Simon Manley

From Jetpack to McDonald’s: The Reality of Modern Enshittification

I’ve been trying to tolerate Automattic’s Jetpack plugin, and the whole connecting me to the larger WordPress world out there while still self-hosting my website and using my own — basic but mine — themes.

The problem is it just doesn’t work. Well not for me. It’s bloated. It’s slow. It doesn’t connect all the time. I don’t gain any of the small benefits of having a wordpress.com account. And they are only small benefits. For instance your website will rarely if ever show up in their feeds — no matter what you do.

So it’s gone. Jetpack has now been eradicated from my websites. Frankly all I used it for was comments, a like button and some sharing buttons. Now I’ve built my own set of these. It’s lighter, does the same job and it’s mine.

Enshittification

Which neatly creates a beautiful segue into my point, enshittification, also known as platform decay — or basically not getting the same experience from a product or service that you may have gotten previously.

And it’s not just software

Recently we went into a McDonald’s. It took a full 27 — yes Twenty Seven — minutes to get two quarter pounders with cheese, fries and a drink. We ordered through the touch screen stand and then presumably some people out the back that you can no longer see, prepared our order of this once fast food.

But something went wrong. Someone didn’t get the little note about our order. We sat there as people came and went with their orders while we stared at an empty table wondering. Barely seeing any employees pop out from behind the dividing wall. Are there even people back there anymore? Who knows?

Eventually after 27 minutes a staff member came out with our order apologizing for the delay and handed me a card to get any sandwich free with my next order.

This brings me right back to enshittification. The fast food experience is no more and the apology for it is to get another serving of their I don’t give a toss what you think of us with an almost 2 month out of date printed card — they actually went to the trouble of mass-printing ‘get out of jail free’ cards — that there is an admission to their level of enshittification being accepted internally.

99 Percent Invisible has an excellent podcast on enshittification all about the John Deere right-to-repair controversy, but enshittification can be applied to almost anything, and we’re dealing with this phenomenon all around us every day.