I thought that the term "enshittification" was just a thing we said in software circles, but it turns out that it's being used for... everything. But let me back up a little.
In software and technology, the term started to show up when talking about the big social platforms. Remember when they were useful and allowed you to keep in touch and the goings on of your friends? Yeah, those days are long gone. They're gone because those platforms only exist to sell ads and increase engagement. You're forced to endure all of the noise to get anything out of it at all, and since the network is not interoperable or portable, you can't just lift and shift your network.
All of it is getting worse, and AI is one of the biggest problems. So much of the "content" on the Internet is written by machines. All of it uses link bait titles like, "This actor makes bold statement about co-star." If this were written in a more classic journalistic style, it would say the names of the actors and something about the statement. It's infuriating that even the entertainment things are going this way. For more important things like Google, they're giving you AI summaries of things instead of showing you the things, which of course is bad because the AI doesn't think critically (although, neither do most people it seems). It doesn't know what's real. This will get worse because all of the things that publish stuff and rely on ad revenue (also from Google) will stop publishing because they don't get any traffic. It's not sustainable. It was bad enough that everyone wanted to be a "content creator" (a totally meaningless designation), but now the Internet is flooded with people and things that aren't even real.
I'm reading on LinkedIn now that basically all of job recruiting is broken. People use AI to spam thousands of job postings, and recruiters use AI tools to find the "right" candidates. Obviously that doesn't work. That so many jobs are remote makes it even worse because there's no geographical limit to applicants. I always preferred to hire from my network, and that would still be the case if I was in a position to hire people. It feels like those days are gone.
Oh, and dishonorable mention to all of the online tooling that the schools use. Most of it is just terrible, and I'm sure the teachers don't care for it either.
The term is spreading to new contexts and variations on meaning. But the intent is the same: Things are getting crappier. Think about how electronic food ordering has changed the relationship with restaurants. The desire for the cheapest goods has led to lower standards for everything (this is also called the "Walmarting" of things). Entertainment is leaning into time-wasting, ephemeral crap online. And obviously, you've seen what's happened to our government and politics.
I'm generally optimistic about things, but I feel like so many things that used to inspire wonder and curiosity are getting crappy, or the crappy things are obscuring the good stuff. I hope that this is a temporary situation.
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