Will Bench

I’ve liked writing for a while but have never really had a place to put it. I’ve never been especially bothered by that or felt the lack of my voice being out there a harm to society, but recently I was introduced to Substack and thought I’d give it a go. I don’t by any means have my finger on the cultural pulse but I noticed a swell in people moving to Substack post the Muskification of Twitter, and the almost evangelical support it gained as some sort of digital utopia.

So I joined, followed a bunch of people and took some time to write a first post. This was great. Interesting articles from interesting people, without the angst and polarisation of Twitter. After a few months of enjoying this, there was a noticeable push from the owners of the platform to engage with ‘Notes’, the community short-form discussion area; effectively all of the functions of Twitter. I engaged a bit with this, reposting and upvoting things. This was fun. Again, the same interesting people engaging with their audience in the short-form. There was however a noticeable interested intellectualism that felt positively profound and respectful after you’d finished a good article, but, from some, distinctly condescending and gate-keeping in the notes section. A childish in-group mentality.

I started to notice an all too familiar bitter taste in my mouth after using the platform, and particularly Notes. The same rise in cortisol that triggered me to deactivate Facebook, then Twitter, then Instagram.

Then the founders added a video function to Substack, essentially the same that was added to Facebook and Instagram after its introduction via TikTok. You know the one. We all do. This prompted a divided response from Substackians(?), who, (and I include myself here), had gone there for all the benefits described above. A lot of people were outraged, announcing it was the start of the downfall (I agreed, but not so vehemently as to make it public; I was new after all). The founders had reneged on their promise?! We came here to write and read, not mindlessly scroll?! Others said variations of “Grow up, platforms change, get over it”.

I forgot to mention that about the same time I joined Substack I came across Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification. For a while I’ve been interested in the political economy of Tech and this pricked my ears up. Doctorow’s thesis was so on-the-nose it won his Word of the Year 2023.

Enshitiffication, from Wikipedia,:

also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. 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.

Enshittification is a strategy that repeats itself, because it works for Big Capital. It is recognisably one of the mechanisms at play in Yanis Varoufakis’s concept of techno-feudalism.

Once you spot the pattern, you start to see it everywhere.

Step 1: Product based growth

Every platform begins by spoiling its users. Surplus cash from investors (usually VC) is funnelled into making the quality experience. Instagram’s clean, photo-focused feed, Twitter’s chaotic but creative public square, or Substack’s haven for thoughtful writing. Users feel valued because their experience is valued. Product point of difference is everything.

Step 2: Lock in

With users attracted, the platform tightens its grip. Twitter’s reactionary interactions with quote tweets and viral moments; Instagram made sure carefully curated life was tethered to its grid. Substack, with its introduction of Notes, nudged writers from long-form reflection into bite-sized engagement, ensuring audiences weren’t just readers, but participants.

Platforms don’t just rely on user satisfaction to keep people around; they create friction for departure. Network effects come into play: the more followers, subscribers, and connections you build, the harder it is to leave. Writers who have built audiences on Substack now feel compelled to participate in Notes to maintain visibility, even if they preferred traditional blog-style content. This is exacerbated by emphasis on ease of monetising audiences. Material conditions are at risk should a successful Substack writer leave.

Step 3: Attention needs to be extracted

Once a sufficient barrier to exit is achieved, platforms stop serving core users and prioritise business customers. These rarely have identical needs. The malaise of the attention economy is what attracted writers to Substack in the early days, but business customers need attention monetised.

Instagram’s shift to video-heavy Reels sidelined photography in favour of reward-loop engagement. Twitter experimented with algorithmic meddling, promoting content based on perceived virality rather than relevance. Platform algorithms start to prioritise the needs of capital. Think shadow-banning of critics of those ideologically opposed.

These changes are framed as ‘innovations’ but they exist to extract more value, in the form of data points, from users. Long-form writing was no longer enough; Substack wanted quick-scroll content, higher user interaction, and more ways to keep people glued to the platform.

Step 4: Consumer and business users squeezed

Once businesses flock to the platform, they also get milked. Free visibility turns into pay-to-play algorithms. Advertisers on Instagram saw reach plummet unless they paid for promotion. Twitter’s ad revenue model became a chaotic mess after algorithmic adjustments.

Now, both users and businesses are locked in just enough to tolerate the decline. The platform has found its most profitable balance: users feel frustrated but not quite enough to leave, businesses see diminishing returns but remain because alternatives require effort to establish.

Step 5: The scandal ‘pivot’ panic

Eventually, something breaks. A scandal, a controversy, a tone-deaf executive decision. Public backlash forces the platform to “pivot.” This is Silicon Valley’s term for scrambling to reinvent itself before users finally abandon ship. Cambridge Analytica initiated a crumble, that prompted Facebook to run to the Metaverse, also hoping to escape its decaying ad-driven model.

So the symptoms are all around us now. And this extends beyond social media, From the Uber riders who pay more while their drivers make less money to the YouTube viewers who watch more ads while performers get less money to the Amazon customers who pay more for goods from sellers who earn less.

As I said, now you can see them all around you. But if these are the symptoms, what are the actual mechanisms?

I defer to Cory Doctorow himself, writing for Locus.

Enshittification isn’t just a collection of symptoms, though. Those symptoms depend on a mechanism, a techni­cal property of digital platforms that enables all these shell games with the value created by end users and business customers. I call that mechanism ‘‘twiddling’’: the ability of digital platforms to change prices, rankings, and other key aspects from instant to instant, on a per-user basis.

A good example of this is found in Uber’s labor-pricing scam, a practice the sociologist FCK Veena Dubal dubbed ‘‘algorithmic wage discrimination.’’ Uber drivers who are more selective about which jobs they’re willing to take get paid more than their less-discriminating colleagues. This is a fully auto­mated process: Uber’s labor-pricing algorithm makes a continuous stream of judgments as to how much a driver should be offered to do a given job, based on how often that driver turned down other jobs they’d been offered.

If these higher payouts lure drivers to become less discriminating, the algorithm starts to titrate their wages down, toggling the price per mile up and down in minute increments based on the previous offer’s outcome, like a fisher playing the reel in and out as their prey gradually tires. Gradually, Uber drivers are tricked into giving up the side hustles that let them be so selective about their rides, then, as they become more and more dependent on the platform, their wages are drained away to the bare subsistence minimum.

The wage-pricing algorithm is ‘‘twiddling’’ the payout knob from moment to moment, playing a shell game with inexhaustible superhuman speed. In every shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Digital platforms have the fastest hands around. It’s not that black-hearted coal bosses and other stock villains of analog capitalism didn’t dream of this kind of payroll shenanigans – it’s that they couldn’t hire enough payroll clerks in green eye­shades to make the dream a reality.

Digital twiddling continuously changes prices, wages, and recommenda­tions, making it impossible for business customers and end users to con­sistently understand the deals they’re making in order to get the best out of those deals.

The observable progression of enshittification – the fluid, continuous shunting of value from users to business customers to the platform’s share­holders – rely on the invisible work of this twiddling. They’re somatype and genotype, or, more accurately, pathogen and symptom.

When you name the thing, you see the thing everywhere.

You know that feeling of simultaneous catharsis and dread when someone articulates something so well that’s been niggling away at you but you can’t quite put your finger on it.

Of course, nowhere online is going to be perfect. I still read and share with others Substack articles when they’re delivered to my inbox. But my engagement is otherwise null.

And what will continue to be particularly pernicious about these platforms is their false pretence they’re doing good, their constant virtue signalling that, yes, they are still creating that digital utopia, all while adding that next attention sink feature. Sorry, innovation.