The digital world's Enshitification

Back in 1993, Blur rather expansively declared that “Modern Life is Rubbish” - which was a little bit rich considering the state of Damon Albarn’s pre-Britpop bowl cut.

In 2005, an encyclopedia of modern life entitled “Is it Just Me, Or is Everything Shit” was a minor publishing sensation, made all the zestier by the bold use of poo-poo talk on its cover. More recently, internet evangelist Cory Doctorow, bolder still, coined the term “enshitification” to describe what’s happening to our digital platforms as they sacrifice the interests of their users to the drive to relentlessly monetise. What was once good, becomes shit, one digital stool at a time.

I am always suspicious of the nostalgic reflex to measure the failings of now against the excellence of back then. The one constant of human history is the conviction that everything is going to shit and that things were once so much better “When I were a lad/ before smartphones/ in the golden age of Pericles”. But with each failed Google search I do, with each peek at my spam-gorged inbox, I have to conclude that it isn’t just me. Digitally speaking, everything is increasingly quite shit.

Search especially has become next to unusable, with a company famous for its mission to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and usable’ now seemingly making it deliberately difficult to find reliable information. Search today forces us to wade through an ocean of affiliate shite, endless sponsored links, SEO-fueled garbage and the mutant faecal creatures of AI-powered link farms. Digital platforms seem to have become excellent at algorithmically feeding us the content we want but terrible at serving us the reliable information we need.

I now find myself deeply nostalgic for the internet that was, its thrilling utility, its near-magical ability to find information as esoteric and bizarre as my twisted little mind could imagine. What felt like a daily miracle is now an hourly curse. And because enshitification happens incrementally rather than all at once, we never had a proper chance to mourn the internet’s passing. Worst of all, like the incredulous Nazis of the famous Mitchell and Webb sketch, I look at the marketing murdered internet and think “Hans, are we the baddies?”

Beyond this sense of loss, what emerges from the wreckage of search? What helps us find what we want when our search engines no longer seem that interested? Perhaps it is something quite old and analogue - enthusiasts and experts who actually know stuff.

In the corner of the internet where I most often hang out, the part obsessed with advertising and brands, search can no longer find me that obscure Fallon Minneapolis Campaign from the eighties I want to show a young copywriter.

But Dave Dye, British advertising’s greatest archivist can. In the wreckage of search, blogs like his “Stuff From The Loft” become newly necessary. As a brilliant creative, festooned with awards and recognition, Dave has always been a one man campaign to de-shitify British advertising. But as a blogger and archivist, his house is more than a good place to find things. His is a place of defiant remembering, where the best that has been thought and said in advertising finds a home.

It inspires us all to do better day to day but it also creates a kind of canon, a curriculum of the very best that our brilliant, ephemeral industry has to offer. And that is just too valuable to be left to a search engine to find.

David Bain is co-founder and chair of BMB