The Enshittification Problem

You've just found a cool new tool that does the thing you want to do. Or maybe you are looking around for alternatives to the personal data economy or the internet of things, alternatives that keep your data privacy and sovereignty sacred.

But you're wary. You've been down this road before. You signed up for the shiny new thing only to have it, a few months later, suddenly change its terms of service on you (a.k.a. "boilerplate creep"). Before long it is sucking up all your information, selling you ads, selling you out. It's a privacy nightmare -- could you have seen it coming?

Cory Doctorow calls this process "enshittification" which he describes thus:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.*

Enshittification has taken hold of so many of our products and services that we once loved: Facebook, YouTube, Google, and so many more.

So what is a new user to do? In the absence of a crystal ball, how will you know if a product or service is likely to enshittify or not?

Economic Sociology Meets Technology

My own perspective on enshittification comes from an insight I gained while working with NASA teams. Not because what NASA builds is enshittified! But rather because it was watching teams build technologies under conditions of extreme scarcity that it became apparent that how a technology is monetized or funded, and by whom, dictates how it will develop. I call this "technosocioeconomics." More sociological and far less catchy than enshittification, but it addresses some of the processes nonetheless.

The "funded by whom" part is important. In the Social Construction of Technology we talk about how "relevant social groups" shape technical systems to solve their problems. In the best case scenario, you'd hope that users would form a "relevant social group" to define the problems that need solving and rationally evaluate whether the tool solves those problems or not.

Wrong! Technology doesn't develop that way. It's not propelled by its own inevitable engine, either (that's "technological determinism", and it is definitly poop). Instead different social groups define what their problem is that needs solving. And whether or not those problems have, for their purposes, been adequatly solved.

Surprisingly to many technologists, sometimes those problems don't even need to be solved! A relevant social group can redefine the problem, or make a rhetorical splash about how it's solved when it isn't. The point is to control the direction the technology takes, often to shut down competitors or any flexibility over how we might interpret or use the tool.

Here is where the money comes in. A major relevant social group at the table is investors. Contemporary technologies and devices exist in a sector dominated by financial instruments of investment capital. A company must appease its Board, its stakeholders, its shareholders. It may receive an angel investment, or be picked up by a venture fund, or become part of an investment portfolio in some way.

And these latter types demand growth: exponential growth. Q1, Q2, Q4 targets exceeded. Growth on explosive curves. Growth at all cost. 

What that means is, the problem the technology has to solve is making money for its investors.  And according to technosocioeconomics, that means it will grow and be shaped both by these relevant social groups, and their economic aims.

So when you look at a new technology, don't just look at its user interface, its cute color scheme, if it's easy to use or not. Don't just look at its privacy policy. You have to go even further behind the hood.  You have to evaluate its underlying technosocioeconomics.  

Who are its relevant social groups dictating the path the technology will take? Which economic social networks is it plugged into? To whom is it beholden, to do what? They will build tech to satisfy their groups, their people, their networks. As a user, you may or may not be in that picture at all. 

You want to check out: is this is a startup? if so, at what stage? is it a product made by a foundation? or an open source group? Each of these groups will shape the technology in different ways, which may be more or less to your liking.

Getting Started with Startups

Likelihood of Enshittification: Very high

Most startups are aiming to get investment interest with an interesting or compelling product idea that seems lucrative and scalable. Then they either a) scale an IPO (and make millions on the stock opening) or b) build enough to get acquired (and make millions on the sale).

This may be an issue for you for several reasons. First, the technology will develop in the line its investors want. They are the primary relevant social group (this is what they really mean when they say, the user is the product).

Second, to scale to IPO means making all kinds of decisions oriented toward major, hyperscale growth. This leaves users behind in the dust. It also means having a monetization strategy which, let's face it, these days is based on the lucrativeness of their user data.

Third, getting acquired means your data will move from Company A (the startup) to Company B (the big company that pays for them). Suddenly more of your data belongs to Adobe, Google, Meta, Cisco, Microsoft. Lots of these companies acquire smaller ones because they want to squash the competition, or sit on their product. But in doing so, user data is always lucrative.

Then there's the final option, which the companies want to avoid. They may go belly up or into receivership. In that case, your data could get sold to the lowest bidder. Not preferably.

So I want to know all I can about these companies. In my personal product research, I always start with Crunchbase. What do they say about this company? What stage of their funding cycle are they in? Series A? Pre series A? Series B? Earlier on, they can be more innovative and user-centered. Later on, they will be ruled by their investors.

