tl;dr

Enshitification is one of the most important concepts shaping the understanding of the World today. It specifically applies to something online getting worse over time as the provider of that service excessively monetizes that service. Google is the canonical example of this. It search is getting steadily worse as Google sells results to the highest bidder. Eventually, Google starts to screw the advertisers, too. All of this is great for the bottom line, but it also destroys the product. It turns out that these forces are more widespread than the internet. The centrality of money rules society. Maximizing shareholder value has become the organizing principle for all businesses. This principle is an engine of enshitification. Boeing is another prime example. Once great, they are a company in freefall (literally). Everything is enshitifying. The Labs where I used to work have gotten steadily worse. Why? Applying corporate management principles drives inappropriate incentives. This is money being the most important thing. As important is that other principles fade from focus.

Enshitifcation Online

“First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.” ― Cory Doctorow

Every successful online company starts great and then gets shittier. Their service enshitifies as the company turns to making as much money as possible. It is counterintuitive and universal today. The same thing is happening to virtually every institution in society.

The idea is what is called Enshitification. It was coined by Cory Doctorow and vividly described in the book of the same name. It describes the process by which the services we all depend on the internet get worse over time, not better. The primary example of Enshitification is Google. We no longer get the best results for our query; instead, we get positions in the search results sold to the highest bidder. The same thing happens in our Facebook feed, where the feed is curated in order to maximize how much shit they sell us. This happens at Amazon, where again the search results for a product you want are curated to the highest bidder. All ofthis is in service of maximizing shareholder value. All of this is dominated by the primacy of money over all other concerns.

“Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.” ― Clay Shirky

This is just the tip of an iceberg of shit. The companies pursue a host of specific online strategies to make things worse. Among the things done to make things terrible are attacks on the labor used. They create terrible conditions and chip away at fair wages. The companies also seek to capture politics to remove regulation and any legal constraints, such as anti-trust law (rent-seeking behavior). On the other side of the equation, they seek laws that make their products unrepairable, or remove all third-party support. They remove any possibility of interoperability on the platforms. It goes on and on with the whole incentive being money.

“Money is a great servant but a bad master.” — Francis Bacon

My thesis is that the process of inshittification and its reasons apply far more broadly. It is not simplythat internet services are enshittified, but rather corporations in general are enshittified. The institutions of our government are enshittified bysimilar processes. In every case, this is driven by money, where for corporations, maximizing shareholder value is the reason. We also see our government enshitifying driven by the same process, where now political speech is purchased by money. It has become powerful and allows the companies to basically write the laws in order that those laws allow them to maximize their money, maximize their shareholder value, and has been a major driver in accelerating inequality across the United States.

This inequality then enshitifies society as a whole, as the bottom part of society gets poorer and poorer. They become angrier, and we become more divided. This, in turn, makes them easy prey for the political forces driven by fear and anger that we see dominating today. So, our entire society has been enshitified. At the root of all this inshitification is our focus on money as a value over all other principles. It reigns over all other values, and everything else shrinks in importance.

As we embark on the use of AI across society, the process we’re going through across all elements of society should concern us all. The en-shitification process has destroyed social media as a positive force in society and created many ills and problems we have yet to solve. AI is a far more powerful technology. Given the incentives that are en-shitifying everything, we should be very worried about what this will do when applied to a technology as powerful as AI. The basic process we went through for social media will be an absolute disaster with AI!

Enshitification Everywhere

“It is important to realize the Boeing of 2024 is a very different company to that of the past.” ― Steven Magee

The posterchild for corporate enshitification outside the online world is Boeing. Once the bastion of American engineering excellence, Boeing has turned into a cavalcade of embarrassing events. This all started with a corporate merger where Boeing absorbed McDonnell Douglas. Like a proverbial alien face hugger, the failed aircraft company inserted its failed corporate culture into Boeing. Boeing rejected its legacy and identity for engineering excellence. In its place, they focused on financial engineering and stockholder value.

“The stock market control of the FAA, NTSB and Boeing needs to end for the safety of air travelers.” ― Steven Magee

They outsourced manufacturing to lower costs. They got rid of senior engineers and experts. Cost-cutting measures were all over the company. I remember getting a visit from Boeing in 2006, where they had sacked almost every turbulence modeler. They decided the problem was solved. As a note, turbulence modeling is a key thing in modeling aircraft and determining the performance of planes. There were two decades of hollowing out the company and replacing excellence with shit. Boeing became enshittified.

