.

He argues that today's internet isn't truly capitalist but rather "technofeudalist," where tech overlords, like medieval landlords, profit by owning platforms and forcing others to rent space. Breaking these monopolies through robust antitrust regulations is his first step, followed by international coordination to prevent further enshittification.

Laws must also guarantee technological interoperability. Currently, companies like HP can price their printer ink exorbitantly because they design printers incompatible with other cartridges—a principle now widespread across platforms and products.

Finally, Doctorow suggests empowering tech industry workers who often share an ethos of collaboration and innovation. Most people building and managing these platforms, he believes, dislike the current state as much as users do. Empowering them could benefit everyone.

Author: Charles Barbour (Associate Professor, Philosophy, Western Sydney University)

Disclosure statement: Charles Barbour does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.