People are really not curious enough about bureaucracy. We complain literally our entire lives about "bureaucracy" and all the bad outcomes it produces.
But I've met literally no one who thought "hmm... if there's this emergent phenomenon across virtually every single large-scale human endeavor... and that phenomenon seems to systematically produce undesirable outcomes... at the cost of billions of dollars or millions of lives... maybe I oughta inspect this phenomenon more closely!"
People have been told for so long that private companies are more efficient than government that they have started to simply believe it, as if the problems of large scale organisation aren't universal.
Some cracks have emerged in that, at least in the UK. Trains, water companies, etc, all used as solid examples of private sector waste and extractiveness.
"Bureaucracy" has been an entire field of study for more than a century at that point. But WMF is not bureaucracy any more than the FIFA is bureaucracy. It is curruption; That of the stated ideals of the origin: non profit, decentralisation and democracy.
Another word whose usefulness has been degraded to just mean “bad behavior by an organization”.
With “enshittification”, Doctorow meant something specific, where a platform rises to popularity by serving its users, then betrays those users to its business partners to make more money, then finally betrays even those business partners to keep most of the value for themselves.
Anyway I guess Doctorow brought this on himself by choosing a word that’s fun to say but isn’t clear about what it refers to.
Doctorow approved the generic use. He said he never meant for "enshittification" to only ever refer to the platform lock-in pattern. It refers to any way that things get worse on purpose.
Enshitification doesn’t just happen, it’s a choice to sacrifice quality and integrity for short term profit. There are plenty of large products and companies that haven’t gone this way.
Which as your article points out, is as easy to solve as reading The Mythical Man-Month. That's why it's an Iron Law. It's easy to remove!
Also, as you point out, it's actually the same as money laundering, which is an actual crime. So as it goes, every large organization is committing massive scale organized crime (to their own detriment, oddly enough), but they can stop doing so by just reading The Mythical Man-Month.
I don't think of non profit bloat as enshittification. Enshittification is gradual reduction in quality of a user facing service over time that used to be trusted. Here it's just a matter of (arguably) inefficient spending as fundraising had increased but I don't think there's any rollback in services.
People are really not curious enough about bureaucracy. We complain literally our entire lives about "bureaucracy" and all the bad outcomes it produces.
But I've met literally no one who thought "hmm... if there's this emergent phenomenon across virtually every single large-scale human endeavor... and that phenomenon seems to systematically produce undesirable outcomes... at the cost of billions of dollars or millions of lives... maybe I oughta inspect this phenomenon more closely!"
People have been told for so long that private companies are more efficient than government that they have started to simply believe it, as if the problems of large scale organisation aren't universal.
Some cracks have emerged in that, at least in the UK. Trains, water companies, etc, all used as solid examples of private sector waste and extractiveness.
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"Bureaucracy" has been an entire field of study for more than a century at that point. But WMF is not bureaucracy any more than the FIFA is bureaucracy. It is curruption; That of the stated ideals of the origin: non profit, decentralisation and democracy.
Maybe so, but the linked article doesn't even allege, much less prove that.
Another word whose usefulness has been degraded to just mean “bad behavior by an organization”.
With “enshittification”, Doctorow meant something specific, where a platform rises to popularity by serving its users, then betrays those users to its business partners to make more money, then finally betrays even those business partners to keep most of the value for themselves.
Anyway I guess Doctorow brought this on himself by choosing a word that’s fun to say but isn’t clear about what it refers to.
Doctorow approved the generic use. He said he never meant for "enshittification" to only ever refer to the platform lock-in pattern. It refers to any way that things get worse on purpose.
If that's really the case, people should stop using the term as though it has explanatory power.
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Enshitification doesn’t just happen, it’s a choice to sacrifice quality and integrity for short term profit. There are plenty of large products and companies that haven’t gone this way.
This is called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy
Which as your article points out, is as easy to solve as reading The Mythical Man-Month. That's why it's an Iron Law. It's easy to remove!
Also, as you point out, it's actually the same as money laundering, which is an actual crime. So as it goes, every large organization is committing massive scale organized crime (to their own detriment, oddly enough), but they can stop doing so by just reading The Mythical Man-Month.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
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Yes. everyone kinda sucks in their own ways. Mostly not enough to matter in their lives, but in large groups, the suck adds up.
I don't think of non profit bloat as enshittification. Enshittification is gradual reduction in quality of a user facing service over time that used to be trusted. Here it's just a matter of (arguably) inefficient spending as fundraising had increased but I don't think there's any rollback in services.