Entshittification

Entshittification

I was putting up my Christmas lights yesterday… and surprise! a part of the string of lights did not work! Just like last year. It reminded me of the tire on my new wheel barrow; the tire started losing air shortly after I bought it, even after a new inner tube that was only 1 year old. I was told I had to store it inside if I wanted it to last. All of this stuff is sh–. All of it planned to fail. Contrast that with the old 1965 wheel barrow we have at the cottage which is built with steel 3x the thickness of my new one and that still has its original tire which is still full of air. What does this tell me? That those who in control of the money have figured out that they make a lot more money if they sell us more and more SH– that breaks more and more often. Not really a great idea when we have the oceans filling with garbage and have microplastics in our rain water.

Also, because our behaviour is SO very social and impacted by our what is around us – as made clear by the fact that cleaning up garbage the crime rate decreases – I am convinced that when we have more SH– that does not work or is ripping us off and cannot trust it BOTH affects us deeply and is ALSO a reflection of how damaged we are. Thus, our state of Entshitification is both a travesty in that we make more and more garbage and more and more pollutions and more and more stuff that breaks but also it is a sad commentary on how much we have declined as people and a society because Entshitification is also a reflection of the state of our souls.

Which brings me to our title: Entshitification. This is a new word invented in 2022 by Canadian Cory Doctorow. The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year. In Cory’s words Enshittification is a descriptor of service degradation as applied to the internet: “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.” He has now written an entire book (which I purchased) on both the process and what we can do to stop it from happening. What I would like to chat with you today about is not this limited version of the concept but a society wide view where we see EVERYTHING in our society, including our intelligence and health, as suffering from the process of Enshittification.

Let’s start with a parable from the Indian {India} Jesuit Priest Anthony de Mello [1]:

A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the

brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He

scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings

and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the

cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of

its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor.

“He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’re chickens.” So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

So what has the parable to do with Enshittification? You probably have your own but for the sake of this writing I want to propose that because we such social beings who derive our sense of self from our culture when we see our rich and powerful using Enshittification for personal gain they not only destroy their companies [in the longer term] but our culture and most of the minds/hearts within that culture. In other words, what Enshittification does is turn us into chickens when we all have the possibility of being Eagles. What does it mean to be a chicken? I mean a person/culture is afraid, is unable to change and adapt, sees themselves as victims first, stop innovating, blames others for their problems and worst of all becomes isolated, addiction prone and gives up when faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges. A key point of the parable is that we become what we are surrounded by. If we are surrounded by Enshittification we start to become like it. Clearly others have applied this concept to other problems in society. For example, Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, applied the concept to US power in general: military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations.

I mentioned above that Enshittification could even be contributing to the decline in our IQ, a phenomena known as the reverse Flynn effect which had data to show that our IQ, which was globally increasing until the 1980s, has been going down since then. I think this it is a possibility that Entshitification could be playing a role in this because of an article I read about how the animal that could replace us once we go extinct is the octopus. I found this part of the article thought provoking[3]:

Professor Tim Coulson from the University of Oxford has spent years studying biology and evolution. He believes our disappearance could open the door to surprising new species that take over Earth’s ecological roles.

“I started to wonder what species might take our place if humans, and our close great ape relatives, were to die out,” Some believe that primates are the likeliest successors, but Coulson raises doubts.

“Primates depend heavily on strong social networks,” he explains, along with the idea that “they engage in activities like hunting, grooming, and defense, which are essential for their survival. These constraints might help them struggle to adjust to a world undergoing dramatic ecological shifts.”

In other words, we are so social that if our social network suffers from something like Entshittification we are severely affected our ability to survive. I say that because our hyper social nature means we become like the environment around us. That is sometimes our greatest strength, because we adapt. But if we have SH– all around, stuff that breaks down or stuff we cannot repair or understand, it risks also being our greatest weakness. And here is another twist on Entshitification: the impact of Trump’s Entshitification on global geopolitics: according to some we are witnessing the Collapse of US as world power on the scale of Soviet collapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT33ITqCziQ

What can you do? Know that things can get better IF we work at it… usually only after it gets worse. This viewpoint as it pertains to Enshittification is put beautifully by Przemysław Wasilewski [2]:

The cesspool the web has become today, filled with SEO garbage and algorithmic nonsense written by bots for bots, won’t disappear. The worse it gets, and it will, the more sense it will make to create valuable content again. Not for thousands of followers, but for a few hundred enthusiasts — like my old virtual friends from the bunker forum. The internet has changed, but people have not. Some of us still want to create for the sake of creating, out of passion, not an atavistic desire for instant reward. And others of us (or the same ones) want to receive what has been created — read, listen, watch, and think. Creating is difficult, and conscious receiving is no easier. And it is precisely facing these difficulties that make us human. Experiencing them gives us deep satisfaction, so different from the quick dopamine rush promised by the attention economy.

AI accidentally made me believe in the human soul by showing me what art looks like without it

Before we part I want to leave you with another parable from Anthony de Mello because I think that parables can often communicate more deeply than more logical words.

Uwais, the Sufi, was once asked: “What has Grace brought you?”

He replied: “When I wake in the morning I feel like a man who is not sure he will live till evening.” Said the questioner: “But doesn’t everyone know this?”

Said Uwais: “They certainly do. But not all of them feel it.”

So, dear friend, in spite of or maybe even because of Enshittification we can see Grace, but ONLY when it moves from our head into our heart and our bodies when WE ACT.

References

1. The Song of the Bird, Anthony de Mello

2. https://medium.com/@gonnabehot/on-longing-and-toni-morrison-e66927146089

3. https://www.earth.com/news/which-animal-could-replace-humans-as-earths-dominant-species/