Wildfires, Mediocrity, and the Curse of "Ensh*tification"

Our elites aren’t failing. They’re doing this on purpose.

At the moment, Americans watch in horror as wildfires burn Los Angeles. The fires are raw nature, but the tragedy is entirely human-created. Among the most basic jobs of the state is managing dangerous natural situations so major cities don’t go up in flames.

Not long ago, something like this would be shocking. There would be stunned outrage. Remember when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, and nobody could believe the government of the mighty United States couldn’t handle a natural disaster? Katrina was less controllable of a disaster, and government handled it better than what’s happening in California.

What should trouble us is how this sort of thing no longer feels like a surprise. We no longer expect when big things happen that an army of competent grown-ups will show up to handle the crisis with quiet mastery, skill, and excellence.

This has me thinking about the business term with an edgy name that emerged over the last few years—enshitification. Everywhere from government, business, media, and academia, our society seems trapped in a dangerous cycle of enshitification.

WHAT IS ENSHITIFICATION?

In 2022, Cory Doctorow wrote a viral essay observing the cycle that tech platforms inevitably travel. They start with an amazing service that delights their customers, and eventually degrade into mediocrity machines abusing customers while making everybody miserable. He dubbed this cycle with the colorful name of “enshitification.”

The process occurs in three inevitable stages. New tech platforms, created by mission-driven founders, need to make an impression in the market to win users. To do this, they create brilliant products people love. Once people are locked into the platform, the platforms then gradually shift focus. With users locked in, their priority moves to locking in necessary business partners and suppliers. The product thus degrades the user experience while creating a brilliant experience for business partners. Finally, once both users and partners are locked in, the company transitions to exploiting what it has built. At this point, the company seeks to take as much of the benefit it creates for itself, and the product degrades until it pleases no one.

A product that began as a brilliant and excellent experience is now profitable, but horrible for everybody.

We’ve all seen this cycle repeated in all the products we use. Uber was great for users, until we all started using Uber, at which point it transitioned to being great for drivers, until all the drivers were locked in, at which point Uber intentionally degraded the experience for everyone. Amazon traveled a similar path. So did Google. So did Facebook. Once you start looking for it, you notice enshitification everywhere.

This isn’t just a problem with technology companies. Companies in every industry that start out as fonts of excellence delighting customers and seeking to change the world inevitably degrade into mediocracy, abusing customers with pointlessly frustrating experiences. Over the Christmas holidays, I was watching the Star Wars show Skeleton Crew with family on Disney+. Every few minutes, Disney interrupted the action without warning, sometimes in the middle of a scene, to cram in ads—in a service my folks paid for with a subscription. Someone clearly spent a lot of time calculating the most irritating experience they could create, just short of what would make people turn the thing off in frustration.

On my way home from that trip, the airline made me wait about an hour to get my bag—pretty normal, which is why, like most people, I do my best to never check a bag. YouTube now crams enough ads to be borderline invasive. Apple no longer innovates, but profits off an absurd 30% tax for every app on their service. Microsoft regularly downloads updates onto my computer while I’m working without giving me any way to stop it until I’m no longer on a deadline. Everywhere I go, every company and institution I deal with intentionally gives me an experience just short of bad enough to walk away or cancel. Everything is Comcast.

All these companies built their reputations on innovation and excellence. Now they’re mediocre, pushing their experience to just short of intolerable enough to walk away.

This is essentially what I think caused the bungling of the wildfires. Enshitification isn’t just about business. It’s the plan all of our society’s leaders employ, and it has swept over every institution, including most dangerously government.

THE PROBLEM WITH AN ENSHITIFIED WORLD

Think about what enshitification means for society: Everything is broken and frustrating on purpose.

Nothing works the way it’s supposed to work. Nobody does their job to their best of their ability. The products we use, the services we depend on, the media we consume, the universities we rely on for knowledge, and even government, is intentionally designed to do the minimum of what is promised. The people leading these institution aren’t even trying to do the best job of which they’re capable. Focused on other priorities, they perform their core missions just well enough so people don’t angrily walk away.

At our every turn, life is needlessly frustrating on purpose.

What’s maddening is these failures aren’t because of screw ups or mistakes. They’re an intentional strategy. The people running things know how to do great jobs. They could create brilliant things that worked excellently if they wanted to. They have the knowledge, the skill, and the resources. Doing so, they would remain just as profitable. They just don’t want to, because in the culture in which they operate other priorities are more important. It’s not that Google no longer knows how to create a brilliant search product that gets you whatever it is you want to find. The people running Google believe it’s in their interest to bury the things you actually want on the fifth page behind the paid links, while they focus on other projects they find more interesting. Google is no longer as useful as it once was, but just useful enough to stop you from abandoning it.

This is why we should stop talking about our elites failing. It’s not failure if it’s the plan. Perhaps our elites are actually quite skillful and successful, but they’ve put their skills to use in a counter-productive environment amid a culture prioritizing the wrong things.

What does this have to do with governance? The people who run the government are the same people, from the same culture, with the same incentives as the people running other spheres of American life. Corporate executives neglect the core product to squeeze out profits somewhere else. Politicians and officials neglect the core responsibilities of government because other things are more important to them—raising money, supporting allies, positioning for the next office, bolstering the party, or chasing other ideological projects, instead of doing whatever it is they’re actually supposed to do.

