On the tech culture roots of enshittification

Some of my old essays remixed, renewed, and re...ady for your enjoyment

Hello reader. While I’m working on a pretty ambitious article, I have something for you today. I have dug up some old essays from my archives, improved them, and arranged them thematically. I’ve got enough material for several such articles. Even if you’ve seen the older versions of these essays, I’ve made them a lot better than the zero-edit streams of consciousness from which they arose.

The theme of today’s collection is how the very culture of the tech industry is partly responsible for enshittification. Attempting to blame the big bad billionaires in isolation is lazy, since it completely avoids accountability, and shuts out any hope that we could actually do something to slow (or even stop) the march of mediocrity that is driving us toward the precipice of oblivion.

So, without further ado, here we go.

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Techbros are a cultivated species

You know those scams where someone claims to be the prince of Nigeria who wants to share his fortune with you? You probably wonder who'd fall for that crap; the messages look like they were written by a five year old. That's the point. The scammers make it as outlandish as possible so only the dumbest people fall for it, the ones who won't start getting suspicious after the scammer has invested significant time in them.

This is exactly what the tech industry has done over the past 15 years. They've released ever more outlandish products, scaring off the reasonable consumers and selecting for a market of gullible, novelty-seeking suckers that we call techbros.

The tech industry began cultivating this market of dupes they snickeringly referred to as "innovators" during the dot-com boom. They were the ones who believed the Segway was going to be a teleporter. Apple’s slogan “think different” was a psychological trick to lull techbros into believing that their gullibility was really a rare, unconventional genius.

During the 2000s, this demographic propped up countless startups by buying their half-finished toys at twice the price, making the most absurd business plans seem almost reasonable to VCs.

The cult of the sucker

But it was during the Great Recession when the codependent relationship between Big Tech and techbros deepened into a religion. Once the mobile internet enabled chronic onlineness, it became possible to exist completely within a tech echo chamber without realizing it. Where being chronically online once required one to be locked away in a musky basement with a desktop computer, smartphones allowed you to be physically present in the real world despite being mentally online. This illusion is what drew hordes of normies into the parallel universe created by the industry.

And it really was a parallel universe. The perception of reality from within the terminally online Silicon Valley monoculture doesn’t resemble that of the rest of the world, even (especially) the rest of America.

• The line “do no evil” from Google was accepted at face value.

• Mark Zuckerberg was held as some sort of minimally flawed visionary hero deserving of a glamorized treatment by David Fincher.

• Every problem that plagued mankind could be solved with an app.

• Physical buttons were seen as primitive and vaguely problematic.

• Broadcasting every mundane detail of your life on a global forum was perfectly normal, well-adjusted behavior.

And, because this new monoculture looks to its inhabitants like the real world—layered as it is on top of the real world via mobile devices—the tech bros never once questioned the universality of their worldview. It just was.

Being in tech meant not just being part of the industry, but being the target market as well. People who believed in the hype also wanted to work at these companies. And the companies were perfectly fine to hire people who believed their hype. They turned their office complexes into adult daycares that deepened the ideological loyalty of the employees while paying them massive salaries that gave them enough discretionary income to buy any tech product without needing to question why.

During the boom years, the tech industry was able to cultivate a sufficiently large population of customers among its own ranks. One could make a fortune solely catering to the affluent twits in the "Greater Valley" (i.e. SF + Seattle + Austin + NYC). At least, that's what it seemed like.

Getting high on their own supply

Perhaps you can see the problem. If the whole thing seems somewhat incestuous, it is. The industry was getting high on its own supply. It was possible to exist within the tech world, never realizing that there was another, much larger world with very different views on almost everything, and any tech company had to sell its products to that world in order to survive.

As it turns out, normal people don’t want an app for everything. They don’t need everything to be internet-connected. They don’t want to share the most mundane or damning details of their private lives. They don’t want to let someone with cameras on their eyeglasses into their house. And they certainly don’t share the luxury beliefs of the average tech hipster who has never known hardship in their life, beliefs that pervade the design of every tech product.

That massive disconnect has led to some spectacular product failures. The Juicero is one of my personal favorites, and one I love to roast. The Cybertruck has been a massive flop despite Tesla having had years of advance warning from negative reactions from the market. The fact that tech founders unironically use terms like the “sharing economy” or claim that “privacy is no longer a social norm” shows how rarely they talk to actual people.

Now it affects all of us

Unfortunately for actual people, not all of the unhinged ideas to come out of the tech industry have been extravagant failures. Many have been insidious successes.

The most obvious example is the smartphone, the very thing that enabled the average person to become terminally online without realizing it. Consider how its design is a reflection of the luxury beliefs of the techbros:

• It tracks every little thing you do with some even believing that it listens to your conversations. Techbros don’t believe in privacy, so this suits them fine.

• It is supposedly more powerful than supercomputers from previous eras, and yet is far more restricted in what you can do with it, by design. This is because techbros don’t believe in private property.

• It bombards you with useless notifications. Techbros need to be constantly connected to the world due to FOMO and a need for self-affirmation with their online tribe.

• It is physically impossible to grip a smartphone comfortably or securely due to its shape. This is a reflection of the priority tech hipsters place on aesthetics over function.

Somehow, the tech industry managed to sucker the mainstream into believing that the smartphone is good design. Now any deviation from the iPhone formula is seen as lesser.

Meanwhile, more of the industry’s warped views on reality have osmosed into the mainstream, such as the idea of a “sharing economy”, which underpins their assault on private ownership. Cars are full of useless tech that nobody wanted, and dangerously short on physical buttons, making them more dangerous and less reliable. Then there is the entire generation of youth that will need years of therapy for their screen addiction.

It would be nice if we could simply write off tech culture as a lunatic fringe, but unfortunately, as our society becomes inextricably entangled with technology, the culture of its creators cannot be ignored. In fact, it must be confronted head on.

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If Apollo 13 were made by techbros

The Apollo 13 spacecraft is famous for two things:

• suffering a catastrophic explosion on the way to the Moon, one that damaged its vital systems, including the power supply and main engine

• somehow making it back to earth anyway

All the odds were stacked against Apollo 13. Most people, including those in NASA itself, thought that the crew would never make it home. And yet they did.

How was this possible?

In short, even with a number of design blunders and a manufacturing defect, Apollo was based on a bygone design ethos absent from modern technology.

How Apollo worked

The entire system had redundancy built in. The Apollo was not one, but two separate spacecraft. The Command Module was the mothership, and it had the Lunar Module (LEM), the dropship. The LEM, despite being only meant to serve 2 of the 3 crew members and for a short window of time, was able to keep all three of those men alive for the entire duration of the ordeal. They were able to get the LEM up and running in just 15 minutes, despite the process being intended to take an hour. This let them save the tiny amount of energy remaining on the damaged command module for their re-entry to earth.

Because the Command Module's engine was damaged in the explosion, they had to use the LEM's engine to propel Apollo away from the moon, back to earth. The engine wasn't designed for this, but it managed just fine.

Plus, the LEM's power supply was used to provide additional power for the CM while it prepared for re-entry. This shows another strength of the Apollo design. Because the crew had the ability to power up each system as needed, they could squeeze the most juice out of this backup system. Without this, the parachutes on the spaceship may have been frozen and it would have hit the ocean like a rock.

Secondly, despite the fact that the air purification systems on the two spacecraft which remove toxic CO2 from the air supply were not compatible with each other, Apollo had the supplies needed to hack together a solution that let them use one type of filter with the other spacecraft.

Compare that to modern tech

The technology, both hardware and software, that we use in our daily lives was not designed to the same ethos as Apollo 13. It is far more fragile, far less customizable, less repairable. This isn’t just sloppiness, it’s a direct result of the culture that created it. Today’s tech is designed by overgrown children who have never known adversity, and optimize their gadgets for the conditions to which they are most accustomed: a safe hipster coffee shop. Any sort of harsh conditions brings the tech to its knees.

If a smartphone screen goes bad, it becomes a paperweight. Older phones had enough buttons to operate without the delicate screen, but not “smart” phones.

