The Enshittification of Personal Technology (Premium)

Tech journalist Corey Doctorow describes the way that services move from being free to abusing their users as “enshittification,” which is painfully accurate. It’s a process any Microsoft user will recognize---witness how previously-free Teams features are now part of the paid Teams Premium subscription---but it’s not just Microsoft, of course. We see this all over personal technology, from the ads ruining Google and Amazon search results to Netflix’s anti-customer strategy of charging extra for sharing accounts with family members.

Doctorow---whose recent book Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back is worth reading---offers more context.

“Here is how platforms die,” he writes. “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.”

There are so many examples of this. Social media ranks highly here: I adopted Instagram as a way to share my love of photography with the world---as opposed to that subset of the world’s population I personally know, which is what I use Facebook for---and while it was never perfect for that use, it has since devolved into a place for videos and shopping, and it is riddled with ads and sponsored posts that hide the content I want to see.

I’m no Luddite, and I don’t want to return to the age of mix CDs, paper photo albums, DVD movies, and dumb phones. But the enshittification of personal technology is a byproduct or symptom of a larger issue in which we collectively charge forward and adopt new technologies without first pausing to consider the ramifications. AI is such an obvious example that it’s almost worthless as a discussion point. But it’s not just AI. It’s everything.

What I care most about, of course, is Windows. And I’ve been complaining about the enshittification of Windows for what feels like forever. From the slippery slope of in-product advertising that began in Windows 8 to the forced telemetry, tracking, and sponsored apps that arrived in Windows 10 to the bogus hardware requirements, functional regressions, and forced Edge usage in Windows 11, it sometimes feels like Microsoft is purposefully undermining this once-revered product. OK, not just sometimes.

I know we have alternatives. And I know that every complaint I issue is like a dog whistle for fans of Linux or the Mac, or even the iPad or Chromebooks, an opportunity to explain how their favorite platform doesn’t suffer from the problems I seem so concerned with. And that’s true. But in a classic “grass is always greener” scenario, they each suffer from their own problems, too. Is each enshittified? I don’t know them well enough to say, honestly. But each does have its own problems, or at least some inherent blockers related to workflow, app availab...

Gain unlimited access to Premium articles.

With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?

Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC