Enshittification

(Heads up, there's some venting in here, but I think it's worthwhile to talk about anyway just because of how prevalent of a phenomenon this is)

Enshittification. That's the official word of 2024 as chosen by Australia's Macquarie Dictionary. I think this is an incredibly apt word for 2024, and I think this is a phenomenon more people should know about. The definition of enshittification according to good old Wikipedia is: "a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders." While very true online (read my blog post about AI if you wanna know my stance on that bullshit lol), I think this phenomenon has silently but effectively crept its way into almost every aspect of life (at least here in the states). 

Here's what made me think of this: over the past few years, I've watched as my parents' street in my childhood neighborhood has had a bunch of new houses pop up on it. It's an old neighborhood but fairly full and typically suburban, but what these developers do is they tear down an old house that's been there since the area was developed in the late 40s, divide the lot in 2, and then tear out all of the trees that used to be around that house and replace the whole thing with 2 cheaply made plastic looking colonial style homes, each of which they then sell for twice the price they bought the whole lot for. As a result, my childhood home is now surrounded by houses 80 years newer than it, packed in next to each other on tiny lots, and a large portion of the trees that lined the street when I grew up here are now gone. This trend began about 15 or so years ago, but REALLY ramped up in probably the last 4. The area just feels a whole lot uglier for it now, it sucks.

Here's another: Why are the climate controls in new cars all on a touch screen??? My mom's car for example, it isn't some Tesla or something that's pretending to be high tech, it's a Honda SUV. To change which air vents are open, you have to open the menu in a touch screen, look away from the road, and select the option on the screen where you want the air to go. Who thinks this is a good idea? Meanwhile, in my Kia there's a simple knob you can turn to accomplish the same task, which I can do without looking away from the road, or with my winter gloves on when it's cold. It just seems like another cost cutting measure disguised as a "feature", blegh.  

My point with all this bitching is- I feel like this is becoming a theme of life right now. I won't even get into the specifics of the political shitshow happening here right now, but I feel like that plays a lot into it too. I think in our late stage capitalistic society we're reaching a point where most things generally just get worse because it makes rich people richer. My main question is- Where do you see examples of this in y'alls lives, and what the hell are we supposed to do about this? I see a lot of people talking about or mentioning things that illustrate these patterns all the time, but I rarely see discussion about the overall trend of this. I suppose I'm just hopeful that if more people are aware of this kind of thing that people will take notice and hopefully push for some positive change, because as it is I feel like the world is just getting shittier around us without people being fully able to pinpoint why things feel worse or more inconvenient or more depressing.

Anyway, if you made it through this post thank you. I'll be back to blogging about more positive and artistic stuff soon. That's how I'm combating enshittification in my life rn. Go out and make things! Partake in and learn more about culture! I think that's what we need more of rn.