There are devices and apps which are inoperable when they are not connected to the internet, not because there is something central to their functionality which depends on a constant inflow of data, but simply… because.

While the incompatibility of the CO2 filters in the Command Module and the LEM was the result of incompetence, that incompetence is now a business strategy. Apple makes proprietary connectors that don't work with anything else. They make it impossible to install products not offered in the App Store. Even when interoperability is possible, as with SMS, Apple stigmatizes it with their green bubbles.

One of my favorite examples of this aversion to practicality is Apple’s refusal to simply allow users to upload data to their devices in the normal way. I remember back in the mid-2000s, I had an iPod and I was absolutely flummoxed over how to upload my songs. I had assumed that it would be like any other thumb drive, where I plug it into a USB, then a window appears into which I can drag my MP3 files. But instead, the process was so convoluted, I actually had to look online for help. And remember, this is Apple, the “kings of UX”.

This entire approach to tech design dates back to a time when "tech" was just silly toys for Silicon Valley adult children. Precious or whimsical design didn’t raise any alarms when the cost of bad design was minor frustration. But now tech is in our cars, our planes, our hospitals, our military, our spaceships. That crap won't fly anymore.

Epilogue

Amusingly, when I posted this topic on LinkedIn, there were a number of people who showed up saying some variant of “but the purpose of tech is to make money”, not as an accusation, but as a defense for modern tech design. As we all know, if you can’t turn a profit without planned obsolescence and walled gardens, you don’t deserve to be in business.

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The enshittification of car door locks

Compare these two car door lock switches. At left is the one from 90s Fords. At right is the one from the 2010s. The latter is but one variation of a universal template for modern car door locks.

I used the one on the left in the 90s and I was able to instinctively press the correct side, lock/unlock, whenever I needed to. It's easy for your finger to differentiate between the hump and the pit, and it's easily written into muscle memory.

All my more recent cars have all had something similar to the one on the right. There's never a tactile difference between lock and unlock. Instead, my brain is forced to memorize which side of the rocker switch does which. And as a result, to this day I STILL can't instinctively get it right.

Fortunately for me, the worst that's happened as a result is me looking dumb when trying to be chivalrous, locking instead of unlocking the doors before I get out to open the passenger side up (hey, at least I didn't close the driver side door). But if you've ever seen a police chase on TV, where the perp exits their stolen vehicle, jumps in front of an oncoming car causing the driver to stop, opens their door, and yanks the hapless driver out in a vain attempt to lose the cops, you'll realize just how much of a liability these crappy door lock buttons are.

The cognitive load of locking the door is so high that the driver cannot do so in the heat of the moment.The above is a design blunder so massive that the designer belongs in the same jail cell as the car thief.

Door lock switches are getting worse

But what's most worrying is that cars USED to get it right. Ford had a great physical design and then they abandoned it for a generic, useless piece of junk, the same one used by every other car company. It seems as though the whole industry has converged on the WRONG design for some reason.

We commonly assume that, once the best design is identified, it will gradually become standard as manufacturers abandon inferior designs. Sure, there are some exceptions where the inferior design becomes standard, but those usually involve the network effect, like VHS vs Betamax and QWERTY vs Dvorak. That does not apply to car door locks.

Nor does cost-cutting explain it because, even though all the door lock buttons have a similarly bad design, they aren't interchangeable, so they're not sharing parts. Car door locks are just one example of the industry standardizing around a mediocre design pattern when a superior one is not only available but has been successfully implemented in the past, and there is no financial or otherwise rational reason for it.

This is just more proof that bad ideas from the tech industry are leaking out into other industries, ones where bad design is much more likely to lead to physical harm, or even death.

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Why the “sparkly stars” icon is everything wrong with tech

If ever there were a visual encapsulation of the difference between technology and "tech", it is this. Time was, if you wanted to signify that a piece of functionality involved some form of artificial intelligence, you'd use a cartoon robot head. It was an optimistic view of technology, since any such implementation would be far less advanced than the androids found in sci-fi, but it was still an admission that technology is technology, and as such, is a tool.

