It does feel like everything's getting worse and there's a word for that - 'enshitification' Photo: 123rf
Serving as both a mirror to society's angst and a tool for rebellion, few words captured the zeitgeist quite like 'enshittification'.
The word burst into our lives in 2023, thanks to author Cory Doctorow, and quickly became a favourite way to describe how once-great things inevitably go bad.
It's the perfect term for that sinking feeling when companies and suppliers stop caring about you and start caring only about squeezing out profits.
Doctorow, a renowned technology journalist and fiction writer whose work explores ethics and society in the digital arena, created the word to explain the rise and fall of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They start off great, luring you in with free services and a good experience. Then, little by little, they pile on ads, cut corners, and make everything worse to boost their bottom line.
Sound familiar? It's like they took your favourite chocolate biscuits, made a new recipe out of dirt, and put fewer in the packet.
And fittingly, enshittification is its own critique of language. As one hack (me) noted, the word enshittification is itself an enshittification of words - it's clunky, crude, and unapologetic. But that's what makes it so satisfying - it calls things what they are in a world full of marketing fluff.
New Zealand's no stranger to enshittification. From sky-high grocery prices thanks to the supermarket duopoly, public transport that barely gets you anywhere, to Air New Zealand jacking up school holiday fares by 167 percent, we've all felt it.
Think of the rigmarole you have to go through to watch your favourite international TV shows now. Most likely they're spread across multiple subscription platforms, prone to buffering issues, internet connectivity and platform changes.
Is all this really more convenient than simply pressing an "on" button at an appointed time and watching the latest episode of Beyond 2000 on free-to-air, cathode-ray TV?
Consumers vs providers
"Consumers need to be more wary than ever," says Aotearoa's consumer watchdog Consumer NZ. "Yet this is harder to do than it ever has been."
Last year Consumer NZ "received many complaints about shrinkflation."
In a 2023 Global Inflation Monitor survey of 33 countries, 46 percent of consumers said they have noticed shrinkflation. It's even higher for New Zealanders - with 55 percent noticing the tactic and the same number (55 percent) saying the practice was unacceptable as a way of responding to rising costs.
"We are concerned consumer choice is gradually being eroded by unfair selling practices," adds Consumer NZ. "New Zealand is lagging behind other countries when it comes to essential consumer protections."
"In the Right to Repair space, there are no rules or requirements for products to be repairable or durable. We're the only country in the OECD without e-waste regulations.
One of the consequences of this is that many manufacturers are unwilling to repair products (it's often cheaper to replace) and people are left feeling like the only option is to throw products away."
Can we escape enshittification?
If enshittification is the slow decay of everything good, then what's the solution? For consumers, the obvious answer is to shop around for something new - find a fresh platform, product, or service that hasn't yet been enshittified.
It's tempting to jump ship from the Facebooks and Xs of the world to piously-pitched alternatives like Threads or BlueSky, hoping for that sweet oasis of an unspoiled community.
But there's a catch: the oasis might feel fresh at first, but it's only a matter of time before the click-baiters and their rubes - the chronically online - wade in and turn it into another cesspit.
We've all seen it before - anonymous discourse devolves into arguments, bad takes, and insufferable noise. Even those you might agree with still make you want to gag. The oasis doesn't stay an oasis for long when the blowhards get involved.
For suppliers and creators, the solution seems to lie in spotting gaps in the market-offering a new version of a product or service that hasn't yet enshittified itself down the toilet.
As a new kid on the block it's an easy pitch not to ruin everything with ads - even if that comes with an unwritten footnote: as platforms, products or services grow, the desire for profit eventually pushes them toward enshittification. It's the lifecycle of everything.
Maybe the best we can do is enjoy the oasis while it lasts, brace ourselves for the eventual decline, and simply move on when it starts to enshittify.
Because as long as humans are involved, when you gotta go, you gotta go.
