Consumer Council / YouTube
“My job is to screw things up.” An absurd video appeals to policymakers and users who resisted the deliberate degradation of platforms and devices — the now famous “enshittification” of services provided to consumers.
The opening shot of the video shows a man hiding under a bed doing a cut into a sock hole from someone else. Seconds later, the man uses a saw to shorten a table legso that it shakes during breakfast.
The video, released by the Consumer Council of Norway, addresses with a absurd record a serious matter; is part of a wider global campaign aimed at combating “enshittification ”, i.e. the gradual deterioration of digital products and services, which ZAP recently called .
“My job is to ruin things“, explains the man, in the video. “The official title is merdificador. What I do is take things that are perfectly fine and deal with the make worse”.
“I come from a long line of people who make things shitty. My father was a bastard, his father was one before, and his father too. It’s a family tradition, which makes us proud”, says the Norwegian trader.
“It’s hard work, but it’s not efficient do it this way, physically. I can’t be everywhere at once,” he explains, as the video shows him ruining a pen, taking the fizz out of a drink, and doing a series of shitty things.
“In the end, the solution was literally in my lap. The Internet!. Suddenly, I stopped having to walk around to mess things up! I could sit in one place, and make things shitty for a lot more people!“, congratulates the merdificador.
NIt doesn’t have to be like this
“We wanted to show that no one would accept this in the analog world”explains Find Lützow-Holm Myrstaddirector of digital policy at the council, told the British newspaper . “But it is this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we believe it doesn’t have to be that way.”
The term “enshittification” was coined by Canadian technology writer and critic Cory Doctorow to designate the erosion of the quality of service of technological platforms, especially in the digital sphere.
Doctorow’s premise is simple, explains Wired: technological platforms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook or TikTok they start by wanting to please to users, but after eliminating competition, they become intentionally less usefulin order to increase profits.
The examples multiply: from social media feeds that have been progressively flooded with advertisements and scamseven software updates that make cell phones slowerand chatbots that replace customer support assistants.
The Norwegian campaign, believed to be the first of its kind, was launched at the end of February, and has joined more than 70 groups and individuals from across Europe and the United States, including trade unions and human rights organizations, who are calling for policymakers from 14 countries on both sides of the Atlantic so that act against commercialization of technological platforms.
“This is not an inevitable process, but rather the result of political choices. Another internet is possible“, affirms Lützow-Holm Myrstad. “It is status quo It’s not acceptable to anyone.”
In Norway, more than 20 organizations pressured authorities to act, in an effort joined by consumer councils from 12 other countries. One was also sent to European Union institutions, while four civil society organizations in the USA contacted several policymakers.
The letters asked policymakers to give consumers more power to control, adapt, repair and alter products that they already have, as well as to allow people to move more easily between different services.
“It’s not too late to reverse the trend“, says Lützow-Holm Myrstad. “Services do not need to be commodified if there is real competition, if consumers can choose which services they use and if the market better regulates all these practices.”
The global campaign is underpinned by an 80-page advisory, which analyzes how commodification has gradually become the norm.
The council has a long history of confrontation with big technology companies; in 2018, he was one of the first to accuse them of tricking users into giving up their data. However, Myrstad recognizes that his efforts were similar to a fight between David and Goliath.
“But in the story of David and Goliath, David ended up winning, right??” says Myrstad. “This is also why this international action is so important. There are groups, on both sides of the Atlantic, speaking with one voice: it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t want it to be like that.”
Expectations for the campaign grew as they saw the video add up millions of views across multiple platformswith over 9,000 comments on YouTube alone, while the report has been downloaded over 6,000 times.
“We had never experienced anything like this; This really touches a nerve with people,” he said. “There seems to be extraordinary support for doing something about this.”