But when the manbuns got their hands on AI, everything went to hell. In keeping with their own desire to make everything in the world a warm fuzzy safe space with coloring books and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, they decided that robots are scary. Robots are the things from Terminator 2 and all those other R-rated movies that Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t let them watch. But magic isn’t scary. Magic is the thing from Harry Potter and Beauty & The Beast. So they turned AI from technology into magic.

While it might be tempting to write off this reframing of AI as a cynical marketing move, recall that we’ve already established that the tech industry is inclined to smoke from its own sack. They unironically believe their marketing as they unironically use the term “unicorn”. And this is much scarier than if they saw it all as a sales front to dupe the proles, because they are personally invested in making their vision into reality.

Magic vs. technology

The entire point of the sparkly stars icon is to communicate the idea that AI is beyond the ken of mortal man and not something that needs to be understood, merely trusted blindly. A robot suggests rationality. There is code in there. Cold, hard, deterministic code that can be interrogated, modeled, and altered as needed. But magic? Magic can’t be understood. You just have to place faith in it, and of course the wizards who conjure it up.

This is all consistent with the design approach to AI products. Rather than being used as a means to assist users in their work, today’s AI is designed to replace users. The most popular AI tools for visual design are ChatGPT and Midjourney, both of which offer the user only minimal manual control over the output. One would expect Adobe to first implement AI in such a way as to help users gain a greater control over their complex products. Considering the average Photoshop user probably doesn’t know more than 15% of the things that Photoshop can do, AI would be a great way to help give users access to the other 85% without having to memorize menu trees. But, of course that is not the case. Instead, they just added Midjourney-but-worse.

All of this is entirely consistent with the worldview of these techbros. They long for a world in which magic spells do everything for us, and every idea they come up with is one more attempt at pushing our society in that direction, no matter that it will never happen. The thing is, it only takes one major company buying into the techbros loony-tune hype and the rest of the upward-failing, McMansion-dwelling cookie-cutter suits will follow the first one off a cliff lest they “get left behind”.

This is how we end up with products like LinkedIn which use a sparkly stars button to “rewrite with AI”, yet don’t allow the user to set up automatic content moderation on their posts to keep trolls out while they are away from their computer. The latter task is infinitely better suited to AI because it’s rote, it’s unpleasant, and it requires constant vigilance. But the former task is fundamentally human, and thus the techbros want to get rid of it.

As it stands, the sparkly stars icon has one good use: informing the user that any feature thus denoted can safely be avoided. In fact, it's safer to avoid the whole product.

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Reddit: A case study in a different type of enshittification

See those up and down arrows practically begging you to offer your opinion on that comment? Yeah... they don't work. If you click them, the arrow turns a solid color, then reverts to white. That's because the post is archived.

It would have been so easy to design the UI so the arrows disappear once the post is archived. They just didn't.

Not only has Reddit ignored this flaming blunder, but they've ignored this flaming blunder for TWO DECADES. I can scarcely think of a UX fail where the cost to fix is so low and the ROI so high, that has gone unaddressed for this long. It's gone on so long, I suspect it's intentional. But what could the intention be?

Reddit is not like the others

Like Twitter, Reddit is a company founded by Valley airheads without a lick of business sense, but unlike Twitter, the core concept of Reddit is pure old internet. It doesn't have enshittification in its DNA. This is important.

Most of what creates bad UX is enshittification culture driven by rent-seeking oligopolies run by late-dynastic heirs with 85-95 IQs and their army of childishly idealistic manbuns. If enshittification is the culmination of a century of bad national policy, its rise to a universal phenomenon in all of technology is distinctly 2010s. That postdates the formation of Reddit's culture.

The point is that Reddit has horrific UX, but it cannot be blamed on Agile or product-first. Nor can it be blamed on budget. Reddit has more than enough resources to fix its UX problems, especially considering how basic the fixes are, and there's no apparent pecuniary motive to keep this bad UX as a dark pattern. No, something else is at work here. Reddit is the smoking gun for a second cultural cause of bad UX that has been overlooked.

