The finest explanation yet made of why enshittification is coming for your kit

Unusual times call for unusual heroes, and it has to be said that the unlikely source of the Norwegian Consumer Council  has absolutely nailed the concept of enshittification.

Just in case you haven't come across it yet, enshittification is the concept that platforms and products get worse over time. It's not just a function of things naturally falling apart due to entropy either; rather it's a deliberate choice made by companies to degrade their offerings as they move through the product cycle.

The word enshittification was coined by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow in 2022. In his classic model, platforms and products initially offer genuinely good functions and services. These are then degraded, however, as they chase business customers, before eventually everything gets borked for everyone as they look to claw back value for their shareholders.

And if you want a clear explanation of how it works, the Norwegian Consumer Council absolutely has your back.

Enshittification and your kit

There is plenty of enshittification underway in the current industry, and likely more to come by the time we get to NAB. We're not going to point our fingers at anyone in our industry, however. Rather we'll join a merry pile on on Tesla.

The Norwegian Consumer Council video ends with a car demanding payment for the brake function to work — a classic illustration of what was once basic functionality disappearing behind a paywall. And while largely satirical, Tesla has made similar moves for slightly less mission-critical features.

It has gated both hardware features, such as additional range, and software perks like autopilot behind software paywalls. How annoying is that? To know that your car is capable of getting you to your destination, but you will have to pay extra to actually unlock the ability? 

Some platforms operate almost like drug dealers: get them hooked first then start ramping up the cost. Amazon let sellers onto its platform then started introducing fees. Facebook worked to attract media companies then prioritized boosted posts once they were dependent. Google? Don't even start us on Google, which is even starting to rewrite headlines in its mainstream service, not just its terminally-enshittified Google Discover.

The question nowadays is: Do you actually own the camera you just bought? Or have you rather more accurately licensed it subject to the whims of the manufacturer's marketing department?

What can you do?

What action can you take? Precious little. Despite the title of his excellent book on the subject Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, Doctorow is clear-eyed about the degree of consumer power when it comes to moving the needle on all this. Voting with your wallet only gets you so far, real change happens when people pull the structural levers that enabled enshittification to take hold in the first place.

Which brings us back to The Norwegian Consumer Council. As well as the killer YouTube video, it has coordinated with over 70 consumer groups across Europe and the US to send formal letters to policymakers in the EU, UK, and US. These letters demand stronger consumer rights, mandatory interoperability, data portability, right to repair, and the actual enforcement of existing competition laws. 

Enshittification was named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society in 2023. If The Norwegian Consumer Council has anything to do with it, in a few years it might have to add the reverse unshittification too.