ALL Internet Services Eventually SUCK! Here’s Why…

The journalist Cory Doctorow coined a term – enshitification – to describe the process by which Internet service providers lure users and businesses to their platforms, only to lock them in and then make the service both worse, and more costly.

You Need To Know This!!!

Cory laid out the concept in a blog post that was republished in the January 2023 edition of Wired like this:

Here is how platforms die:

• 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.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

The reason you need to know this is that Cory argues that “‘enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything”, with “enshittificatory” platforms leaving humanity in an “enshittocene”.

Why It Matters

You can read an interview with Cory here. But I want to make sure that you are always aware that anything you do with any provider on the Internet will ultimately end this way – no matter what you think.

So for your business, be careful about locking any of your services into providers you can’t move away from. And even for your personal stuff, make sure you can migrate away if you ever needed to.