There’s a lot of arguing about why Los Angeles is burning. The core of every explanation is a failure to adequately prepare. The people in charge of preparing to stop an inevitable wildfire spent the effort and resources meant to be used to prepare for this inevitable event on things that were more important to them—other priorities or other causes. Now they claim these failures were beyond their control. It was entirely within their control to be prepared, trained, and ready, for something everyone knew eventually would happen.

Our elites aren’t failing. They’re doing this on purpose.

IMAGINE A WORKING AMERICA

Imagine for a moment an America in which the people running things had an incentive to make them work. What would happen if the people at the top used the same skills and resources to chase excellence, the way Walt Disney or Apple under Steve Jobs chased delighting people by delivering an amazing experience? For the most part, the same people would still be in charge and would still be living amazing lives. Our great corporations would still be profitable, and their executives highly paid. Institutions would have the same power. Politicians would still get re-elected. The only thing that would be different is where they spent their efforts—on making things actually work.

For the average American, on the other hand, this America would suddenly be a dream. Instead of fighting each day with institutions incentivized to make things frustrating to the point of tolerance, suddenly things would be incentivized to make life as easy as possible. A lot of darkness people feel about America would vanish overnight. As workers, we would all be happier too. Being part of something excellent gives people a thrill and sense of meaning. Nobody likes being mediocre. What if every worker came home proud about how their hard work helped people and made their lives actively better, instead of feeling like they took advantage of them in some idiotic game? Everyone would be happier, at no additional cost.

I think this is the source of a lot more discontent in America than any of us likes to believe. Dealing with one enshitified company is annoying. An enshitified society is infuriating. Nothing works right. Everything is pointlessly frustrating. Every experience is draining, like going into battle to haggle something from a tout in a medieval bazaar. Going through life like this is demoralizing for everyone. People don’t know who to blame, so their anger gets focused on politics.

I realize this might sound like the bad habit of offering the easy solution of “if people would just...” As events remind us often, people are not going to just. People are going to be people, chasing after the incentives that get them the things they want. I know many complacent people will therefore say this situation is just inevitable, simply a matter of incentives meeting human nature. Looking at history, I know that simply isn’t true. Across the real world, institutions and entire societies have had genuine cultures of excellence, and others didn’t. The societies, companies, or organizations with cultures and incentives prioritizing competence and excellence flourished. The ones that caused smart people with skills to do idiotic things failed.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, in just a few years America turned a second-rate army of 174,000 soldiers into a modern machine of 8 million that could supply logistics across an ocean. On D-Day, needing to supply its beachhead, we actually manufactured functioning mobile port facilities and sailed them all the way to France. Later, that same America created NASA, which built a rocket and flew it to the moon. It invented modern democracy, built the tallest skyscrapers in the world, created the automobile, and created a society of mass prosperity. It did these things because, at these moments, it prioritized excellence and achievement.

The Soviet Union also contained a lot of brilliant people—educated and well-trained scientists, engineers, and administrators. They were trapped in a system with perverse incentives and pathways for mobility at odds with getting things correct and true. They therefore acted in stupid ways, spreading misery and failure, and leading to the collapse of their society. The difference wasn’t talent, resources, or skill. It was culture and incentives.

We have plenty of wealth and resources in America. We have brilliant, innovative, skilled people. We don’t have to live in a society in which everything is frustrating by design. We don’t need to tolerate a government that flounders and flails at basic competence. If we simply insisted our society prioritize excellence, everything would magically become excellent using the exact same people, resources, and ideas. A few things might cost a bit more here and there, but if everything ranked up simultaneously that all comes out in the wash.

Ending this intentional degradation of America might be easier then we think. What we need is a movement demanding better. The reason people cut corners, neglect responsibilities, or provide shoddy services is because they believe they can get away with it while reaping the same rewards. They push their actions to the limit of getting called out as disgraceful. No one in power wants to cross the line from business or public leader into con artist, grifter, sleaze, or slumlord. It makes you low status. You embarrass your mother.

Among the reasons I’m fascinated with the nineteenth-century Progressive Movement is it was a movement of ideas that drove policy, not a movement of policies that drove ideas. In the real world, a lot of what happens isn’t about laws and policies but expectations and what people believe is normal and acceptable. We recently saw America’s business culture turned around overnight not by new laws but public changes in attitudes through movements like Me Too. Make excellence high status. Make chasing cheap rewards and mediocrity low status. Stop tolerating enshitification. Make it shameful instead of natural and clever.

The first step is recognizing we have a problem. It’s my belief that the path to reform lies first in creating a movement that clearly identifies the problems we must fix with clear goals for reform, and then letting the politics and policy to implement these new attitudes catch up. This is something we have to fix. Our elites aren’t failing. America’s leaders are accomplishing exactly what they set out to do—unnecessarily deteriorating America because they refuse to prioritize competence and excellence.

We don’t need to live like this. If we no longer want our major cities to burn down, we can start by insisting the people responsible for protecting us do their actual jobs.

What do you think of the degradation of American excellence? Join the conversation in the comments.