Can things ever get better?

Does it ever seem to you like things are getting slowly worse all the time? It can't be just me. And last week I finally saw a video that explains why.

It's a joke, of course. The video purports to show us "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator," someone whose job it is to make every product and service a little bit worse. The main character addresses the audience directly, explaining that he inherited his calling from his father before him. And at first he starts off small: cutting holes in the toes of socks, and sawing half an inch off one table leg so that the table rocks. But the Internet allows him to expand his operations. Soon he offers online services for free—just long enough to get users hooked on them—and then incrementally degrades the services to encourage customers to pay for "Premium" status (viz., the same level of service that was free last year). I won't give away the punchline, but the ending is perfectly in line with the dark humor that pervades the rest of the video. It's well worth the four minutes.

Wow, that sounds cynical! Who made it? Some disgruntled undergraduate? 

The "Breaking Free" report

Actually, no. The video was produced by NewsLab, a Norwegian communications agency; but it was commissioned and publicized by Forbrukerrådet, the Norwegian Consumer Council. Their point is to advertise a new report which highlights that this drift towards "enshittification" is a conscious, deliberate policy of the major firms in Big Tech. The report, entitled "BREAKING FREE: Pathways to a fair technological future," spells out the exact steps by which major tech firms hook customers with free or discounted services, and then squeeze them for payment once the cost of leaving the service is too great. Nor do they stop there. Forbrukerrådet winds up the report by identifying a slate of legislative measures to protect consumers from this predatory behavior. And in a logical next step, they and other allied consumer organizations have already sent letters to legislators in Norway, in the European Union, and in the United States urging adoption of these measures.

In case it's not clear in what follows, I wish them well. I agree that life is worse when online services are designed so that you can't easily switch between providers. And it could be interesting to study the slate of concrete measures proposed in the report, to understand how likely they are to achieve their stated goal. If you want me to drill into the details in a future post, please tell me in the comments. What is certain is that even with the best measures, bringing the corporations to heel won't be easy. (Consider the "Alternative to fines" discussion in this post from two years ago.) But what I want to ask right now is a far more basic question. Once the legislators get these letters and read them, what motivation do they have to act on the proposals? What's in it for them?

Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad,
Director of Digital Policy,
Norwegian Consumer Council

I don't know how politics works in Norway, nor at the pan-European levels of the EU. But in the United States, legislators are generally motivated by re-election. They support measures that will get them re-elected, and they oppose measures that would prevent their re-election. The Big Tech firms contribute generously to the campaign funds of legislators who are disposed to help them. Who contributes to their opponents? Who is out there in the public square, capitalizing on the attention earned by this funny video, mobilizing voters to throw out the rascals who protect Big Tech and to replace them with insurgents defending the Common Man? Can you think of a name? Anyone?       

Because without such mobilization, I think the measures are going nowhere. If legislators are motivated by re-election, then the surest way to make progress on this topic is to convince those legislators that supporting consumers against the depradations of Big Tech is essential to getting re-elected. It might be possible to make such an argument some day, with enough organization. But up till now I have not heard it made.

Maybe it sounds like I'm ranting, or preaching cheap gloom-and-doom. But I'm not. There's an important Quality lesson here, one that applies to every improvement project you undertake—in the office, on the shop floor, or anywhere. The point is this: 

• Every improvement project requires someone in authority to say, "Do it."
• Therefore, every improvement has to look good to the person who authorizes it.
• This means that no matter how much benefit the improvement might bring, it won't happen unless you can persuade the person in authority that he or she is better off approving the project than rejecting it. At some level, there has got to be something in it for him or her.   

Often that "something" is just that your improvement will make things run smoother in the office or on the shop floor, and naturally the boss wants things to run smoother. That might be enough. In other cases, you might have to be a little more persuasive. But the point is that there has to be something. And my biggest concern about the package of reforms that the Forbrukerrådet has proposed to protect common consumers against Big Tech is that these measures benefit everyone except the tech executives themselves and the legislators who have to pass the laws.