Enshittification

A wonderfully grotesque word for a very real problem. It looks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) as if the word pre-existed Cory Doctorow’s precise use of it for a problem largely created by the co-existence of the internet and “two-sided services” and rapacious late 20th and 21st Century capitalism.

Details #

The Wikipedia article seems to me to be typically excellent but the essentials of the idea are as follows.

At first someone, or some company, create a service that is useful to end users and may offer it for free at first, or not.
However, they then mess up the quality of the service often so it becomes profitable to them and to their commercial users but quality for general users deteriorates (typically the free level becomes more and more restricted and users are pushed to more and more expensive non-free levels of the service. In the process the users’ data often becomes the property of the service locking users in as hostages to their own data.
Eventually, in the full Doctorow model, the service becomes so poor, as the shareholders want more and more return from the company, that the service dies. I don’t see this as a necessary final stage and far too many services actually stabilise in a shitty state before this, feeding huge profits to the companies running the service but also to their shareholders for most such companies. That wikipedia article gives a good list.

So why is it here? Partly through personal hurt as I have been caught by enshittification over the last 30 or so years as I tried to offer zero cost services and resources to the therapy and psychosocial service and research and communities. At first the world wide web was clunky but I could easily run my own server for Email lists and HTML content. Then WordPress (WP) and MailChimp came along and creating HTML content became much easier and MailChimp’s free level of lists made managing lists safer and easier. Then the latter priced my lists out of my reach as they reduced what the free level of their service offered, meanwhile WordPress was complemented by more and more plugins, mostly initially free but more and more of them started to strangle what their free level offered and managing a good WP site became more and more difficult if one is not a wealthy company or full time WP content manager.

As I see it the same process has happened in the academic/research literature too. Robert Maxwell is reputed to have been the first to see the profit that could be made from academic publishing: you make academics pay for journal subscriptions, submit the content (sometimes having to pay just for that privilege) and peer review the content. As publishing moved from paper to the internet the process became a simple one of enshittification and as it came alongside the management of universities essentially purely for profit, the academics are caught in a particularly nasty vice of enshittification of their content and of precariousness (precarity) of occupation.

Yes, I think an entry belongs here!

Try also #

Nothing yet!

Chapters #

Not covered in the OMbook.

Online resources #

Well I do still just about manage to maintain some lists and provide some services!

Lists (all outgoing only, low volume, no risk of swamping your in tray, these are the sign up links!)
WordPress sites
- CORE (with subsites in Spanish, Finnish and Portuguese, Spanish subsite fairly active)
- My non-CORE research
- My personal site (which started in 2016 when I cycled from London to Compostella after retiring from the NHS and clinical work)
Other resources (update alerts via that non-CORE research list above)
- Glossary/encyclopedia of terms that started out to complement the OMbook (sadly, the OMbook is not free). This is free and expanding/improving most days/weeks.
- My Rblog for topics that need more expansion than fits in glossary entries and more geeky things about using R particularly but wider.
- My shiny apps aimed at supporting practitioners and researchers broadly in the psychosocial intervention and therapy fields. A lot of statistical utilities.
- The CECPfuns R package for practitioners and researchers in those fields who use R, contains various functions for our field ranging from pretty trivial to moderately complex to roll your own and all designed to be as user friendly as I could make them, particularly in error trapping and giving helpful error messages when arguments or data cause errors.