It was designed that way
Erin Kernohan-Berning
7/31/20244 min read
If you’ve been using the internet for a while you may have noticed that social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter, among others, have become less useable. What started out with the promise of you follow someone > they post stuff > you see their stuff is now a jungle of intrusive ads and infinite algorithmic feeds. There’s a joke on TikTok, for instance, that once you follow a content creator you never see their videos in your feed again.
There’s a word for this degradation of useability in social media platforms – enshittification. Coined by author and blogger Cory Doctorow in 2022 and declared 2023’s Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, enshittification refers to the decrease in quality of a product that comes with a company’s shift in focus from the user to their shareholders. Originally coined with respect to social media platforms in particular, the term enshittification has been rapidly expanded to apply to a variety of technologies and services that have suffered in the face of extractive business practices.
Enshittification doesn’t describe a new phenomenon, rather it elucidates a progression that arguably has been going on for at least a couple of decades. Doctorow outlines the following steps in the process of enshittification:
“…first, [platforms] 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.”
Much of enshittification stems from early efforts to monetize the internet. Morten Rand-Hendriksen, instructor at LinkedIn Learning, describes in his video “How we lost the war for Web2 to capitalism” a change in the early 2000s that may very well have paved the way for enshittification. When blogging stopped being a way to share information on the internet and instead became a way to generate advertising revenue, that also caused a shift from designing useful tools for the sharing of ideas to instead designing tools to make money regardless of usefulness.
To be clear, this isn’t about designing better tools to make someone’s job more efficient and therefore allowing them to make more money. And this also isn’t about designing a really great product that many people find useful and want to buy into. Rather, this is about designing platforms that exploit their userbase to generate profits that are then diverted to shareholders.
In 2010 Metafilter user blue_beetle commented “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” This comment was directed at the news aggregator site, Digg, and has since been applied to platforms like Facebook. However, similar sentiments were being leveled at television in the 1970s, according to futurist Bryan Alexander. In a 1973 film titled “Television Delivers People” a caption reads “In commercial broadcasting the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold.”
In his book “Ruined by Design” designer Mike Monteiro notes “making money is a requirement of starting and maintaining a business, but it’s not a goal.” For example, creating a business that makes hammers requires being able to sell those hammers to maintain that business and for the business owner and workers to make a living. Money is certainly a requirement. But the goal is to make hammers. Enshittification, according to futurist Andrew Curry, occurs when companies “become takers not makers.” Or when business models become extractive. When money is not just the requirement but the entire point, design suffers.
Monteiro points to social media, such as Facebook, as an example of how the way a company makes its money (in this case serving users and their data to advertisers) can lead to ethically suspect design decisions. Design decisions such as allowing a proliferation of ads containing false information to enter users’ feeds, or leveraging rage farming to increase engagement and therefore ad revenue, or for creating user interfaces that manipulate users. Rand-Hendriksen in his TikTok videos describes “dark UX”, a set of design tactics that are meant to prevent users from easily disengaging with an app. All these design decisions are made in the service of making money for corporations, not providing users with a useful product.
How can we combat this problem? Monteiro calls for a designer code of ethics. Unlike disciplines such as medicine, the tech sector has been rudderless when it comes to industry ethics. A code of ethics could help centre the good of humanity in design decisions. As users, if we understand that our technology is working the way it is because, as Monteiro says, “it was designed that way” then we can think about that technology more critically and stop laying the blame for its enshittification at our own feet.
Learn more
Social Quitting. 2022. Cory Doctorow. (Medium) Last accessed 2024/07/25.
How we lost the war for Web2 to capitalism. 2021. Morten Rand-Hendriksen. (TikTok) Last accessed 2024/07/30.
“You are the product”: one interesting source for the meme. 2019. Bryan Alexander. (bryanalexander.org) Last accessed 2024/07/30.
Ruined by Design. 2019. Mike Monteiro. Mule Design. (Dead tree edition) Last accessed 2024/07/30.
The ‘enshittification’ of the corporate world. 2023. Andrew Curry. (The Next Wave Futures) Last accessed 2024/07/30.
The Enshittifcation of TikTok. 2023. Morten Rand-Hendriksen. (TikTok) Last accessed 2024/07/30.
The 'Enshittification' of TikTok. 2023. Cory Doctorow. (Wired) Last accessed 2024/07/30.
Dark UX. 2021. Morten Rand-Hendriksen. (TikTok) Last accessed 2024/07/30.
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