Enshittification

· 3 min read

I came across the term ’enshittification’ coined by the great Cory Doctorow.

It’s the idea that things/platforms decay overtime. This is because the incentive structures we’ve created mean that you need to increase output with less input in order to maximise profits to shareholders. This leads to worse quality.

With digital platforms, companies do this by offering useful services for free to lock in users, and then the suppliers. Once they are both locked in, they shift the focus to the shareholders, and the incentive structure means that they no longer need to provide quality for the user (you’ve already locked them in with high switching costs).

Doctorow says its a ‘3 stage process’

Here is how 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. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Examples

Along with many other services and goods.

Exit Voice and Loyalty

Exit, Voice, Loyalty is a book with the idea that in response to declining quality, customers have three options. Exit (leave), or voice (complain to try and repair or improve the quality) or loyalty (stay).

This applies to much more than enshittification, and it is a broad framework for the options we have when market dynamics are at play.

The issue with digital platforms is that you can’t take your data and migrate to a less enshittified platform. I remember I deleted my facebook account sometime in 2014, and I had no option to take my data with me.

With people locked into digital ecosystems, like the google cloud or apple’s services, it becomes much harder to ’exit’. Most users just put up with it and don’t voice there concerns, so they’re stuck.

I quite liked ’twitter’ as a platform, but over the past years, it’s enshittified to the point where I can no longer use it and remain sane - Sam Harriss said the biggest ’life hack’ he’s experienced in the last few years has been leaving twitter.

Sadly enshittification is everywhere, and with AI I suspect it will only get worse.

The whole concept reminds me of the power of incentives.

Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome Charlie Munger

When we have maligned or perverse incentives, don’t be surprised at the outcome.

Craft

· 1 min read

Reading this beautiful long reads post on the value of sustained attention and craft in the age of AI

Mary Oliver writes that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” I am learning to pay attention, to be devoted to these songs, this craft, this instrument. And this is formative. As screens fragment our attention, as AI pushes for speed and efficiency at the cost of our humanity, as the academy puts a pinch of incense on the altar of innovation, slowing down and revisiting a text again and again (whether sheet music, a book, a recording, a poem) is a revolutionary act. It turns you into a particular kind of reader, one attentive to the minute, to nuances, to how meaning can shift ever so slightly when this word is used rather than that.

One Hand Clapping

· 3 min read
Abhis.blog cover

A fantastic book that I think I need to read again to fully absorb. ‘Awe’ inducing in the way the best science books are. I can no way compress the book into a short blog post, but here are a few take aways.

The book opens with the conundrum, that if existence is all material, atoms and chemical reactions, then why does it feel like something ’to be’? Essentially pushing back against materialism/reductionism, and opening a bucketload of questions and threads.

He proposes the concept of ‘ideas/essences’ that contain meaning, and they exist independently from our imagination.

Not in a ‘magical/mystical sense’. But instead that they are real patterns/organisations in nature and our minds can discover them. They exist in nature whether or not you imagine them, but are not detached from the material world; they are embedded in the structure, relations and causal flow of the entire system.

Emergence is a good example to understand this, that ’the whole is greater than its parts’. Molecules are not just atoms, but also contain information about their configuration and shape. A melody is not just the notes, it is the harmony produced by their arrangement.

“An emergent system has properties that are not reducible to the properties of its components. "

He gives the example of carbon and oxygen. Biochemically, they are like the ‘chemical Vishnu’ and ‘chemical Shiva’ of nature. Carbon with it’s ability to form four separate chemical bonds, ‘unify electron clouds into a communal whole, build impressive molecules of increasing scale’. Oxygen on the other hand with it’s ruthless ability to break bonds and steal electrons.

With the idea of ’essences’, they are not just ‘mere elements’ but they play a functional meaningful role in a larger system as destroyers and creators. Meaning emerges from the relationship of things to other things; the relational nature of everything.

Material things are not just material things, but also having an embedded meaning from their relationship with other things.

That’s what the Koan ‘what’s the sound of one hand clapping’ gets at by the way. “When two hands come together, the sound is what’s born out of their contact”. There are not two things, but just one thing and its their interaction that is making the sound. There is a oneness, nature knows no boundaries.

Something one can experience from a subjective single person perspective too (meditation).

I like his concluding sentences.

You must stop seeing your mind as being opposed to nature and rather see it as an integral part of it… your brain is a corner of the universe where nature’s ideas compress into a singularity

Overall mind bending and wide ranging book exploring the origins of life, evolution, selfhood, the mind, consciousness and much more. Too much marginalia. I’m going to have to read it again…

TLDR : Meaning is real and that it arises within the relationships and organisation of nature itself.