Startups are beholden to a Board, including the CEO. The Board is comprised of early stage investors. If a VC fund invests, they get a seat at the Board. Decisions are made to satisfy the Board, which is all investors.

(The best book I can recommend about all this is Ben Shestakofsky's Behind The Startup. It's eye opening for anyone who thinks a tech firm is just about the technology.)

If you get in early, you'll need to monitor the product's funding as it develops. I would use them but give them only dummy personal information (like email masks and masked credit card numbers). Be prepared to walk as soon as you see these kinds of changes, which indicate that the investors truly are in charge:

• A new CEO
• Tons more money flowing in in Series B
• An announcement that they are no longer doing x,y,z which was part of the product before, now they're just doing x, and y and z will outsource to our partners (usually accompanied by the caveat, we still value you as a customer and think this will be cheaper!)

Foundations and Non-Profits

Likelihood of Enshittification: Very low

If your product is built by a Foundation, like Signal or Mozilla, they don't have to scale. Foundations are non-profits and they have different requirements. Their relevant social groups and technosocioeconomics are different.

Non-Profits have to be mission driven. They need to take donations and track and report these carefully. They must remain non-profit-generating.

Non-profits have a Board too. But their job is different than the for-profit corporation. Their job is to be sure a) the mission is always upheld and b) the non profit follows all the nonprofit financial rules and stays solvent.

Their job is not to scale. Their job is to stay on mission. As long as you donate to the Foundation, it can keep its mission and mission-oriented tech alive.

What this means is that you can very likely trust that a Foundation will stick with its mission, as long as it stays solvent and doesn't fold. Because its funding status is largely dependent on whether it's meeting its mission goals, you should be okay.

Note that Foundations can get complicated. For instance, Mozilla is both a corporation and a foundation. That means that both sides of the organization don't always move in lock-step: some decisions are made to the advantage of the corporation, others for the foundation. This is an unusual hybrid model but it does mean that things can be more variable at Mozilla than elsewhere.

Sometimes, technologies are developed under one auspice and a Foundation or some kind of non-profit is spun up to take care of them over the long duree. Zotero, a citation tool used by many academic researchers, was built at a university department and eventually transfered to a non-profit for oversight and continued development.

So if you find a foundation's website associated with a technology, or the technology's website indicates that it is foundation-made, assume that the technology will likely keep you at heart. 

Unless it goes under. So be sure to donate much and often.

What about B-Corps?

Likelihood of Enshittification: Medium

Note: there is an interesting middle ground in the concept of the "B-Corp." These are companies that operate as corporations but are also mission driven. Benefit-Corporations are similar in orientation: they must consider public benefits as a way to measure success as opposed to stock price alone.

A third party company evaluates "B-Corps" according to the following rules. They must:

• pay attention to social and environmental performance and impact
• legally change their governance structure so that all stakeholders have a say
• Be transparant about their performance and publicly post their metrics with respect to these social and environmental goals

For instance, bookshop.org is an online book retailer that gives money back to local independent bookstores. You can buy from them online, and they will ensure that a portion of the proceeds benefit brick and mortal stores of your choice.

What is interesting about the Benefits Corporation or the B-Corp is that other values are at stake and other people have a say in how the company runs.  The relevant social groups are as likely to include other stakeholders -- workers, for instance, maybe even users -- as they are to be limited to the Board of the Corporation.

Because metrics that are both non-monetary and pro-social are constantly a consideration for these companies, that means the "problems" they're trying to solve are not ones that involve growth at all cost or the production of massive amounts of localized wealth.

The technosocioeconomics of B-corps have yet to be fully determined but if you came across a technology developed by such an organization, you could likely expect it to meet its social and environmental benchmarks with its technical product as much as possible -- within the limitation of a for-profit company. 

Open Source?

Likelihood of Enshittification: Low to Medium

If it's built by an Open Source community, people are building it on their free time. Their goal is to ensure the tool stays free and open to inspection. This is, in general, great and good for everyone because free code is actually free, not like "free" Google products you pay for with your data (and your actual democratic freedom too).

There are lots of ways to demonstrate support for an open source product. You can buy them a coffee! You can follow along in the forums to figure out how they work. You can also join in to open source projects you love the most (I've done this--it's super fun!).  

Many open source tools just don't have the bells and whistles that corporate products do. Some manage to attract a lot of attention and assistance; others wither or transform themselves constantly. So some of these products start out not-too-great. This can easily be mistaken for enshittification, but just because a product is kind of shitty doesn't mean it's been enshittified.

