I’ve been kind of obsessed by the state of the internet lately. And I’ve been wanting to share my obsession for a while. Both writing about it, but also through the project I have called keep the internet weird.

Enshittification

My obsession got fueled when Cory Doctorow coined the term “Enshittification”. With that, Cory Doctorow had put what I’ve been feeling for a while into words. I would highly recommend reading that article. For those unaware, this is the original meaning of the term “enshittification”:

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.

  • Cory Doctorow

Enshittification describes the process through which platforms deteriorate over time, typically following three distinct stages before either dying out or becoming irrelevant.

First, a platform needs to attract users, so it makes itself valuable and appealing. This phase is characterized by offering something shiny and desirable to draw in a large user base. During this stage, the platform may invest heavily to build a compelling offering.

Once a substantial user base is established, the focus shifts to monetization. The platform starts prioritizing revenue generation, often by attracting business customers, sometimes at the expense of the user experience. For example, Facebook began to show less of users’ chosen content in favor of content from advertisers or outright selling user data. The goal is to make the platform indispensable to businesses, creating a dependency.

Finally, the platform’s owners, investors, and higher-ups shift their focus to extracting maximum profit. This stage involves exploiting both users and businesses to maximize financial returns. Ultimately, the platform’s value declines, leading to its demise, and a new platform eventually takes its place.

The Rot Economy

After delving into the concept of enshittification, I came over Ed Zitron’s piece “The Rot Economy”", which felt like a natural extension of the idea, setting it in an even larger context. Zitron’s analysis explores how the main focus on profit maximization leads to the degradation of quality and ethics across various sectors, not just online platforms.

Zitron explains how companies, in their intense pursuit of profits, often cut corners, compromise on ethics, and prioritize short-term gains over long-term sustainability. This results in a cycle of diminishing returns where the original value offered by these companies weakens over time. He highlights how this rot extends beyond just the tech industry, affecting various aspects of our economy and society. The result is a pervasive decline in the quality of services, products, and even workplace conditions.

Zitron paints a picture of a world where corporate greed leads to widespread deterioration. This connection between Doctorow’s and Zitron’s ideas shows the systemic issues plaguing the modern internet and economy, revealing how deeply intertwined they are with the pursuit of profit at any cost.

(I seriously recommend reading Ed’s post about the rot economy. Or if you are into podcasts, check out his podcast Better Offline)

The corporate internet

So how does all this fit into the state of the internet which I have been obsessing over? Facebook (and social media in general) marked the start of what I like to call the corporate internet. While, corporations have been a part of the internet’s landscape since its inception, the influence and control held by social media platforms are a different beast entirely. These platforms works like silos, where all data is supposed to be kept within the platform. By having walled-off gardens, they have a monopoly on your data, which they monetize by hoarding and selling it off to advertisers. The corporate internet is characterized by algorithms that favor engagement over genuine interaction prioritizing sensationalism and virality over meaningful content.

This shift has commodified user attention, turning the vibrant, diverse and chaotic web of the past into a predictable, homogenized and controlled environment. The once weird and wonderful internet, full of quirky personal pages and niche communities, has been overshadowed by the dominance of a few powerful corporations.

Let’s keep the internet weird

Instead of just whining about how shit all platforms have become, and reminisce about how everything was better before, I’ve decided I want to do something proactive. I am diving into the depths of the internet, exploring all the fun, interesting and useless out there like it was the early 2000s. Anything besides the corporate and sterile internet. I am going to write about it and report my findings over at keep the internet weird, my project to celebrate and preserve the unique, creative, and uncommercialized corners of the web.