There is a big winter storm threatening most of the continental US, and as any pair of overworked parents with an infant would do, my wife and I waited until a few days before snow piled on DC to get our other kids some new cold-weather boots.
We decided to shop in person rather than on Amazon because: 1) their feet are growing so fast that we have no idea what size boot they would be wearing for a particular model and 2) we had no time to try on a pair and return if the fit was bad, because the snow is coming in, like, less than 24 hours. My wife, having kept some contact with brick-and-mortar stores, suggested we went to the closest large shoes-only stores despite there being a Macy’s, a Nordstrom and a few other general department stores within walking distance from us, because apparently those were’t what they used to be. Okie dokie.
And so we took the green line to DC USA, a “multilevel enclosed urban shopping center anchored by big box stores”, most of which had closed since the mall’s heyday but we both remembered there being a DSW just around the corner and how could it have possibly gone out of business when its nearby competitor went bust shortly after we moved to DC? I think you can see where this is going: DSW too closed its DC locations for good early last year so we “kissed the door” as they say.
But there was a Target in the same building, and a Marshalls, and even something that used to be called “Burlington Coat Factory”. Surely between the three we would find a decent selection of children’s winter boots in the middle of January. Not a chance, said my wife who is wise and knowledgable in the ways of shopping, I write this without wanting to promote any stereotypes because we both in fact hate shopping, but it is all a matter of degrees and she hates it slightly less than I do. and I didn’t trust her but I should have because I did go into the Target remembering it as the Target of my youth — well, late 20s — when I had just come to America and its shelves along with those of Wallmart seemed to stretch into infinity.
My friends, the kids shoe shelf of this particular Target did not stretch into infinity. It barely stretched six feet. It had no more than three sizes of each model and no more than two models of each shoe type. Marshalls was even worse. Under the wise direction of our master shopper we didn’t even walk into the Burlington.
Which is to say, before online services began enshittifying, they had already spurred self-enshittification of the offline world. Cory Doctorow may have intended enshittification to signify the four-stage worsening of online services under the squeeze of financialization, but Doctorow himself in the book and elsewhere welcomed the broader use of the term which is what I’m doing here and if you want to be pedantic call if “self-shittification” instead. There is an economy/sociology/other “soft” science paper there somewhere in describing the stages of offline enshittification. Put it together with online and you get a PhD in enshittology. Big department stores have been hollowed out, along with big book stores, big electronics, big toys, big airlines, and anything else big that depended on volume and not personal relationships and brands. Like all bad things, this happened slowly then suddenly: trying to outcompete the cloud businesses, they themselves raised a toe up to the cloud. Note how the de-enshittifcation of big box stores involves a more personal approach. Those who can pivot to it will survive. But being a cloud platform is like pregnancy — you either are or are not — and they were clearly not.
Effects of the cloud on everyday life are particularly salient now that I’ve read Technofeudalism Though I maintain that “cloudism” is the better term and will use it instead. so this may be overstating the matter, but the broadest correct use of “enshittification” could be to describe the negative effects of cloud platforms becoming the dominant form of ownership, the thing that people need to have in order to become the movers and shakers of other people’s lives. For most of human history “the thing” was land. For the last few hundred years it was manufacturing capital. And now it’s this.
Each time, it made sense to sacrifice some of the base layer to build up and up. Yes, food was still important but even more important was the capital, so raze those fields of wheat and corn to erect factories. The famine will be worth it in the long run, for the survivors.
This is one big way in which cloud platforms have ruined meatspace. Digishittification!Another one is the digitization of what should be simple tasks: from AV equipment at a university to digital homes. This is different from what happened to big box stores as it is not a self-inflicted response to cloudism but rather the effect of cloudists trying to impose themselves further onto meatspace and expand their domain to an ever-increasing number of objects and interactions. Heated seats as the horse armour of our new age, though even Bethesda didn’t have the gall to ask for recurring payments.
The third and personally most irksome form is the enshittification of our inner lives. Lifeshittification! I have spent the last hour recounting our family’s voes of shoe shopping instead of cooking brisket. My conversations increasingly revolve about bad things that are happening, the reasons why they are happening, and the ways to prevent them from happening. More often than note this means: Teams is junk; Microsoft is a junk company; try to get Microsoft out of your life even if it means changing your kids' schools. Attention is now the commodity that land and capital used to be, and the cloud platforms have most of my attention. So is there even a way to win this fight?