craigmcn

There’s a word for what happens when a useful tool slowly turns against the people using it. Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined it in 2022: enshittification. The American Dialect Society made it their word of the year in 2023, which tells you something about how widely the feeling had already spread. The pattern Doctorow describes is straightforward: platforms start by being good to users, then degrade that experience to serve advertisers and business partners, then degrade it further to extract value for shareholders. At some point the product that was supposed to help you is mostly just using you.

The fitness tracker is the perfect illustration. Kent Beck wrote about this in January after his Fitbit buzzed to inform him that it looked like he was exercising. He was walking. He knew he was walking. He was the one doing it. The notification exists not because anyone thought it would be useful but because someone at Fitbit needed to demonstrate that their automatic exercise detection feature was generating engagement. The watch buzzed, the user looked at it, the numbers went up. That the user found it annoying is simply not a metric anyone was tracking.

What makes this particularly galling is the subscription dimension. I’m paying for these tools. The Apple Watch, the fitness app, the navigation software, the music service aren’t free products quietly monetizing my attention because that’s the trade-off. I’ve already paid. And yet the notifications pile up, the sponsored results creep in, the upsells appear in places carefully chosen to be hard to ignore. When a free platform degrades its experience to serve advertisers, that’s cynical but at least coherent. When a product I’m paying for does it, that’s just taking the money twice.

The mechanism Beck identifies is worth understanding because it explains why this keeps happening without requiring anyone to be a villain. Individual contributors need metrics to justify their work. Metrics create incentives. Incentives shape what gets built. Nobody decided to make the product worse. They just each made locally rational decisions that added up, over time, to a device that buzzes you while you’re walking to tell you that you’re walking. The fix isn’t a better metrics system. It’s someone with enough authority deciding that interrupting users who didn’t ask to be interrupted is simply something we don’t do. That person is increasingly rare.