Enshittification, and things that suck less than being online

If I see another AI slop artwork or soulless generated IG caption, I am going to **** someone with a ****

I’ve never been so back.

And by that, I mean here’s a piece I started working on in August last year and then forgot about.

This whole thing isn’t me being cantankerous, I promise, but it does start that way.

I’m writing this because I’m so tilted about website pop ups.

Every day I encounter a thing that caused society so much hassle that we all put aside our differences and agreed to kill off in like 2008 but, like fascism and emperor palpatine in that bad Star Wars movie, has somehow returned.

But this is the tip of the tilting-Jesse Iceburg.

It’s also the fact that every single service online has its own login, and app, and two-step verification, and some weird points system that doesn’t seem to do much unless you decide to route your entire life through a Qantas Frequent Flyer Points Generation System (patent pending) to save a hundred bucks on a flight. I went to book an exercise class, but to even see the schedule and pricing, I had to make an account and verify my email, only to see said bogus pricing and abandon my account forever, its only remnant the extra couple spam emails I now receive.

I don’t want to give my phone number to the exercise studio, the fish and chip shop or IKEA. The idea of being on a shop’s mailing list is cute in a vacuum, because who doesn’t want their local bookshop sending them bookclub info, specials and recommendations? Unfortunately, because social media has eroded and in marketing world (where I spend my non-rambling time), having someone’s email is a golden path to actually getting messages to their eyeballs, my inbox has more than 1000 unread emails, almost entirely marketing emails; things that individually may be good to look at, if there were time, but now just looks like a trough full of slop which I must wade through to find my movie tickets.

Meanwhile, someone in the UK Government had the galaxy-brained idea to ask people to delete old emails and pictures to save water, at the same time that AI is obliterating water around the world. I’d love nothing more than to delete my emails, except to maybe run a bulldozer through the infrastructure that makes them possible in the first place. But every time I delete a good batch of a few thousand, the slop spigot opens and brings forth a fresh offering. It never ends. As Godspeed You! Black Emperor said, We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.

This piece was in draft for ages, and I gave up on writing it because examples of the general crappiness of being online kept popping up. How can you encapsulate an example of enshittification when everything everything everything online has eroded to the point where it’s either borderline non-functional, genuinely and knowingly false, or has become paid service (which, as history is showing us, goes down the slippery slope towards the same erosion).

A not-so recent example: My partner and I got stuck in an endless loop of resetting passwords for our internet provider, only to be sent to the wrong window (a home page, not a password reset page). When we navigated to the actual password reset and tried to use it, it registered that input instead as a failed login attempt, sent us back to the login screen and warned us we now had one less attempt remaining before the account was locked. We got stuck in a loop, with an ever-diminishing countdown. When we called the provider, the folks on the phone were nice, but after a while on hold they came back and said, “yeah, look, we’re gonna have to escalate this.”

We then got forwarded to someone else, who we ran through our awful gauntlet from scratch, and agreed that yep, that is a problem.

Now I’m sitting here telling the story, I actually don’t know where it got escalated to, but the issue was never resolved. I think we’re still locked out.

A recent example: The app I use to manage calendars with my fiancée (god, I do love using that word) keeps asking me to subscribe for several dollars a month so I can change the colour of the calendar. Who is buying this? Has someone subscribed for this? Whoever designed microtransactions for calendar colour-shifting deserves whatever torment lies in the deepest circles of the underworld.

Before I continue through to my solution, some positive things.

Photos I’ve taken recently(ish)

I’ve had the privilege of photographing naarm/Melbourne-based burlesque dancer Cora Noire a few times in the last year or two, and it’s always been a great experience. I took this one on my Mamiya RB67, a gigantic camera I bought in NYC, in the backstreets of Fitzroy.

The Ovens River at Bright, a perfect and magical corner of the world that my partner, Alex’s family escape to once a year. Blue skies, 30+ degree weather every day, and countless hours spent swimming, sitting and reading in the river. It’s difficult to bring a camera because I want to spend every moment underwater; living it, not documenting it.

Wilson’s Promontory, where Alex took me last December for my birthday. A new tradition has been swimming in the ocean on my birthday - which started on a glorious 30 degree morning in Geelong a couple years ago. The day we were here, it was 14 degrees and windy, and the water temperature was about four degrees. But we ran past some practicing surfers on the beach and threw ourselves into the waves anyway. After five minutes of blasting the car’s heater, I could feel my fingers again. It was perfect.

Alex and I threw an engagement party!!! At our local bowls club!!! With bespoke Garfield artworks by one of our favourite tattoo artists!! Here’s one of the only photos I took on the night, of Alex challenging anyone and everyone to sprint-races across the green. I love this photo and this night and this woman so much.

Adventures I’ve taken

So I’ve been cycling.

A lot.

Like on holidays last year in Korea, where my partner and I rode 600km from Seoul to Busan over 6 days (it was so good, I have so many photos, and I’ll be writing about that in another little piece):

And for fun:

And a very ill-advised trip or two to work (this was the end-half, a miserable uphill slog (see: EASTFIELD ROAD BAD UPHILL):

This has slowed down juuuust a little in the middle of this year, but being on my beautiful, semi-busted 1999 Giant Farrago (which includes some stickers from its previous owner) is a dream when I’m flying around Melbourne and something I want to do much, much more this year.

Riding to work doesn’t sound like an adventure, but when you get lost and accidentally add 5km to the trip, or realise the only snack you’ve packed is a sad and crumpled peanut butter sandwich, it reeeeally feels like one.

I also studied a little bike mechanic’s course last year so I can repair bikes and it’s come in handy! Because I serviced my own bike. Which means the handlebars will sometimes come a little loose on a hill. But at least I can fix that!

