Commercial priorities are killing the usefulness of web platforms and publishing, despairs Russ Swan.
I came across a new word recently, and it sums up the world in 2024 just perfectly. Coined a few months ago to describe the steady deterioration of internet platforms, it encapsulates how just about everything on planet Earth is getting worse.
The word is enshittification. Credit for its creation goes to tech writer Cory Doctorow, who observed how the big online platforms – everything from Facebook to Spotify to Amazon to Google – are busy making themselves unusable.
I remember when Google first burst upon a then-adolescent internet. Search had been a troubling matter, until this bright new service appeared. We loved its simple clean interface and reliable results. News of its existence was passed in whispers among the cognoscenti, like a secret key to the inside world of the web. We were charmed by its founding motto: Don’t be evil.
Google is now well and truly enshittified. Results are more polluted than the average British river, with paid promotions pushing what are still euphemistically called organic results off the first page.
What was a search engine is now the internet’s overlord of surveillance capitalism, recording and exploiting everything you do online. Tellingly, the motto was quietly dropped about six years ago.
The same story is retold on every major platform. I can no longer look at Facebook to see what my friends are up to because the cursed algorithm prefers to show me advertisements. Twitter or X or Twix or whatever it’s called is unusable since Elon Musk took over. Amazon has such a powerful monopoly in online sales that it extracts margins out of both buyer and seller.
Enshittification is spreading like mycelium on a warm damp substrate
Have you tried following a link to a news story recently? Even the most resilient of us will succumb to a clever bit of clickbait, only to be presented with an endless series of intrusive advertisements, cookie demands, pop-ups and pop-unders. Is it any wonder that readership levels are falling?
Enshittification is spreading like mycelium on a warm damp substrate. I tried to use an AI chatbot to check a detail about a car park, and the damned thing wouldn’t even start until I gave it a valid email address. I allowed my phone to download a ‘security update’, against my better judgement, and found that features disappeared and performance deteriorated. My domestic broadband service gets slower and less reliable every year.
More seriously, the enshittification of science is already upon us.
The less scrupulous academic publishers, in the pursuit of profit, no longer give a toss about quality. Pay-to-publish journals will take any old crap. Researchers, meanwhile, are under increasing pressure from greyminded accountants and their myopic obsession with metrics. Publish or be sacked.
Throw a little spice into the mix in the form of generative AI, the most recent and allpervasive flavour of enshittification.
A few strokes of a keyboard will generate text and images that might vaguely resemble a research paper, at least as far as a roboeditor is concerned.
This gibberish is then stolen by the next LLM bot, the bogus knowledge it contains absorbed into the next iteration of ‘science’, and the cycle continues.
Are we doomed, then? Are we doomed now, for that matter? Our only hope is for some sort of self-correcting mechanism: we stop using the platforms and publications that offer us less and less value for our time.
