Enlazification - Enshittification's Core Propellant

If you are too lazy to think, someone is going to do your thinking for you, and it is a hundred percent certain that the ultimate beneficiary of someone else's thinking will not be you.

The progressive enlazification of society has mapped out a corporatocratic playbook in which the public are ruled not by the fist or the gun - but by their own aversion to effort...

OH JESUS...

I don't make the following statement with any kind of religious affiliation. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing a publisher could do with the New Testament is rewrite it in cod patois, paperback it, and shove it in the fiction bin at a chain of petrol stations. But I can't help thinking that if Jesus H(allucinatory?) Christ had been born in 1996, he'd now be busy telling the "enshittification" woe-sayers to grow up, stop crying, and heed the parable of the blindly selfish digital slob, who was rightfully punished for his laziness and cyberdevil-worship.

Slobbery is a scourge of the 21st century.

Rug-pulls, corporate ambushes and straightforward scams are its just punishment.

It's a bitter irony, but the archetype to whom I'm addressing this article would never have read beyond the heading. Slobs never read anything. They refuse to spend the ten minutes it takes to read the privacy policy, and instead choose to spend the three hours it takes to watch six separate digital marketers (who themselves have never read the privacy policy), speculating about the privacy policy on YouTube...

Having gained nil but unclear and conflicting information, our intrepid slob then resorts to posting on forums to ask whether the speculation found on YouTube is true. Half a day now invested in something that would have taken nine and a half minutes via the logical (as opposed to the lazy) route. You're laughing because this is reality. This phenomenon - in which people's attempts to avoid a modest amount of work end up consuming vastly more time and energy than the original task - I refer to as "shortcut-sink". And it's something convenience culture has normalised.

Extreme capitalism relies on the public's failure to notice that doing things "the easy way" ultimately takes longer and entails more work than doing things "the hard way".

Most of the "convenience" that consumerism presents to consumers isn't even real. We're talking here about a public who will spend money to drive to a gym, then spend more money to go in and run for an hour on a treadmill - when they could simply run to the gym and back, for free, and in less time (think about it), with exactly the same result. That mass inability to see economic logic is a gift for consumerism.

Consumerism deftly hacks the public's pathological commitment to the most convenient option, by breaking down long and grossly inconvenient tasks into bite-sized chunks. Chunks that appear, in themselves, to be convenient, but when assembled, turn out to be a massive waste of time, effort and money. Sometimes even trapping the consumer into total inactivity.

THE EFFORT-BYPASS

Throughout documented history, it's been recognised that reward requires effort. But modern marketing has won its fortune contradicting that scientific inevitability. And even before the birth of the commercial Internet it began to work. The success of books with titles like Eat Fat and Grow Thin showed that the public would lucidly suspend common sense when the nonsense they were fed had sufficient synergy with their desires.

There's an adage that says: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." I don't know what that makes people who still believe what a commercial "tech blog" says after the six hundred and tenth "ha ha, not really tho".

Steadily, the sphere of consumer marketing was flooded with equally comical avoidance strategies for both willpower and effort, which people just could not resist the urge to take seriously. Even when we could see repeated evidence that the claims were empty, we still overruled reasoned thought in favour of delusional optimism.

Nowhere have these dynamics been more comprehensively exploited than in cyberspace.

CONVENIENCE IS A WEAPON

Somewhere back in the annals of my work history (and I definitely can't say where), I sat in an office next to a world-travelled cyber-marketing expert whose speciality was extracting money from consumers by making trivial changes to a Web page. The dude was undebatably a genius.

It's fair to say that I was always aware you could engineer a 10% reduction in complaints by making it 10% more difficult to complain. But the heights to which you can take this concept proved shocking even for a cynic like me. I sat there watching "session recordings" of people making phenomenally stupid decisions simply because that was moderately more convenient than the sensible option. If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it. Since that enlightening exchange, I've regarded convenience as a weapon. One of the most powerful behaviour-control mechanisms ever.

Offer the average human two ways to do something, and they'll pick the laziest one - even if they know the long-term consequences will outweigh the short-term benefit. And that prompts service and product providers to calculatedly regulate ease of use, so that the route they want you to take is the easiest to travel. Or at least looks like it is.

The most impassioned rants about "enshittification" have certain inevitabilities. They come from untethered bullshit-gluttons who are running, panting, after consumerism like a dog chasing a stick. And they relate to a set of "brands" with AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE aerosolled onto them in consumers' blood. If you're still kneeling in front of someone who's been hosing dog piss into your face for the past ten years, simply because you are too idle to find a more conducive place to live your life, then it's not them, it's you.

BEING TOO IDLE TO GET UP AND WALK OUT, OR TOO SHEEP-INDOCTRINATED TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS TO GET THE FUCK OFF FACEBOOK AND DIAL A TELEPHONE NUMBER IF THEY WANNA TALK TO YOU, IS NOT BEING "LOCKED IN"

One of the fundamental tenets of the now excruciatingly repetitive "enshittification" meme, is the lock-in. The notion that we tolerate sitcom-level mistreatment from global consumer services because we have no choice.

But there's a difference between being locked in and refusing to walk out because your rug is too cosy. The real problem is not that corporations are gleefully mugging off their consumers. It's that we've become a society of expectant, milksop slobs, too bone idle and sheep-indoctrinated to do anything about it.

THE S-WORD

Yes, that S-word. It's almost disappeared from our vocabulary, but the word SACRIFICE still exists.

Nothing good ever came without sacrifice. And if you're not prepared to go without some dumb appstore toy that you're still playing with because you haven't yet noticed you became an adult, then carry on suffering. And you will.

If you're not prepared to learn, and work, and build your own solutions, and above all DO YOUR OWN THINKING, instead of terminally relying on other people to do all of this for you, then you DESERVE enshittification.

"Blaaaaghhh haaaagghhh, why don't people build me more free shit that I can gluttonously consume without expressing a gram of gratitude?"

Same reason you wouldn't do that for them. They only did it in the first place because the tech elite scammed them into the belief that they could make a name for themselves. But deep in the age of single-result search engines, no sane creator is left in any doubt that they were always kicking uphill on an almost vertically-slanted pitch. For the realists, the game is over. If you want it, you can either get off your arse and buy it from someone who is not part of Surveillance Valley's collective of criminal-but-too-rich-to-prosecute scam-artists, or you can make it yourself. It's your choice, but don't expect the freak historical interlude of "something for nothing" to continue.

We're approaching a phase of praxis, during which consumers slowly awaken to the fact that effortless reward is a contradiction to the laws of nature. A lie sold to the public in the Thatcher/Reagan era of anything-goes capitalism, and steadily scaled up as the true extent of public stupidity and regulatory lethargy was recognised by the commercial elite.

The fact that governments allow tech brands to hit you up with barefaced lies, and scam you, and steal from you, and treat you like they own you, does not mean that you should allow it. Stop complaining, because complaining doesn't work. Fighting works. But fighting is not for either the lazy or the sheepish.

"Thinking is the hardest work there is. That's why so few people do it." - Henry Ford

Let's resolve to stride away from the digital dark age of enlazification and battle our way back towards independence. Buying real, paper books, from real shops, in the real world, and shoring up local jobs - instead of further fattening the wallets of multi-billionaires.

LOCAL BUSINESS WILL REVIVE IF YOU USE IT

A couple of weeks ago, a local business guide dropped through my letterbox. I do normally give these things a cursory flick through, but I found myself actually reading this one. It was sprinkled with features. Not great. Not terrible. But the WWW has become so devoid of anything but American takes on global issues, proxied through approved propaganda factories, that it was refreshing to see anything at all of relevance to an ordinary dweller in UK suburbia.

There was a sense not only that the Internet has lost its ability to market in a colloquial and relatable fashion, but also that the producers of this booklet knew it, and were taking steps to exploit the weaknesses in an advertising arena that has grown too big to connect. It would not even be possible to advertise some of that booket's products on Google. Not because they infringed on some online marketing regulation, but because Google would consider their keywords too limited in query volume even to accept in a campaign. It's true. There's a huge number of niche products that Google won't advertise because they don't garner enough clicks - and thus generate enough revenue - to be worth the space they take up in the results.

That's economic logic, but it's also tragic. And it's one of the reasons I believe we're heading towards a groundswell of new interest in local enterprise, which is attractive precisely because it's NOT online, and it hasn't had the personality, individuality and customisability strangled out of it by tech giants who are only interested in global-scale critical mass.

Let's remember that there was a time before any of the cybertech oligarchs existed, and that it was a good time, in which life felt more relaxed, and people were nicer to each other, and businesses respected the customer - and vice versa - and community was about contribution. Not about sitting back and expecting one village mug to do everyone's work for free. Or the Lord Mayor burgling everyone's property and then selling their own possessions back to them under the banner of "personal assistance".

The first step towards this better life is for all of us to stand up, labour for ourselves, and most importantly, think for ourselves. Because if you are too lazy to think, someone is going to do your thinking for you. And it is a hundred percent certain that the ultimate beneficiary of someone else's thinking will not be you.