En-shit-i-fi-cation is a term coined by Cory Doctrow a few years ago to describe how once good digital platforms or services become ever ‘shitter’. We’ve all seen it: a platform which starts good for users, then starts favouring advertisers, then starts to exploit those advertisers too to capture remaining value for itself. It is easy to find examples in big-tech – Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Marketplace, Google Search, Netflix et al, Adobe and on and on – but it goes further. Take Smart TVs as an example – once neutral devices now shipping with heavy tracking, prominent advertising and promotions pushed into the core viewing experience. As the consumer, you’ve actually become the product, while still paying!
Another issue prevalent today is that business is hard. Pick almost any category and there are just too many competitors. Consultants will say “you need to find a niche” but in most categories to truly find the oft described “blue ocean” you need to niche down to such an extent that there’s only 12 people in the world who fit the profile, which doesn’t make a viable business. The result is that most of the already too many businesses are doing exactly the same as the others, hoping to differentiate by doing exactly the same! In variation of Einstein’s famous quote, I’d argue: “Insanity is doing the same thing as everyone else and expecting a different outcome”. Once commoditisation takes hold, enshitification becomes the only available path to profitability.
Take Netflix as an example (Uber is clearer but I cannot bring myself to say anything that could be interpreted as positive about them). Once Netflix had proved the streaming model, Disney+, HBO, Apple, Amazon, Paramount etc. etc. all launched identical products. Content libraries merged, prices converged and now they’re all doing the same things – price hikes, ad tiers, password crackdowns – in sequence like dominoes.
With the exception of Uber, I don’t think these platforms are evil, they’re just the inevitable output of commoditised two-sided markets with high switching costs and no regulatory friction. Enshitification isn’t a choice per se, it is the new equilibrium.
And so I turn to telecoms, where we also have too many companies, we also have commoditisation and we have the encroachment of enshitification. It doesn’t take the form of advertising (yet) but it can be seen in 7 year contracts, hardware lockins and number portability games. My worst days are when I’m reminded just how shit some parts of this industry are, and how hard-working businesses are being shafted as a result. It is a slippery slope of more for less and this is visible at every level, from the consumer facing examples I’ve given, through to carriers who have failed to invest for decades and where innovation is a dirty word. Enshitification is sadly the only way many businesses in our space will survive.
If you look around our sector, who is different? At the reseller end, many are reselling the same solutions, frequently with the same order form, just bearing a different logo. They’ll delude themselves of course into thinking they add value – I recall one talking to his team at a bar saying how everyone else was a Ford and they were a BMW. Why? No idea, he’d just decided that was what made them better. Objectively they were the same, doing the same, just with a veneer of self-denial.
At the carrier end, we’ve seen numerous examples of operators who in a Starmer-esque way think that if they say it, it is so. Fed up with the market recognising their lack of innovation and efficiency, they decide that they need to look like a software company. A few overpriced acquisitions, the odd blatantly misleading annual report describing themselves as CPaaS and in the short-term they’re rewarded. Long-term, the market is not stupid and that is why so many of these muppets trade on low single-digit multiples and in one case has seen their share-price fall 50% in the last year. The solution? More talk, ever more enshitification.
But there is another way. To further twist Einstein’s words, if you do something different to everyone else, you can expect different results to everyone else. Outside our sector look at upstarts like Liquid Death – water in a can, built on rebellion and humour, not some health or purity story. It is almost the polar opposite of Evian/Fiji/SmartWater’s plastic bottles, and corporatised alpine branding. It works.
Now I know I’m biased, but to be perfectly honest if I didn’t believe what I’m about to say, I’d have hung up my boots a long long time ago. Simwood is irreverent, proud to say what needs to be said and about as anti-corporate as they come. We’re the only carrier investing in eradicating nuisance calls (just as voice fraud before it) – look at your other carriers and tell me anyone else who, for example, blocks invalid CLI rather than simply charging supranormally for it? We’re the only carrier who is genuinely API-first and a true software company – everything those others have tried to mislead the market they are. We’re the only carrier who is drawing a distinction between voice and telephony, recognising the future in WhatsApp Calling, Conversational AI, and the many other emerging capabilities of the Simwood Potato. And we’re the only carrier funding the investment all that necessitates by getting more efficient – investing in internal automation to fund the future. Need I go on?
Enshitification, is a path but not one we’d ever take. How about you?
