Enshittification in 3 acts with the cure

As mentioned recently (here), "enshittification" is a concept created by Cory Doctorow (2023, 2025), Canadian-British author, academic, philosopher and critic of the digital economy. The term, enshittification, named the concept: the systematic erosion of online platforms as focus shifts from providing user service; to user exploitation maximising shareholder and founder returns (Doctorow, 2023). There are three stages: a user-friendly start, moving to a "business-to-business" exploitation mode; ending with enshittification - or total value extraction. User data is sold for targeted advertising, marketing profiling, voter analysis and forecasting. Competition is bought out and mothballed. Ownership is transferred for 'free' tools; the tools are ring-fenced, what is free becomes paid; access becomes tiered and free is worthless; all while opting out becomes more and more difficult. Companies have become monopolies. The hook was 'freemium', and the end-goal, fully paid premium. But wait! There will be a level beyond that too, I am sure. As C. S. Lewis said "Come farther up, come farther in!" (1956, p. 155), beckoning us onwards into the unknown.

Enshittification is the result of monopolies and the transfer of ownership and control. If we - the collective we - allow products without reparability, give our personal data away, and allow sharp practices, we will reap the rewards of restrictive digital ecosystems (Doctorow, 2025). I thought it was worth mentioning that there are solutions for "digital decay": prevention of monopoly-creation; allowing users to opt-out of software locks; opting out of upgrades/updates; ensuring users own their data and not allowing implied transferability via unread EULAs (end user licence agreements).

Norway has a great programme running to remind us how we can take action ourselves (Forbrukerrådet - Norwegian Consumer Council, 2026):

We could return to a more open internet, where we keep control over our devices and data. Although Tim Berners-Lee gifted the www to humanity (Berners-Lee, 2000; Fenton, 2010, p. 116), perhaps we could consider what he and his colleagues built-into the embryonic www: a micropayment 402 protocol allowing us to all pay a little, and thus create a true socially-owned space (Berners-Lee, 2000, p. 65), using the HTTP 402 placeholder 'payment required' (Li, 2026).

Something to think about.

Sam

References:

Berners-Lee, T., with Fischetti, M. (2000). Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (1st ed.). HarperCollins Publishers.

Doctorow, C. (2023, January 23). The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok: Or how, exactly, platforms die. Wired Magazine. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Doctorow, C. (2025). Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. Verso.

Fenton, N. (Ed.). (2010). New Media, Old News: Journalism and democracy in the digital age. SAGE Publications.

Forbrukerrådet - Norwegian Consumer Council. (2026, February 27). A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator [video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ

Lewis, C. S. (1956). The Last Battle (second reprint 1965). Puffin Books.

Li, S. (2026, March 27). The War for AI Payments Has Begun: HTTP 402 Awakens After 30 Years. LinkedIn Pulse. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/war-ai-payments-has-begun-http-402-awakens-after-30-years-simon-li-tzfnc/

 * NotebookLM was used to create the claymation-style infographic components in the image accompanying this post

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The enshittification of education

Successive governments in New Zealand - and probably world-wide - have failed to adequately invest in education. The training and education sector - like manufacturing and so many other sectors - have taken hit after hit in recent years, and taken those hits out on staff first, and customers second. For example, our rangatahi "18-19-year-olds specifically, will now face a double blow. University fees were set to rise by 6 percent for the second consecutive year, after years of maximum fee hikes of about 2.5[%]" (Meyer, 2025). Further, "the high proposed fee ceiling 'reflects that fees have lagged behind inflation in recent years, making it harder for providers to maintain course quality'", yet post-Covid-19, inflation in Aotearoa has been at almost 7% yet course fees were "capped at 2.8[%]" effectively falling from 2021 (Meyer, 2025). 

Wages have increased in other sectors, inflation has impacted everything, infrastructure costs have risen, and the cost of living has increased: yet salaries and contractor rates have not increased in education. Further, the services which used to be supplied because this was not a well-paid sector are also being cut. For example, on-side printer services are closing, staff parking is now often a limited paid for service, creches have closed, coffee must be purchased via student cafeterias, heating must be turned on again and again as it is on a timer switch in classrooms, and extra services - such as gym access, discounted course fees, or private use of facilities - have become restricted or cut completely.

Canadian academic and author, Cory Doctorow wrote an essay on the erosion of TikTok's service (2023):

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a 'two-sided market', where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them" (Doctorow, 2023).

I think this applies across many sectors, not just TikTok, and not just service platforms. The author thinks the same. In his words: "Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop" (Doctorow, 2025, p. 11). 

Due to the continual erosion of funding, support, and service delivery, I think Doctorow's ideology can be applied to what we are experiencing in education as "the enshittification" of the education sector (Doctorow, 2023, 2025).

I am not sure how we stop it. But the erosion needs to stop before education becomes worthless.

Sam

References:

Doctorow, C. (2023, January 23). The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok: Or how, exactly, platforms die. Wired Magazine. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Doctorow, C. (2025). Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. Verso.

Meyer, F. (2025, May 22). Alarm bells sound on tertiary education budget: More students set to seek tertiary qualifications than the system is funded to support. Fee hike set to remain at 6 percent. Newsroom. https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/05/22/alarm-bells-sound-on-tertiary-education-budget/

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Goodhart's Law, or duck-shoving

While I have talked briefly about Goodhart's Law before (here), Charles Goodhart was a chief economic advisor to the Bank of England. He looked at central banking institutions' inflation-control methods, through restricting and easing of circulating cash in the system. Goodhart's Law was an aside said in a 1975 paper that he wrote, saying "Ignoring Goodhart's law, [i.e.] that any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes", then he went on to explore the actual impacts of risk management around monetary policy (Chrystal & Mizen, 2003, p. 222).

Goodhart was apparently noting that once banks focused on a particular inflation target, they changed their behaviour - for example, creating and using new instruments not counted in the measure - making the original 'money supply' statistic useless for policy-making. Experts say that what Goodhart (1975, as cited by Chrystal & Mizen, 2003) meant by this self-proclaimed law is that we shouldn't put our blind trust in statistics once they become our goal, because all we did was observe a normal pattern of behaviour then turned our observation into a target. It is A target; but who knows if it is THE target? Or the RIGHT target?

It is a good point. Because as soon as we have a goal, we don't want to 'spoil' our ability to meet the target. So we change our behaviour... and the observation no longer holds.

There are two other very similar phrases:

• Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern simplified Goodhart's Law to "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" (Mattson et al., 2021, p. 2), which I don't feel has quite enough sting; and
• Social scientist researcher Donald Campbell said that "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor" (Mattson et al., 2021, p. 2). Ouch. That has sting. We could reframe this as the more we use a stat as a marker, the more we are likely to try to game it. 

How about this for a current example. Let's think about hospitals who say surgery cases are only allowed to be on a waiting list for 6 months; surgery is expected to have taken place, the case resolved. So to meet that statistic, at the end of 6 months, the surgical department sends the patients back to the specialist for reassessment. The clock resets, and the countdown to six months begins again. The statistic has been met: regardless of the surgery not having been done, the person's quality of life is still poor, but the statistics look great.

I would call this duck shoving. Rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. 

Or Goodhart's Law in action ;-)

Sam

References:

Chrystal, K. A., & Mizen, P. D. (2003). Chapter 8: Goodhart's Law: Its Origins, Meaning and Implications for Monetary Policy. In P. D. Mizen (Ed.), Central banking, monetary theory and practice: Essays in honour of Charles Goodhart (pp. 221-243). Edward Elgar.

Goodhart, C. A. (1975). Monetary relationships: A view from threadneedle street in papers in monetary economics. In Reserve Bank of Australia Conference Proceedings, Papers in Monetary Economics (Volume 1, pp 1-20). Author.

Mattson, C., Bushardt, R. L., & Artino, A. R., Jr (2021). "When a Measure Becomes a Target, It Ceases to be a Good Measure". Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 13(1), 2–5. https://doi.org/10.4300/JGME-D-20-01492.1

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