#enshittification

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If anyone is involved in the UK Party they might want to look at motion A6 for the spring conference
which includes

"The Green Party supports users’ rights to control the digital devices they own,
including the right to install, modify or replace operating systems and
software, access full file systems, and remove pre-installed applications,
particularly on computers and smartphones."

and some amendment discussions around @pluralistic proposals on killing DRM and

@pluralistic > Disenshittification Nation (29 Jan 2026):

Like all the best Americans, I am a Canadian, and while I have lived abroad for more than two decades, I flatter myself that I am still steeped in our folkways, and so as is traditional at events like this, I would like to begin by apologising... I'm sorry... I'm really sorry... I know that at a tech event, you expect to hear from a speaker who will come up and tell you how to lose hundreds of billions of dollars building data-centres for the money-losingest technology in human history, a technology so wildly defective that we've had to come up with new, exotic words to describe its defects, like "hallucination." A technology that will never recoup the capex already firehosed on – let alone the trillions committed to it – and whose only possible path to glory is to somehow …

Reading and had to put it down after the Facebook case study because it made me so angry.

Specifically, I'm angry that our need to be social has been used to manipulate and control us. And it makes me more angry that most people stay on a shitty platform. AND it makes me even more angry that those who do leave, jump to a new platform that will be enshittified in a few years.

Thanks @pluralistic for spreading this message. I will return to the book once I simmer down

This film is for anyone trying to understand why the world's going to shit and what they can do about it.

From Uber rides to endless battles with customer service bots, Cory’s journey becomes a frustrating, absurd mirror of the very platforms he’s trying to expose.

We’ll be there as Cory dives in headfirst to confront the Enshittocene. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’ll be entertaining!

Stay tuned and join us as we wade out of the enshittosphere @pluralistic

The One Film Brave Enough To Tell You Why Everything Sucks Let Cory take you on a wild, topsy turvy, painfully funny, and at times frightening tour of the hellscape that is our modern society... While on the speaking tour for his book, Cory tells us why the internet and services we rely on... and once loved... are, well, turning into steaming piles of shit. And why is this? It’s a tale as old as time, corporate greed and a business model that intentionally uses venture capital to run companies at a loss until they create monopolies, which then squeeze both customer and supplier dry. The one percent wins. Everyone else gets screwed.
Our Cameras Will Catch Every drop of shit! Imagine Manufacturing Consent mind-melded with Bowling For Columbine and you’ll get a rough idea of how we see the Enshittification film. We’re filming Cory as he takes Enshittification out on the road with a book tour and a series of staged pranks. From Uber rides to endless battles with customer service bots, Cory’s journey becomes a frustrating, often absurd mirror of the very platforms he’s trying to expose. And we’ll be there as Cory dives in head first to confront the Enshittocene. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’ll be entertaining. Cory’s tour becomes the spine of the film, taking us through how and why everything’s gone to shit.
Enshittification The Film! Across a backdrop of weird and whacky images from the tech hellscape we live in now.
You're going to eat shit and like it. We’ll be using artwork from the upcoming Enshittification graphic novel, animating it for the film, and using it to deliver hard-to-grasp ideas in candy-coated form. We will combine that with the tour footage, ‘found footage’ from the length and breadth of the internet, ‘news’ archive footage, expert interviews with thought leaders, and candid interviews with everyday users, on both sides of the shit sandwich. The film will call out the key toilet jockeys behind Enshittification, pulling no punches, and naming names - Google, Uber, Amazon, Meta, and even Boeing.

Fascinating @pluralistic is developing his theory of into a general theory of the rise and eventual collapse of power based on network effects.

Short version: Network effects make switching costly. User are trapped and become sitting ducks for ever-increasing exploitation. As long as the cost of switching is larger than the costs of being exploited, nominally free users rationally decide grin and bear it. But when the costs of being exploited becomes to onerous, it starts to look attractive to buckle the costs of switching. Particularly if the burden of exploitation rises for lot of people in parallel.

This, so the general theory, not only applies to social media, but also to other systems with strong network effects, such as the dollar system.

I'm sure economists could turn this into a formula to predict the point where networks suddenly crumble.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

Search on YouTube is at its worst right now. You type "how to make apple pie," and the algorithm gives you three ads, a viral cat short, and a "For You" video about gaming.

It is what @pluralistic rightly calls enshittification.

I spent the last month refactoring the core script for search fixer. Big improvements:
> A new settings UI that doesn't look like an airplane cockpit.
> Anti-Shorts Protocol: Revert shorts to the normal player.
> Fixed the filters for those annoying auto-generated "mixes" that clutter the results.

https://phoennix.gitlab.io/youtubesearchfix/update.html

Reclaim your feed and I hope you give it a try✨🙏

…

Like a 21st Century Chomsky, the noted visionary and no fucks-giver Cory Doctorow surveyed modern society and declared: “We need a word that adequately describes the hell that’s our world.”

And thus, the word of the year was brought into existence: “Enshittification”

Join us on our journey out of the Enshittocene, as we document the journalist, the activist, the tech crusader extraordinaire Cory Doctorow and everything

@pluralistic

enshittification noun | in-shit-uh-fuh-KAY-shun When a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits ‘Enshittification’ is spreading through the zeitgeist like shit through a goose. The American Dialect Society named it their word of the year in 2023. Australia's Macquarrie Dictionary named it their word of the year for 2024. And millions of people have used it to describe the inescapable online dumpster fire that’s roasting them alive. Enshittification is the word that best sums up our era. And this film will sum up that word.
A whole bunch of weird, late-stage capitalism clip art with the words "Enshittification - What is it?" plastered over the top. Boy, you're in for a journey.
The internet avenger! Journalist. Activist. Tech Crusader. Acclaimed Science Fiction Author. Internet Avenger. Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘Enshittification’ in a series of posts to his daily blog, and it took the internet by storm leading him to write his latest book - ENSHITTIFICATION: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. He is a NY Times best-selling author, co-founder of the UK Open Rights Group and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He blogs daily at Pluralistic.net. He has a die hard cult following of over a million people across multiple platforms.
WELCOME TO THE ENSHITTOSCENE Ever get that feeling that the apps are out to get you? Nothing seems to work as it should? It’s not just you, the internet and online services are getting worse, fast. When just ordering a sweater online, or getting to a meeting on time turns into an existential nightmare, you've entered the Enshittocene. Your tour guide? Cultural shit stirrer, our last, best hope: Cory Doctorow.

Hey @pluralistic. wanted to let you and others know that we just bought our copy of from bookshop.org with the plan to donate it to our local library after we read it.

BUT THE BOOK THEN DONATE TO YOUR LIBRARY. Then, later, buy a copy to keep.

gonna be wearing out this phrase, grace a @pluralistic's talk, 'a post-american, enshittification-resistant internet': guillotinable plut.

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet