Back in 2018, I wrote about the Enshittening, now more accurately called the "Enshittification" of the internet, the observation that we're all surfing on a river of bullshit while each contributing our own tiny tributary of turds. For those uninitiated with the concept, it's a three-stage grift befitting of the underpants gnomes.

  1. Hook:: The platform lures you in with a good product.
  2. Lock-in: The platform keeps you in its walled garden through network effects and switching costs.
  3. Squeeze: The platform extracts every last cent out of you by making the thing you relied on progressively worse, as you're held hostage to the platform's business model.

Most users of the internet are tacitly aware of the Enshittification cycle, even if they've never heard the word. When someone laments the state of the internet, it's enshifficiation. The Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet) just released a brilliant PSA that deserves to be spread far and wide.


The video accompanies the Council's report, Breaking Free: Pathways to a Fair Technological Future, replete with examples of the Enshittification cycle in action. Facebook and Instagram feeds are flooded with scams and fraudulent ads. Meta reportedly rakes in roughly $16 billion annually from fraudulent advertising on its platforms. Google Search is serving up AI-generated slop instead of actual results. Car companies charge you a subscription to heat your own car seats. OEM parts have DRM preventing repairs. Advertisements exist in operating systems. Customer service has been replaced with chatbots designed to deflect rather than help.

In my 2018 post, I wrote about Amazon's counterfeit problem, Facebook's apathy toward its role in political manipulation, and the bot-infested simulacrum of an internet. Seven years later, every single one of those problems is worse. Not just a little worse, industrially worse. Amazon is still a landfill of counterfeits and fake reviews. Facebook (sorry, Meta) still doesn't give two shits about the damage it causes. It also has an AI chatbot shoved into every one of its apps. While I won't pretend that I was able to predict the rise of AI slop, I did write:

Too lazy to make up your own bullshit? Want to build an empire of bullshit? There's an entire bullshit industry you're probably not even familiar with, even if you've heard of low-rent bullshit like Fiver. There are full-on bullshit mills to generate bullshit on your behalf!

I didn't have any answers at the time, just an observation of the problem and a small platform to raise awareness. Now I'm happy to write that there's a growing group of people who are calling out the Enshittification cycle and demanding better regulation.

What makes the Norwegian Consumer Council's effort notable is that this isn't just a funny video. They've coordinated with over 70 consumer groups across Europe and the US, and sent formal letters to policymakers in the EU, UK, and US, demanding action: stronger consumer rights, mandatory interoperability, data portability, the right to repair, and the actual enforcement of existing competition laws. You know, the kind of common-sense regulation that gets endlessly lobbied against by the same companies profiting from the enshittification cycle.

This is the sort of activism I can get behind. Let's try to make the world less shitty.