In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More regularly than not, I’ve found that the answer is fairly simple: the tech industry’s incentives no longer align with the user.
To be clear, I don’t believe that this gradual enshittification is part of some grand, Machiavellian long game by the tech companies, but rather the product of multiple consecutive decisions made in response to short-term financial needs.
Software companies aren’t providing value to consumers in exchange for money. Users are a nuisance these companies have to put up with to sell to other businesses. This is all in service of short term gain. Ed calls this the The Rot Economy.
Ed points out that these constant reworkings of software are the cause of our feelings of “feeling unable to keep up with tech”
The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same. While buttons on our cars might have moved around — and I’m not even getting into Tesla’s designs right now — we generally have a brake, an accelerator, a wheel, and a turn signal. Boarding an airplane has worked mostly the same way since I started flying, other than moving from physical tickets to digital ones. We’re not expected to work out “the new way to use a toilet” every few months because somebody decided we were finishing too quickly.
Why does our technology need to keep redefining itself every release? In theory this can be helpful, new features could be useful. In practice, this means we’re constantly having to re-learn how an increasingly large portion of our lives works. So much we do is digital. Constantly having it shaken up is exhausting.
Ed points out that since this redesigning is happening so constantly, all these little paper cuts add up to a meaningful degradation of our quality of life.
These go past just papercuts though. Ed describes these apps as “at war with their users”. Their goal is not to deliver you value, but to get you to click on something or spend more time with them. These are probably not our goals as users.
It’s digital tinnitus. It’s the pop-up from a shopping app that you downloaded to make one purchase, or the deceptive notification from Instagram that you have “new views” that doesn’t actually lead anywhere. It is the autoplaying video advertisement on your film review website. It is the repeated request for you to log back into a newspaper website that you logged into yesterday because everyone must pay and nothing must get through. It is the hundredth Black Friday sale you got from a company that you swear you unsubscribed from eight times, and perhaps even did, but there’s no real way to keep track. It’s the third time this year you’ve had to make a new password because another data breach happened and the company didn’t bother to encrypt it.
In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
This is interesting. Ed calls this an economical and sociological crisis. Or at least something that has the potential to become a crisis. At some point, will all of these hostile things that have no underlying value collapse?
The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years.
The pain that normal people experience on underpowered machines and without the technical knowledge to avoid being locked into Microsoft’s (or whoever else’s) ecosystem is exponentially worse. I’ve seen this watching family use older laptops before. It is so painful.
Why should a device you paid for slowly stop working over time? My toaster doesn’t stop working after five years. (Well, it might now if it is “smart”.)
The biggest trick that these platforms played wasn’t any one algorithm, but the convenience of a “clean” digital experience — or, at least as clean as they feel it needs to be. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if they’re engineered to manipulate you, even if the experience gets worse seemingly every year, because at least it isn’t as bad as the rest of the internet. We use Gmail because, well, at least it’s not Outlook. We use YouTube to view videos from other websites because other websites are far more prone to crash, have quality issues, or simply don’t work on mobile. We use Google Search, despite the fact that it barely works anymore, to find things because actually browsing the web fucking sucks.
Each of these apps is run by a company with a “growth” team, and that team exists, on some level, to manipulate you — to move icons around so that you’ll interact with the things they want you to, see ads, or buy things. This is why HBO Max rebranded to Max and created an entirely new app experience — because the growth people said “if we do this in this way the people using it will do what we want.”
I’ve thought about the idea of Growth teams to be really weird before… I remember being really surprised to learn about the demand generation teams.
We, as people, have been trained to accept a kind of digital transience — an inherent knowledge that things will change at random, that the changes may suck, and that we will just have to accept them because that’s how the computer works, and these companies work hard to suppress competition as a means of making sure they can do what they want.
Even if you’re technologically savvy, you’re still dealing with these problems — fresh installs of Windows on new laptops, avoiding certain websites because you’ve learned what the dodgy ones look like, not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know what a spam bot looks like, and so on.
This is a good point. Just because you’re tech savvy enough to avoid some of the garbage of modern computing doesn’t mean the garbage doesn’t effect you. Why do I need to keep clicking “unsubscribe” on so many emails?
Every single weird thing that you’ve experienced with an app or service online is the dread hand of the Rot Economy — the gravitational pull of growth, the demands upon you, the user, to do something. And when everybody is trying to chase growth, nobody is thinking stability, and because everybody is trying to grow, everybody sort of copies everybody else’s ideas, which is why we see microtransactions and invasive ads and annoying tricks that all kind of feel the same in everything, though they’re all subtly different and customized just for that one app. It’s exhausting.
The idea that we could focus on stability as a target for our software instead of growth is interesting. I wonder what it would look like to make software that way. I feel like that’s generally what I’m looking for in my tooling. I like that VS Code is basically always the same. I like that ls still works the same way as always.
The Rot Economy is neoliberalism’s true innovation: a kind of economic cancer that with few reasons to exist beyond “more” and few justifications beyond “if we don’t let it keep growing then everybody’s pensions blow up.”
We are all pushed toward growth — personal growth, professional growth, growth in our network and our societal status — and the terms of this growth are often set by platforms and media outlets that are, in turn, pursuing growth. And as I’ve discussed, the way the terms of our growth is framed is almost entirely through a digital ecosystem of warring intents and different ways of pursuing growth — some ethical, many not.
The origin of the title of this article:
I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer, and the more I learn about both their intentions and actions the more certain I am that they are unrepentant and that their greed will never be sated. I have watched them take the things that made me human — social networking, digital communities, apps, and the other connecting fabric of our digital lives — and turned them into devices of torture, profitable mechanisms of abuse, and find it disgusting how many reporters seem to believe it’s their responsibility to thank them and explain why it’s good this is happening to their readers.