Old-school chronically online

What is that cause? I'm not sure it has a name. But it goes deep into the roots of modern tech. Key to Reddit's UX is the idea that you should "just know". You should "just know" you can't upvote an archived post. You should "just know" the rules of a sub rather than having the app check your post. You should "just know" that "top posts" doesn't mean "top of all time".

Remember how I said that the 2010s mobile tech boom made it possible to be chronically online without having to sit in front a computer all day? That doesn’t mean that people weren’t chronically online. It just meant that such an existence was the province of a specific type of person. Desktop screen addiction wasn’t for everyone. It was an exclusive club.

During the 1990s, and even the 2000s to an extent, using the internet was considered somewhat unusual. In the earliest days, it marked you as a geek. Later on, if you used the internet for anything more than checking e-mail, or news, or stock prices, you were seen by the unplugged masses as… different. The Old Internet was a place not fully under the dominion of legacy institutions. It was a place where nobody knew you were a dog. Those who spent too much time online were viewed as slightly transgressive. Put it this way: if you met your significant other on a dating website in 2003, you might have just told others “oh, we met at a party” to avoid any weird looks. Because those weird looks came.

(d)Weeb culture

One side effect of this disconnect from mainstream society was that some people took it a little too far. They saw the internet not just as a means of staying a step ahead of mainstream society, but of escaping from it entirely. These were people who were already socially ill-adjusted, and they had found tribes online who enabled their least-adjusted traits. As such, they took pride in further separating themselves from the rest of society. One means of this was using their mastery of technology as a barrier. Only those who were as tech-savvy as they could truly enjoy the benefits of online life.

This is the culture that informed the design of Reddit. Reddit, despite its major redesign several years back, retains many of the trappings of the Old Internet. The non-working vote buttons are an intentional bit of esoterica meant to confound normies. And they are hardly the only example. Many SubReddits have “traps” when you submit posts. Your post can be rejected for any number of reasons that could have easily been detected and flagged prior to posting. You might not even notice the post was auto-deleted unless you see the message notification. This is one more way of punishing outsiders in order to keep them out.

It’s not just Reddit

I mentioned in another article that Wikipedia suffers from this same issue. It remains under the thrall of a denizenry of cyberdorks who don’t like outsiders, and they don’t like changes to their small world. They will delete your submission if it violates some archaic rule. They will protest any user interface improvements, even something as objectively good as adding margins to the text, or removing the unsightly frames around the images. They may not have any nominal leadership at Wikipedia, but they wave around the fact that they are contributors like a weapon.

Consider that all major tech products have pre-2009 roots. That plays a bigger role than you think. Enshittification is not pure 20th century capitalism; it has a lot of Old Internet DNA. To fully understand enshittification, you cannot look at it merely as an expression of greedy corporations, nor even of that plus Mumford & Sons loving yupsters who want to turn the internet into a giant daycare. There is a powerful, but subtle base layer of dweebocracy that you can see in the very design of tech products.

This culture is the reason for the artificial gulf between highly technical users and everyone else. Broadly speaking, tech products are designed to be either easy to use but functionally neutered, or powerful but arcane and obscurantist in design. The most flagrant example of this phenomenon is Google Analytics 4, where, unless you are highly technical, you will only get laughably basic information.

But the problem is far more pervasive. Web development, music production, 3D rendering, and data analysis either require you to have substantial technical knowledge of specific software platforms, or relegate you to a tinkerer. Generative AI perpetuates the problem by reducing production to “prompt and pray”. Wikipedia itself only recently added a WYSIWYG editor, meaning that non-technicals were excluded from contributing, rendered mere passive consumers of information. And let’s not forget Steve Jobs’s infamous quip that “you’re holding it wrong”. User-blaming is a norm of the Old Internet that still lives with us.

And, because this layer of enshittification is so foundational to technology, it’s harder to even identify it compared to the corporate buffoons and hipster manbabies. That makes it more insidious than the others. One has to wonder just how many people in the industry are compromised. I think it’s more than anyone would like to admit. And yet, if we are going to stop enshittification, we have to contend with the enemy among us, not just the one in front of us.

A bridge, a bridge, a schmidge

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