By now, you have probably heard a thing or two about enshittification – the process by which online platforms lure a customer base with favorable terms, then gradually sour the deal once users are locked in. Often, this involves a multilevel game of “the customer is the product”, or as Cory Doctorow puts it:
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.
The term has quickly become a household word in some circles. Enshittification has even been named 2023’s Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.
But let’s take a step back. From where comes the “en-“? The prevailing description of this term gives the air of an almost organic process that happens later in the life of a moribund platform, almost like a disease it catches along the way. But that’s not really the whole story, is it?
As my kids’ favorite author is fond of saying: “But before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story.” So lets talk about honeymoon phases and the Great Throttle Map Conspiracy.
In the olden days, a car’s gas pedal was simple: you romped on it, it pulled a little cable that pulled a valve open and gave the engine more air & fuel to burn, and revving ensued. Nowadays of course, cars are largely drive-by-wire and the gas pedal is an electronic sensor that conveys your revving intent in the form of a pedal position signal to a computer, and the relationship between pedal position and revvs delivered, or the throttle map, is software-defined.
Throttle maps in consumer vehicles have been rather front-loaded for some time now, a little psych-hack to give the illusion of a more powerful engine and a fitting complement to fake, pre-recorded engine noise piped into the cabin from hidden speakers. Whether it guzzles hydrocarbons or electrons, if you lightly nudge the pedal and the acceleration tosses you back in your seat a bit, just think what would happen if you pressed it all the way! It’s an illusion of course; the computer giving you 60% power at only 30% pedal doesn’t actually change what the motor does wide-open, but it feels more powerful, and this trick works. The “sport mode” settings on some vehicles further play with this.
I have no solid proof for it, but I have a conspiracy theory that some automakers build in a honeymoon period mechanism that gooses the throttle map when the car is new (saliently including test drives), then gradually flattens it again as the car ages, giving the subtle feeling of the vehicle wearing out and losing power. The cherry on top is that their dealerships can reset the honeymoon period at will, restoring that fresh-off-the-lot performance sensation for a time. The other shoe of this conspiracy theory is that the same dealerships, conveniently, sell expensive tuneup packages that promise to restore your engine’s like-new performance…
Ahem, back to reality here. There’s no “en-” in enshittification; it was planned from the beginning. The modern megaplatform playbook involves Get Big Fast and operating at a loss for potentially decades to build a userbase and squeeze out competitors. Unless the proprietors failed business school miserably, the pre-enshittification period is really just a honeymoon phase, a long-con equivalent of the attractive introductory rate offered by the attractive cable-cellphone-internet-home-security hawker constantly knocking on doors in your neighborhood, and it has a planned end date. Commercial platforms are born shittified; it’s just a matter of how long the honeymoon phase needs to last to stifle competition and reach network-effect critical mass. Amazon, as an example, operated at a loss for its first nine years. For Facebook, merely five. TikTok still operates at a loss as of 2024.
So, the next time someone complains about the recent enshittification of their ex-favorite platform, just tell them the truth: It’s just shittification, and the honeymoon’s over.
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