<
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish>
"It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely
on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once.
Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI
slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people they are on the
service to communicate with. This is infuriating. Frustrating. And, depending
on how important those services are to you, terrifying.
In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going
on all around us:
enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word
is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. It isn’t just a
way to say something got worse. It’s an analysis that explains the way an
online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s
causing everything to get worse, all at once.
This moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material
phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an
epidemiology. When doctors observe patients who are sick with a novel pathogen,
their first order of business is creating a natural history of the disease.
This natural history is an ordered catalogue of the disease’s progress: what
symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order?
Here’s the natural history of enshittification:
1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business
customers.
3. Next, they abuse those customers to claw back all the value for themselves –
and become a giant pile of shit.
This pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you’ll start seeing it,
too. Take Amazon, a company that started out by making it possible to have any
book shipped to your door and then became the only game in town for everything
else, even as it dodged taxes and filled up with self-immolating crapgadgets
and other junk.
In Jeff Bezos’s original business plan for Amazon, the company was called
Relentless. Critics say that this is a reference to Bezos’s cutthroat
competitive instincts, but Bezos always insisted that it was a reference to his
company’s relentless commitment to customer service.
How did Amazon go from a logistics company that got packages to you quickly and
efficiently to a behemoth of digital content defined by the Prime experience
(which has much less to do with free shipping now and more with everything
else)?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
