The Enshittification Engine

(Spot on image, update from his earlier version by Chaz Hutton https://www.instagram.com/p/DDbmv-yNijL/)

When explaining the concept of enshittification, Cory Doctorow sets it out as the manner in which platforms die “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

It speaks to a general degradation of experience, of the thing that once drew you to a service or platform becoming increasingly lost, amidst adverts, trolls, bad user experience, and principally through a lack of care for the users. This can be done because users are locked in, as John Naughton notes, through a lack of interoperability and the network effect. So we have to just put up with more crap, as the platforms get rinsed for everything they can.

I was thinking about this recently when I saw Zoom’s new announcement (I thought it was parody at first, but alas, no, these tech dudes mean it). In it they state that “Zoom is now about so much more than video meetings. We are an AI-first company…” Then they go onto claim that their AI Companion will “Over time… translate into a fully customizable digital twin equipped with your institutional knowledge, freeing up a whole day’s worth of work and allowing you to work just four days per week.”

Let’s just take a moment to consider how batshit crazy that is. Will all our digital twins have meetings? Will I come back to work to find my digital twin has volunteered real me to take on more tasks? I’ll bet our digital twins won’t ask any awkward questions of company policy, though. And yeah, that age old promise of “it’ll free up more time”, and not, you know, be used as an excuse to lay people off.

I’ve seen calls for an AI university, for AI to make medical diagnoses, and as I highlighted in the last post, AI as the gatekeeper to knowledge sources. And as we already know, try speaking to a person at a bank, service provider and increasingly Doctor’s surgery.

A while ago, I suggested that if you wanted to know what the wealthy proponents of AI really valued, then watch their own behaviour. Now ask yourself, would Elon Musk be happy to have a meeting with your digital twin instead of the real you? Would they send their kids to AI schools, or be subject to AI medical diagnosis. Somehow I doubt it. But they have money, so can get the best doctors, teachers, investment bankers and so on. The AI version is for the rest of us.

This is enshittification – not of a platform, but of your life. Many aspects of your everyday life will be downgraded to the AI-as-default version. The things you currently do and take for granted will be sold back to you as the premium version. For a monthly subscription you can have access to real people, otherwise it’s AI for you. Paying for access to better service has always been the case of course, but AI allows for it on steroids due to a combination of two factors: performance and cost. It’s just good enough to meet most needs without damaging the customer base and it’s a lot cheaper to run than people. Also, as with platform enshittification, now that everyone is doing AI, where are you going to go? There’s no escape.

The demands of capitalism turn AI into an enshittification engine, and we’re locked in. This is almost inevitable with the combination of those two factors of performance and cost. So, the next time you see people propounding how AI will improve your life and efficiency, substitute “the enshittification of my life” for all those promises and you’ll be closer to the truth. But let’s not feel hopeless, as Doctorow says, it’s a choice. You can choose to use different platforms and providers (sometimes) and we can all choose to value and promote good human actions. I would suggest that openness also offers some antidote to this. As does not promoting every piece of tech utopian bullshit. This is not about AI being useful, it clearly is in many places, rather it’s about what happens when it gets enmeshed in society and capitalism without due care.

Anyway, merry Christmas everyone.

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