“The Boeing 737 Max is turning into the Ford Pinto of modern commercial aviation.” ― Steven Magee

This had tragic consequences. It started with something minor. The 787 design and production was a shitshow. Next, they had the crashes of foreign 737-MAX planes due to fucked up engineering. In both cases, the engineering cuts I heard about in 2006 hollowed out the company. So, we can conclude that engineering excellence was gone at Boeing. Next, they had manufacturing issues as a door blew off a plane in mid-flight. Lastly, an old McDonnell Douglas UPS plane crashed. It crashed due to an issue identified a decade ago. They are a company that turned its legacy and reputation into shit.

I remember asking my managers at Sandia if they were talking about Boeing. If they were paying attention to Boeing’s problems. Their response was “no, it is not relevant, we aren’t looking there.” Sandia’s brand is similar to Boeing’s in terms of engineering excellence. Sandia is run by an aerospace company, too. Maybe Boeing is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. If Sandia management was competent, they would pay attention to what happened to Boeing. Make sure it doesn’t happen at Sandia. To not look at the issues and check for parallels is management malpractice. What that malpractice reallysays is that Sandia does not want to look in the mirror at its own enshittification.

“The reason for enshittification’s popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and what we should do about it.” ― Cory Doctorow

How Make Government Shitty Too

In many respects, one of the places that’s become most entrenched recently is our politics. It’s hard to say what the chicken and egg are. We know that the Supreme Court has basicallyinstilled the principle of money as speech, thus unleashing vast sums of money into our campaign system. This was a system that was already awash with money. It’s become clear that our Congress, for sure, is bought and paid for. It seems pretty clear that much of the Supreme Court is also bought and paid for by billionaires. So, the idea of free speech is now equated with money. The ultimate resolution of this now is an executive branch corrupt to the core and showing graft for very vast enrichment, all based around the idea that money is always the best thing and always worth any action, even actions that completely lack any moral compass. Money is replacing moral and ethical ideals as an organizing principle for our politics.

A big part of the whole enshutification process is the emphasis on the superficial over the consequential. Everywhere you look today, superficiality governs. Instagram and Facebook are both engines of superficiality. We see the Department of Defense organize around superficiality in the form of the edicts of Pete Hegseth, who himself is an enshutification of the Secretary of Defense. What matters more to him is how things look: how soldiers look, how fit they look, how they’re groomed, how they’re dressed. He cares nothing about the laws, the tactics, or the strategy. It is all just about things looking like he thinks they should.

One must be really focused on understanding how the change towards a focus on money at the labs and universities has contributed to the lack of trust in science. This crisis in trust reached a fever pitch in the wake of COVID. The roots of this mistrust fall into the persistent focus on money at scientific institutions preceding it for the 15-20 years of this millennium. Money and managers rule science, whether it is a government lab or a university. The root of trust failure is this focus on money. Just as this has undermined the trust in social media and Internet companies, it will soon undermine the trust in AI.

The focus on money means that one always looks at the underlying motives for those who lead. Perhaps no place is more susceptible to this focus on money than medicine. This truly shows the power of COVID and its ability to annihilate the trust in science. The basic fundamental idea is that money is the root of a loss of trust in institutions and elites in the United States. This is an engine of enshitification across society as a whole.

One of the things that I look for is parallels. I see strong parallels between my situation at work and the national situation. For example, nationally, we see this theory of the unitary executive promoted by the right wing to give executive power without bounds. I see the same thing at work, where the managerial or executive class does whatever they want. Technically correct decisions are immaterial. The most effective way to solve problems is immaterial. All of that power, all that authority is grantedto the manager, to the executive. Everyone below them is merely there to implement whatever the executive wants.

This is the beating heart of the process of inshittification. Management and its focus on money displaces all other responsibilities, all other means of assessment, and all other means of success. In its wake is left something that is completely at the will and the competence of whoever is in that executive role.

“It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.” ― Clay Shirky

The Root Cause

“Ethical decision-making considers the impact on all stakeholders, not just shareholders.” ― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

I am not suggesting that money is of no importance. I am suggesting that money should not be of primary importance. It is important to manage and steward money with great responsibility. The problem is that we’ve allowed money to overwhelm all other responsibilities. It’s overwhelmed ethics. It has overwhelmed quality. It has overwhelmed basic societal good. Almost all manner of bad, evil intentions can be justified in the name of money, and this primary focus is being a corrosive element across our entire society, and it is killing the institutions we all depend on for our life, our liberty, and our happiness.

