The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
Unfortunately, that just isn’t true. The board of directors have a legal fiduciary responsibility to the share holders. And they hire or fire the ceo. If they don’t chase that virtual pennies, the shareholder can, and do sue them.
And as I said, if they don’t do things that at least make it appear they are attempting to increase profits, shareholder will sell, and they will go out of business.
It’s a race to the bottom. And the system is to blame. The system has rewarded people who enshitify products, and thus it has shapped who gets hired to make those decisions.
It’s because those shareholders are captive to that same narrative. These practices do carry a real cost, but executives have made themselves blind to it. There are people who’s job it is to judge the value of customer satisfaction and loyalty and to measure it against the cost of providing good service, and they think the former is less valuable than the latter. My premise is these people are not doing their job well.
This view of the purpose of a company, to ruthlessly extract every cent of value from a company or else face the wrath of shareholders, it’s a fairly recent view. Shareholders selling doesn’t cause a company to go out of business, failing at that business does. Stock price falling is a different issue, it matters because company success has come to mean the success of its shares more than the amount of customer goodwill. But that matters.
I sense though that we really aren’t on different sides. I wouldn’t say you’re absolutely wrong, nor that I’m absolutely right. We both have profound dissatisfaction with this world that all these rapacious companies have build around us. The next generation of business people, if we’re privileged to even have one, will have to figure out some things for themselves all over again.
I do agree we seem to be on the same side.
Semantics is a bit of a passion of mine. The question I think we differ on the answer to, is wnat is an executives job. I wish it was what you appear to believe. But at the nd of the day, they are there to make money. And helping the stock price makes money for the people above them, who in turn will ensure they are employed in the future. Including at a different company.
And true, a falling stock price does not but a company put of business, that was a poor choice of words. It causes it to get bought by someone else, and either disolved or absorbed. So I guess maybe extinct is a better word. It certainly is more fun.
Please consider: it at executive’s job is only to make money, then why would any executive do anything but chase the single most source of maximum profit, which right now is obviously scamming people and courting Trump’s favor to get out of consequences? Who would care about building anything real? How could they? Just chase hollow bets and game the system as far as you can?
You can complain about capitalism, and indeed there are many problems with it, but I think you should realize that today’s hyper rapacious version of it is not historical, it’s a fairly recent interpretation of the law. A company is more, MUST be more than a single minded profit making engine. If it always had been, our civilization would have collapsed long before now.