Users, advertisers – we are all trapped in the ‘enshittification’ of the internet

theguardian.com:

“T hose whom the Gods wish to destroy,” says the adage, “they first make mad.” Actually, that’s overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it’s been clouding our perceptions of what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that.

Examples? Everywhere you look. Take Google search that, once upon a time (1998), was elegant, efficient and a massive improvement on what went before. You typed in a query and got a list of websites that were indicated by a kind of automated peer-review called PageRank. Now, the first page of results from a search for “high-quality saucepans” produces a myriad of “sponsored” items, ie advertisements.

Try shopping for “the best multimeter” on Amazon – once a byword for an efficient online experience – and you are immediately confronted by four “sponsored” results (ie ones the vendor has paid Amazon to highlight). Once upon a time, Facebook and Twitter showed you stuff from your friends and followers; now you get a torrent of things that the platform’s algorithms think might increase your “engagement”. Instagram has become a machine designed to keep you in constant scrolling mode. Ditto TikTok – on steroids. And so on.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow, the great tech critic, we now have a term for this decay process in online platforms – enshittification. “First,” he writes, “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.” Enshittification results from the convergence of two things: the power