The term 'enshittification' has become quite popular in the recent years, to describe the ways in which services, typically digital, start out as friendly to users in order to garner attraction and approval, and gradually devolve as the inevitable race to the bottom leads them to compromise their integrity in favor of profits.
Everyone can see this happen with social media platforms for instance, but it's not too hard to see that enshittification happens with all kinds of products and services. In a world where energy and labor keep getting more expensive, it's not difficult to imagine that companies would rather let the quality of their products and services decline, rather than increase the prices, a process known as masked inflation.
Specifically, I keep noticing how technology keeps getting worse and worse, even as all the hype around the new fancy 'AIs' might convince us otherwise. Things such as:
§1. Wifi and other forms of wireless network replacing the good old ethernet cables, at a huge loss of speed and reliability. Some internet providers use terms such as "high-speed wifi", relying on the fact that most people don't know how to distinguish between good and bad, but anyone who has had good internet speed, provided with optical fiber and ethernet cables knows that they are the best and most reliable.
§2. Touch screens replacing buttons, knobs and latches. Not only are mechanical inputs far more satisfying, are easier to fix and replace, but very importantly, you can precisely tune them without looking directly at them due to the tactile feedback. This makes a world of difference while driving, where you obviously need to keep your eyes on the road and need to adjust a few things here and there. If you aren't dumb, touch screens aren't going to kill you while at wheel, but it's one of those obvious cases where the "new" technology hasn't solved any real problem, and is only there as a gimmick to justify a higher price tag.
Most machines don't need touch screens. The point of one is to be easily configurable, but most of the things we use only need to do the same things again and again, in a reliable manner. The simpler you keep the components of let's say a laundry machine, or a dishwashing machine, or a microwave oven, the cheaper they are and the easier they are to take apart and repair.
§3. The entire direction of our economy has moved away from creating durable, reliable and reparable devices, and towards a dumb quest for profits, keeping people dependent on products and services to milk money, and reassuring everyone that we are "progressing". This is obvious, but still, what has been lost needs to be acknowledged.
Technology went from something which interested people could take apart, understand and tweak for their needs, to essentially black boxes which are plugged together. Cars are integrated with so many electronic components that people can't really tinker around with them, at least not as easily. Of course, someone who has nothing else to do in their day besides play with cars could maybe still do that in our times, I seriously doubt it but then again I have never tried, but raising the barrier for entry inevitably creates societal changes, as people don't have all the time and energy to learn whatever they want, they are busy with work, family, hobbies, and so on.
§4. Operating systems are supposed to be a seamless layer which allows us to not interact with the "raw" world of interacting with the specificities of hardware, and instead think in terms of more tractable abstractions, such as files, programs, storage and so on.
But they have become these weird invasive systems, which first of all channel you into the dreadful Windows or the crazy expensive Macs if you are not willing to get into Linux, and in the case of Windows keeps getting more and more bloated, filled with pointless updates and for god knows what reason, politics. Yeah that's right, Windows, an operating system, by default plugs you into the news, which as you can expect from a company managed by Bill Gates, is quite keen on offering you a vision of the world which favors people like him.
I have heard that Windows aims at becoming an "agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere" 1. If Windows has steadily become worse and worse over the years, we can only guess at what the results of AI-written code and a care for your "security" will lead to. My next computer will run on Linux, the Windows ship has sunk far too deep in the ocean of shit.
§5. Phones are similarly an egregious case of making people even more dependent on things which they don't understand and have no control over. I am someone who is clearly against modern technology and the technological system at large, but it's hilarious to see that even technology in the modern world is not done well. You would expect our glorious world of technological progress to be filled with people who have a deep understanding on what they use, able to do basic repairs and make simple changes as they need, but instead what we have by and large are people who are used by technology.
This is most obvious with phones, which most people use most of their time in the act of scrolling, though 'act' is perhaps a strong word for something which is so laced with apathy. Whereas a computer offers you the option of writing, drawing, making music, editing your videos, and much more, even if in practice people likewise scroll on them, just on a bigger screen, phones do not give you such possibilities to begin with.
