It’s not been a great year on this increasingly embattled planet and there’s a nasty new word for a nasty experience: enshittification, coined by Cory Doctorow.
As ever Big Tech is leading the way. This is what Gemini tells us: The enshittification of Windows refers to the ongoing decline of the operating system’s quality as Microsoft shifts its focus from user experience to corporate extraction, forced cloud integration, and artificial intelligence features.
Where Microsoft leads others follow and the marketing universe is chock-full of companies hell bent on shifting their focus from “user experience to corporate extraction, forced cloud integration, and artificial intelligence features.”
Yours truly in currently trying to install a` new Virgin Media router. In the process this particular customer champion is demanding all sorts of security sign-ins to its crappy app, which I neither want nor need. Information gathering one presumes.
But it’s also the case with mundane consumer products. Consultant Michael Farmer in his excellent Substack itemises the way consumer product companies no longer try to offer better products to increase sales (their sales are static at best) and major on smaller portions at higher prices. He observes that this is one of the problems for WPP: these companies dominate its vast client list and, essentially, they’re going nowhere.
The riots breaking out across Europe are another sign: people are furious about getting less for their money – like education – even as prices rise remorselessly. Who’d be a debt-laden student these days if they had other options?
The enshitter-in-chief is, of course, President Trump who is doing his damndest to destroy American democracy, intent only on buttressing his supposed reputation as a strongman and lining the already-bulging pockets of his tech pals and greedy family.
Back in the marketing world advertising is reduced to the role of participant in a gigantic con operation, trying to browbeat consumers they’re getting a better deal when demonstrably they’re not. Close as many supermarket tills as you can to get customers to do the work themselves; join our loyalty scheme or pay twice as much.
No wonder the current fashion is for influencers, people who have made an online reputation doing something else flogging any old product for money. Expertise doesn’t come into it.
A decade ago many of us had tired of advertisers and agencies majoring on purpose. As investor Terry Smith famously observed: The purpose of Hellmann’s is sandwiches. Purpose may have been silly at times but it was a damn sight better than enshittification.