Some things I’ve been reading online that were honestly just really lovely
(all these links should be un-paywalled)

• The New York Times’ Obituary for Rodrigo Moya - Read more

• An article about a dance competition in Castlemaine. - Read more

• A cruise down the river in a shack to meet folks. Genuinely a very nice reminder that good people aren’t just out there, they’re everywhere. -Read more

• A piece about contact sheets and their use in photography over the years. - Read more

Some things I’ve been reading offline that were honestly just really lovely

• Love is an Algorithm + A Curse for the Homesick, both by Laura Brooke Robson, AKA Retrograder. Some of the loveliest books I’ve read in a very long time. Before this year, reading had dropped off pretty hugely for me. I’d started making more time, in little baby-steps-ways, and then saw my local bookshop had a book club for Laura’s soon-to-be-released (now recently-released) book, Love is an Algorithm. I grabbed a copy on Thursday, ahead of Monday night’s bookclub and author meeting, and flew through it. I adored every moment of reading it, and the momentum of that has taken me through about 17 books so far this year. Importantly, it became a reminder that I don’t have to read books that feel like a slog, if I’m not liking the writing. If it doesn’t bring me in, like Laura’s books had, I can maybe put them aside (see you one day/never, Infinite Jest).

• Frank Herbert’s Dune. I immediately understood why we’re still doing things with this book 60 years on. Incredible world-building that never leaves you behind. I’ve heard the later books are whacky and I can’t wait to find out how.

Things I’ve been playing

I downloaded a copy of Dark Souls Remastered for Nintendo Switch, hankering for the awful masochistic punishment of Elden Ring (which I had the joy(?) of playing long ago, and now am awaiting its Switch release), and fell back in love with getting absolutely pummelled by horrors beyond imagining. When I played Elden Ring (my first FromSoftware game), I told a friend that I’d never played anything so punishing, but it simultaneously felt like the game was constantly encouraging me to be better, to think a bit harder or learn more as I tried again. I really think it’s one of the very few video games I’d describe as perfect (right up there with Horizon: Zero Dawn / Ocarina of Time / Resident Evil 4 (both versions)). DSR is…less perfect. But it’s cool seeing the pieces that came together later on to make a game I adored. And getting crushed by a gigantic skeleton holding a gigantic sword. That’s fantasy, baby.

Our title track - Enshittification / Breaking Out of the Slop Factory

Let’s start with the term, so we’re all on the same page.

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, in a blog post about platforms or services that bring in users with a good service, then degrade that service to make more money, once they know their users can’t easily leave.

Here’s a rundown from the ABC in Australia/Macquarie Dictionary, which is more concise: the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform as a consequence of profit-seeking.

It can probably be more simplified to the Netflix experience over the last decade:

• You get a $10 subscription, and everything you want is on the platform.

• Your subscription cost goes up after a while, and there is less content but it’s still useful. You like Netflix shows and they have some good oldies and some new things exclusive to there - what are you gonna do, torrent it?

• Your subscription costs more now, and includes ads. Netflix makes money from you and from businesses, for no discernable increase in quality.

• Oh and by the way? One login per household. And we’ve mailed you a loogie. Fuck you.

And it’s everywhere. The double-whammy is going on social media where a majority of content you’re seeing is manufactured/undeclared sponsored content, AI slop ads from businesses who can’t be bothered to pay a designer/mock up something in Canva, alongside an ad for every two-or-three organic posts you see.

I meant what I said at the top - I don’t want this to be all cantankerous. Someone once told me that it isn’t helpful to bring up a problem without a solution which is shaky at best, but I do actually have something here that’s helped me a lot.

Being offline more, and making it harder to be online at all.

Give me friction (baby)

Two months ago, I installed a (free) app called ScreenZen. You tell it which apps you want to put time limits on, and the intervals you’d like to set (for example, 30 minutes a day in 5 minute blocks), then how long you want to wait before the app opens (I’ve gone 20 seconds). When it’s set up, you open Instagram and are met with a purple screen that asks, “is this important?” and, even though the answer is always no, you can click Open, and a timer begins. You watch it slowly tick down, then you have five minutes to use the app before you’re locked back out. And it’s absolutely bonkers how fast that five minutes melts away.

You can tell the app to lock you out for periods after you’ve used it, to prevent continuous opening, so after I run out of time, I have to wait two minutes before I can hit open again. By then, I’m off and running on some other time wasting activity.

This sounds like a lot of maintenance to keep a person out of their own apps, but it’s worth remembering that the apps are designed to make you want to use them. Pull down to refresh make brain go brrrrr.

The level of friction this little lockout has brought to the experience of social media completely eradicated any urge I have to scroll mindlessly. It’s genuinely blissful.

In the morning while making coffee, holding the soy milk jug under a steam wand, angled to get some good froth, I wait my 20 seconds. I check my messages, I see some beautifully-targeted Instagram posts (either cycling or Magic the Gathering), I send a meme to my partner who is still snoozing in the next room, and I’m back on the Purple Lockout Screen.

The one big thing I’ve needed to do while setting this up is encouraging friends to text message me, rather than message on Instagram, if there’s to be any hope of a reply. But that, too, has been joyful and I really recommend it.

Is it important?

Two months in, I’m reading more. I’m trying to journal or scrapbook or draw, pen on paper, and only be looking at a screen when I really kinda have to be.

When my phone buzzes, if it’s a text message it gets forwarded to my watch (nifty!), or Crossplay. If it’s anything else, I don’t really see it until I go into the app to seek it out.

It’s easier to stop myself from breaking concentration and checking the phone, knowing that 99% of what goes on in there can be replied to later.

It’s not much, but it’s helping.

I’ll leave you all with that. I hope that this email doesn’t find you well; I hope it doesn’t find you at all, and that your phone buzzing is a muffled nothing in the air of a room you’re not even in.