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The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
In late February, in a campaign that is believed to be the first of its kind, the publicly funded Norwegian council joined forces with more than 70 groups and individuals across Europe and the US, including trade unions and human rights organisations.
Together they urged policymakers in 14 countries that straddle the Atlantic to take action against enshittification, arguing that it was not an inevitable process but rather the result of policy decisions. “Another internet is possible,” said Lützow-Holm Myrstad. “The status quo is not acceptable for anyone.”
In Norway, more than 20 organisations pressed officials to take action, in a push echoed by consumer councils in 12 other countries. A letter was also sent to EU institutions, while four civil society organisations in the US contacted several policymakers.
The letters called on policymakers to give consumers more power to control, adapt, repair and alter the products they already own as well as to allow people to move more easily between different services.
Policymakers were urged to double down on the enforcement of existing laws, such as those designed to protect consumers and their data, as well as work to foster greater competition in digital markets, for example through the use of public procurement processes to favour alternatives to big tech.
“It’s not too late to turn the tide,” said Lützow-Holm Myrstad. “Services don’t need to be enshittified if we have real competition, if you can choose as a consumer which services you use, and if the market will better regulate all these practices.”
The global campaign is backed by an 80-page report by the council, delving into how enshittification steadily became the norm.
While the council has a long history of taking on big tech companies – in 2018 it was among the first to accuse them of deceiving users into giving up their data – Lützow-Holm Myrstad acknowledged that its efforts were akin to pitting David against Goliath.
“But in the story of David and Goliath, David won in the end, right?” Lützow-Holm Myrstad said. “This is also why this international action is so important. Groups, transatlantically, are all speaking with a common voice: it doesn’t need to be this way. We don’t want it to be this way.”
Their hopes for the campaign have swelled as they watched the video rack up millions of views across multiple platforms, with more than 9,000 comments pouring in on YouTube alone, while the report was downloaded more than 6,000 times.
“We’ve never experienced anything like it, it really strikes a nerve with people,” he said. “There seems to be an incredible amount of support to do something about this.”