The affordability of phones is geared towards scrolling, a passive experience of receiving information from a feed curated to keep you addicted as much as possible to a platform. They don't try to empower you towards creating or being more independent, it's just a water hose of slop from the screen to your mind, on demand.
Moreover, because phones do not give you much control over anything, you end up being forced to buy a new one regularly, because operating systems eventually become outdated. There might be something you can do to bypass that, by jailbreaking the phone and getting fancy with it, but again, the manufacturers certainly won't make it easy for you, and that again takes a lot of time you could spend on inherently meaningful activities, like you know, interacting with real people.
I say, instead of figuring out how to work better with smartphones, better throw the whole thing altogether and get a dumbphone. That decision has made my life a lot better.
As I mentioned in my piece predicting a few things we can expect in the coming years, so-called 'AI' has become powerful mainly because of all the hardware and data which we throw at the problems it's solving. But without the specialized technical knowledge to maintain the supply chains for the hardware, and the vast amounts of energy which power data centers and the computers needed to train them, the technology is largely useless. This is why I don't spend much time thinking about the long-term effects of AI, because eventually both of those dependencies will weather away, as our world runs lower on effective energy and skilled technicians.
In the short-term, I think AI will largely make things worse. It's already filling a lot of places with slop which people have already gotten tired from, but there's no going back, because identifying AI by using AI is a battle which one side can never fully win, it's like trying to have one part of yourself, the discernment side, beat the other part of yourself, the bullshitting side, instead of trying to reconciliate the two.
As for general software, I think the advent of vibecoding will simply lead to a lot of poor-quality scripts, instead of fully-fledged robust programs, and certainly few deep technicians who know the inside out of how to work with computers. This is mainly because we live in the age of rackets, where convincing a lot of people in the short term beats building solid foundations, which drives people to always chase the new shiny thing which everyone is hyped about, instead of having a robust way of delivering value.
Technology is increasingly going in the hands of priests, and not technicians. Priests are those who mediate between the plebs and a transcendent version of God 2, and they have all the interests in the world to keep themselves necessary. This is why a lot of people end up learning rituals to do things with technology, such as the basic act of restarting your computer, or asking Chat-GPT what to do, or following a generic way of writing software, etc.
People don't learn the deep foundations of how anything is made, because everything has become so complex that it would take an insane amount of time, and also because there are many people who benefit from being necessary mediators, either by making technology you can't repair yourself, or by fixing your problems but not explaining to you how you could stop depending on them.
Technology is not just getting worse on a quantitative level, it has become disempowering. People have to use things they don't have the time to understand, which makes them dependent on a suit of professionals to meet their own needs. This is not the codependency of let's say a village, where people naturally depend on one another because human beings have always lived in groups. Rather, this is the codependency on parasites who are and can only be interested in profits, not fostering a harmonious world.
Clearly, if technology keeps getting worse and worse, the solution is to not rely on technology as much. I'm seeing this as my coworkers are struggling more and more with their car, either because the country is adding more and more taxes, making it more and more difficult to find a place to park it, is pushing towards electric vehicles without the appropriate infrastructure to charge them, as well as the insane changes to cars which give you less and less control as the years go, with their integrated sensors—making self-repairs even more impossible—and sometimes features which actively do things for you, such as the lane keep assist feature.
The official reason is that those changes are for our "safety", or for the "planet", or simply for "progress", but ultimately everything is getting shitter because a world of rackets, driven by profits, can only do so. All it can do is extract, extract, extract, until nothing remains but slop and shit. Clearly if the internet is getting filled with slop, it's an invitation to live more in the real world.
2 Transcendent as opposed to let's say immanent. A transcendent God is one you need to "rise" to reach, whereas an immanent God is everywhere, it is Reality itself. Transcendent Gods require the mediation of priests, immanent Gods require us to be with the Oneness of everything, which in a sense we always are with, but can be more or less conscious of.
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2026-01-22