DOCTOROW COINED THE TERM “ENSHITTIFICATION” in 2022, though it was hardly a new phenomenon even then. Facebook had started burying all posts with external hyperlinks in 2017 in a bid to force users to spend more time with its lousy ads; Apple had been purposely sabotaging the quality of iMessage texts since at least 2013; Amazon had retooled its search results to aggressively preference sellers who had spent heavily on ads, and de-emphasized price comparisons, which were replaced with a price-hiking algorithm called Project Nessie starting in 2015. (After four years, Amazon dropped Nessie, perhaps presuming they could hit their benchmarks by milking third-party sellers for an ever larger cut of their revenues.)
Massive internet platforms aside, companies like Boeing and GE had been enshittifying for years, in arguably a direct descendant of “planned obsolescence,” a term whose first usage I could find came from a 1929 Christian Science Monitor essay contemplating the fashion industry’s exhausting habit of raising and lowering hemlines.
But the era of enshitment clearly started to accelerate in the early post-pandemic period, as evidenced by the parallel output of intellectual kindred spirit Yanis Varoufakis, who Doctorow reminds us worked for a video game developer after resigning his post as the finance minister of Greece, to identify and analyze an epidemic of algorithm-abetted parasitism he called “technofeudalism,” another description of the business model behind enshittification.
Both Technofeudalism and Enshittification owe much inspiration to Elon Musk’s leveraged buyout of Twitter, where Doctorow has nearly a half million followers and Varoufakis has 1.2 million. For the Greek economist, Musk’s self-destructive pursuit of Twitter, which destroyed his personal brand and tanked Tesla sales, was definitive proof that something fundamental had changed about the sociology of capitalism.
“If I had to name one person to illustrate the need for technofeudalism, both word and concept, in order to understand our collective predicament, it would be Elon Musk,” Varoufakis wrote in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. “For all his success as manufacturer, and despite attaining richest-man-in-the-world status, neither his achievements nor his wealth granted him entry into the new ruling class … he has lacked a gateway to the gigantic rents that cloud capital can furnish. Twitter could be that missing gateway.”