+++
title = "Enshittification"
glassblowers = ["felixstalder.md"]
+++

A term [proposed](https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc) by Cory Doctorow in 2023, to make sense of why most of
the commercial Internet services not only got objectively worse (Google
Search is less capable of finding relevant stuff today than it was 10
years ago), but also why it has become an outright hostile environment.
He describes it as this:

> It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

The most hopeful part is „Then, they die“. Because it points towards a
configuration of social infrastructures beyond the one we know and hate.
To help imagine this “beyond”, we can look at projects and their
infrastructures that never entered this process in the first place.