Additionally, open source projects don't have ethics offices, and the demographics of the people who tend to code these projects are largely homogeneous. This is changing rapidly, but it can sometimes be hard to find projects and products that take into account various user needs associated with a disability or a gender-specific task.

Now, open source projects don't "enshittify" due to corporate interests taking over how the project goes. But because they are funded through people's donated time and labor, their technosocioeconomics are subject to a different calculus. They won't enshittify because they sold out, but they can become poorer in use due to the following shortcomings:

• The people who run it might lose interest. Everyone has another job to pay the bills. (Of course, if you're interested and capable, you could pick it up or join in.)
• It could be just someone who puts up a script and leaves it (we call this "abandonware") so you use it at your own risk.
• They may not have a decision-making strategy other than a) everyone has a voice or b) this one guy will decide all the things (we call this "benevolent dictator for life" or BDFL). This means the project could go in a direction you don't like.
• They might get into a fight about which direction to go and fork the code into more than one project, in which case you may need to pivot to follow the branch you agree with.

Most successful open source projects attempt to organize in some way (sometimes by starting a 501c3 or other non-profit org) so that they can avoid precisely this pitfalls. So be on the lookout for that as you evaluate.

There is one major way in which open source tools enshittify, however. Many tools start out open source and then get acquired or subsumed into companies or whatever.  Like how Cisco put their name on Jabber, an open source tool. In other words, the the big tech companies are gobbling up FOSS tools because they're "free."

The best is something like NextCloud or Wikipedia or Signal, starts a non-profit corporation or foundation to ensure the survival of their tech. Some people think this is selling out, but it certainly beats being bought out and enshittified.

As we say online, YMMV (Your mileage may vary.)

Enthusiasts' Communities

Likelihood of enshittification: Low

Some companies or foundations, for whatever reason (and there are many), decide to have massive community involvement in their products.  

One major reason is that the technology becomes defunct. When Nokia's operating system department folded, a hobbyist community hacked the phone's firmware and rescripted it so that they could keep using it. Many years later, the whole shebang is reformed as Jolla, makers of the Sailfish phone, and they still have a big community around them who makes software and apps for the phone and beta-tests releases.

Similarly, when Pebble was bought by FitBit and eventually canned, a group calling themselves the Rebble Alliance brought it back to life and through chats and hackathons over Discord, they kept those devices alive and well.

Another reason might be that the company or foundation doesn't have enough money or bandwidth to do everything. They need beta-testers, or they need content producers, or they need people to help each other answer questions on the forums.  

For instance, Mozilla has a large number of community members who answer questions about their products online, as well as entire open source communities who volunteer to work together and build things like Thunderbird, the Mozilla email suite.

Tech Cooperatives

Likelihood of enshittification: Low to Medium

These may build systems but they also . But it is possible to have a cooperative form of governance with respect to a technology or system. Here is a terrific list of many options to choose from.

Most of these cooperatives deploy, manage, govern, or collaborate around systems. But some of them also build technologies: for instance, the Zinc Coop builds community-owned digital spaces and photo sharing tools.

Cooperatives are governed by their members. There is no Board dictating what the company or organization should do. Instead, the relevant social group is the people who work there. That means the technologies will take shape in a way that serves those people.

This may not be the same thing, however, as serving users of a technology. Additionally, shared governance is very difficult (and not often practiced in American culture) such that new features or directions forward can be hard to agree on. As a result, a coop may be better to its members and have certain best interests at heart, but may have trouble achieving them.

That said, it's so cool to think some of our technologies are being built by people who actually, truly, at least try to listen to each other!

Self-Funded Vanity Projects

Likelihood of Enshittification: Medium to High

If it's something a billionaire is putting out there, it's either going to get eaten up by one of their existing companies or lose their interest overtime and become abandonware.

There is a possible third option which is that it may pass into the hands of an enthusiast community.  In which case you are lucky!

Or I suppose a fourth, if you start one yourself! 

Otherwise, buyer beware!

--

And there you have it! Several different technosocioeconomic arrangements, each of which may put your needs first or last when it comes to the direction their technology takes.  Keeping the relevant social groups in mind helps paint a clearer picture of where and how the technology may grow or change. Noticing the role that capital, funding, labor, decision-making, and other social and economic relationships behind the scenes play can also be a strong indicator of where the company is going next. 

Still, you never know when a backroom deal or a major economic blow ill happen to a company that makes something you've invested time, money, and personal information into --- and then it will enshittify rapidly. 

So even if you've done all your homework, constant vigilance and flexiilbity is the order of the day. 

* Go read Cory's full article, it's dead on. Alternatively, here is a video version.