The money is the driver for the corruption. When other things don’t matter, and money is all that matters, it causes unethical and corrupt behavior to become normalized and even acceptable to management. This focus on money is exactly the thing that is driving the enshitification of the internet, and by virtue of that, it is the enshitification of institutions. My wife has seen this in colleges and universities. I see it in the research labs. I suspect it also happens across the corporate landscape.

Surely, the process of enshitification is coming for AI too. Pretty soon, the AI companies will have to actively work on making money, and that making of money will drive them to become worse. This is the system we have installed everywhere. This process will unfold like a natural law. It will play out just like social media. It will likely become another shitty way to sell people shit they don’t need. Just as everything online has taken social media to just making money, even though what they’re doing is socially irresponsible, the same thing happens at the labs. The loss of any social or ethical responsibility results in accelerating the enshitifcation process. The core principle is that it’s all about making as much money as possible.

“Running the company for the shareholders often reduces its long-term growth potential.” ― Ha-Joon Chang

Enshitification happens when a value other than the quality of the product or the service is replaced by a value in money. When money becomes the chief way of measuring the quality, and shitification is a natural outcome. Goodhart’s Law describes how this happens. The standard, clean version is:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Money has become the target. It no longer measures organizational success. All the things that matter for actual success fall away from active management. At the simplest level, this is all about incentive structures. The incentive structures in the United States, in virtually every system we have, have become solely and completely dominated by money. Financial interests are dominating every decision and every benefit in society. There is almost a religious belief that financial interests will manage everything well, and it’s a complete facade. Empirical evidence shows the opposite. The enshitification process makes that very clear – money and financial interests do not assure quality. This is certainly something that I’ve seen in my time at the national laboratories. There has been more financial focus, which has done nothing to improve and actually contributed to the decline in the quality of science.

Let’s All Blame Milton Friedman

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud” ― Milton Friedman

At the core of the problem with money is Milton Friedman’s maximizing shareholder value principle. This principle has become the organizing principle of our entire society. First with corporations, but then due to political pressures, corporate governance has been applied to our government work. In every case, money becomes the thing that’s managed, and almost everything else becomes subservient to money. I’ve seen it at the labs and seen it in corporations where product quality, technical quality all suffer. This is the beating heart and soul of the process of enshitification.

The real core observation is that applying the corporate governance model to the governance of government functions has not made anything any better. It has done the opposite; it’s made almost everything worse. I’ve seen it, plain and simple, in the work that I do in the places that I work. Where we had a steady march towards worse and worse results, worse and worse quality, and demands of financial management overwhelming all other considerations, hand-in-hand with this focus on money is a drive towards managerial behavior that is just outright corrupt and undermines the basic mission of the very institutions they are managing.

“This era, the Enshittocene, is the result of specific policy decisions, made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us.” ― Cory Doctorow

The issues with trust caused by the focus on money are real. The loss of trust is a rational and correct interpretation of what people are experiencing. Those in positions of authority, when focused on money, are not focused on the actual institution’s reasons for being. Thus, the loss of trust is a true reaction to a loss of the basic integrity of these institutions, driven by this over-focus on money and the loss of a focus on anything else that is important. This is something society needs to grapple with, or the trust and the general institutional shitification will continue unabated.

The summary statement is that it isn’t the scientists that can’t be trusted. It is the managers for those scientists who can’t be trusted. The management’s distorted view of the work that’s being done is the root of what can’t be trusted. This is true at the labs, this is true in industry, and this is true at universities. It is our science management that has created the problem of a lack of trust in science.

A great exemplar of these trust-destroying exercises is the management’s tendency to bullshit about all their success. The bullshit just spews out without any real success, with any problems or failures being deep-sixed. The end result is the lack of trust. The reason they bullshit is that it’s all about the money. The loss of trust is science can be tied to the financial benefits associated with lying. The actual science is good; it is its management that we hold in contempt.

One of the things I’ve noted is that increasingly, the people who are lauded for professional success are the managers. You see managers in high positions in professional societies becoming professional fellows and a variety of other accolades. No longer are we reallyfocusing on the scientists who create, but rather the scientists who manage. The problem is, those who manage are the ones who are annihilating our trust. These managers are also the source of the failure of American science. More amazingly, they are lauded for it!

Unless we change the rules of society away from a focus on money, disaster awaits. We either let that make us change, or get ahead of us. Based on history, the disaster will be the route. Hopefully not a fatal one.

“Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.” — Agatha Christie