The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
Eh, if you define it that way then almost anything is innovation.
But innovation, even at the low bar you define it at, for its own sake is useless. It has to do something substantive, or else it’s just more noise.
I think of innovation more like following ideas instead of money. Money is almost always involved, but somewhere there is a hard to define line between doing something innovative that will also make money, and doing something innovative to make money.
Butt right now, we have a lot of companies that just do what other companies have done to make more money from their existing products. Putting in more ads isn’t innovative.