The "Enshittification" of Innovation

Cory Doctorow recently wrote of "enshittification," a term that seems to be catching on. (I have since seen it used in such publications as The Financial Times.) It denotes a cycle of business activity in which businesses are "good to their users" at the outset, gain a consumer base which cannot easily depart because of "network effects" and "switching costs," and then exploit that "captive" consumer --successfully for at least a time, though with (at least if the market works) the abuse of the consumer catching up with and ultimately costing said businesses.

It is, of course, to be expected that with business following such a trajectory technological "innovation" will reflect the imperative--that companies will mainly think about how to more fully profit from abusing the consumer rather than set about that more difficult task of inducing them to use their service by producing things they would actually want to buy. And it would seem that the great wave of techno-hype of the '10s was exemplary of that. Consider what a buzzword "Big Data" became. Of course, one could envision the collection and analysis of data on a revolutionary scale with revolutionary thoroughness yielding something significant. However, I remember that the analysts of these matter often talked about Big Data as some great boon to advertising specifically--talked about it breathlessly, and not only in the pages of some trade journal but more general publications, as if people generally were supposed to be excited about advertising efforts being refined, and individually targeted to them.

Of course the great majority of people would not be excited about such a prospect. They do not want more collection and sifting of their personal data for the sake of more individualized advertising online. What they want is for Big Business to leave their data alone, and a better Ad-blocker so that ads will never be forced on them again. But one would never have guessed that from the coverage of these matters. (Consider, for instance, this New York Times piece, with its few cursory references to "privacy advocates" in an overwhelmingly enthusiastic item.)

The enshittification imperative, in confirmation of the view of the press as the "stenographers of power," was absolutely taken for granted, and ultimately successful here, advertising today indeed individually targeted in this manner. (Thus when you look at your browser's privacy and security settings you are likely to see the higher setting come with a "warning" that the advertising you see will be less individualized for you--as if this were a bad thing!)

Thinking over the fact I find myself again recalling the disappointing record of "innovation" in recent decades. Along with the way that, for example, investors' love affair with tech was never the same after the "dot-com" crash, or the prevalence of short-termism in company decision-making and the preference of business for "sustaining" innovation over the "disruptive" kinds that people selling fantasies about gales of creative destruction love talking about, the fact that enshittification may absorb so much R & D effort may be a reason why technological progress has been so grindingly slow.