SPEAK UP: Enshittification Nation

Why do we endure the abuse we get from the companies and institutions we depend on?

We know there’s a torrent of anxiety-provoking news out there, but something that really hit a nerve online (and close to home) this week was an essay that media critic Ed Zitron published in his newsletter. Titled “Never Forgive Them,” it asks a simple question about why so many things in our online and everyday lives feel so frustrating. Why, exactly, Zitron asks, do we put up with how awful tech firms have made our experience of almost every interaction or transaction? Weren’t these people supposed to make things easier?

The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.

It’s everywhere, even in politics. Sam Stein over at The Bulwark has a piece today about how online political fundraisers are finally under pressure to rein in the spam. We know you can all relate.

Now, “enshittification” is the popular (so popular it’s earned a “word of the year” title) term for this effect, describing everything from how difficult it is to figure out which streaming service your favorite show is on to negotiating a chain of chatbots to make a complaint to your insurance company about a claim denial. You’ve probably gotten angry about your online experiences as you’ve been doing your holiday shopping. You may even have run into a wall trying to access your favorite newsletters (we get it — we get plenty of emails asking about access issues, and we’ve run into them ourselves. Which e-mail address did we sign in with again?)

But what Zitron points to goes further. He identifies a pervasive sense people have that the companies that supposedly exist to serve us are actively working against us, or at the very least treating us not like clients or customers, but as ore to be mined.

You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.

We really encourage you to read the piece. And we want to know: What do you struggle with in this modern world of supposed conveniences? What do you think sucks? What makes you mad as hell so that you don’t want to take it anymore? Why do you think it’s happening…and what do you think needs to and can be done? And if you think there’s anything that bucks the trend and is working out just great, we’d love to hear about that, too.

These open forums are for our subscribers, and, as such, we expect people to be generous and open, to listen and to share. This is not for anyone with an internet connection. This is your space.

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We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.

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