How does “enshittification” explain the decline of technology—and what does it reveal about power, accountability, and violence in modern America?

In this wide-ranging exchange, Rick Rosner reflects on Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” as a useful lens for understanding why beloved technologies degrade over time—social platforms, search engines, and digital services alike. Speaking with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rosner contrasts the optimistic futures of Star Trek with the grimy realism of Blade Runner, arguing that technical progress often masks declining user experience driven by extraction and control. The conversation widens to state power and moral triage, examining public reactions to ICE-related killings and how sympathy hinges on identity, optics, and narrative framing. The through-line is accountability: who benefits, who pays, and who gets believed.

Rick Rosner: I’ve been reading—I was showing you the cover, but you can’t see it because my camera is shitty. I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in November 2022 to refer to the degradation of online platforms and services—especially two-sided businesses—over time.

Repeatedly in the book, he says to go ahead and use “enshittification” for anything that is shitty or gets shitty. That is the way a word enters everyday use: you use it loosely. The book is telling me stuff I already know because I follow Doctorow.

X is another thing that has been wildly enshittified since Musk bought Twitter, and arguably even before that. It got worse and worse, but now it is highly degraded. It is the process by which big social media platforms deteriorate and screw users. He says step one is when a product or social media platform is good to people: it gives you all sorts of great stuff and lets people connect for free or cheap—early Facebook, early Google.

During the early stage, it is losing a ton of money. It appeals to venture capitalists by showing investors that it can attract hundreds of millions of users.

During the good times, it locks in the users. Users get accustomed to it and build their networks there. Then it starts, gradually or not so gradually, screwing the users. It gets meaner—usually just worse for users. Part of this is that they have to start making money at some point, so they begin figuring out ways to charge people.

During part two, it is still suitable for advertisers and businesses. During step three, they start screwing businesses too, through terms that degrade, worse deals, and shifting incentives that extract more value for the platform. Step four is when it goes entirely to crap.

X is deeply in step four. Some of the other services we are used to, like Google, are also discussed. The book talks about how Google search has gotten worse in ways that can increase ad exposure. He mentions a subscription search service called Kagi as an example of a paid alternative that aims to deliver higher-quality results without ads.

Google has been sued for antitrust violations, and trial records have revealed details about its ad and search practices. More generally, modern advertising systems involve automated matching and query expansion, so what a user types and what advertisers bid on are not always a strict one-to-one match. The broader mechanism is real; concrete examples should be understood as Doctorow’s interpretation unless tied to particular trial evidence.

Say you are searching for winter pyjamas. You type that into Google. The claim being relayed is that ranking and ad systems may steer results toward commercially valuable outcomes in ways that are not transparent to users unless they know what to look for.

It is interesting and easily understood by me, at least in general terms, even though I am not technical, because I see it happening in real time. It pisses me off every day what happened to Twitter.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The general trend in technology is that it gets more powerful and more sophisticated, but enshittification describes a cultural and business overlay on how that technology is deployed—a reduction in user-facing quality despite underlying technical improvements. There is a difference between new technology as you see it in a science fiction movie and the latest technology as we actually experience it.

Rosner: In sci-fi movies—at least until Blade Runner—the general sense was that the future was fantastic. Star Trek is generally optimistic. They have tricorders, they can fly anywhere in the galaxy pretty fast, the future looks clean and friendly, and everybody gets along unless aliens mess with their psyches or something.

Star Trek was Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a future in which people get along. Hence, the multiracial bridge. By contrast, the way we experience new technology is maybe a brief wonder, but it feels grubby pretty fast. It is closer to the Blade Runner experience, where everything is kind of dirty and crowded. That movie has that dirty-future feel.

When we first got iPhones around 2007 or 2008, people were generally amazed. When we first got Google, people were astonished. A coworker once asked me whether he should invest in Google. I said I did not know because I did not understand their business model. Before Google, search engines were terrible, and Google was excellent. I did not know how they could give us all this and still make money.

If I had understood enshittification—though the word would not exist for almost another twenty years—I could have said: people love it, they may not be making money now, but they will figure out how to extract it from users. At the time, I just thought, I do not get this. If I had understood the life cycle of a massively successful tech company, I would have told him to throw a ton of money at it, and I would have done the same. But I did not.

Jacobsen: If you could only wear jeans, dress pants, or khakis, what would you wear?

Rosner: I would choose khakis. Jeans rub my legs, pull out my hair, and give me ingrown hairs. With khakis, I can find a comfortable fit. Jeans are uncomfortable. Jeans are for younger people who want to wear tight pants and show off to hook up. Dress pants are for people who have jobs that require them. So, khakis.

Jacobsen: Anything else?

Rosner: We should probably talk about Alex Preti, the man who federal border enforcement agents killed. The indignation across almost everyone—except the most extreme apologists—is considerable. Preti was killed on video by multiple agents in Minneapolis while he was trying to help a woman whom the agents were harassing. These were Border Patrol or ICE agents, not local police, which raises additional questions about authority and conduct.

Beyond the killing itself, there is a grim reality that victims often have to “check boxes” to receive public sympathy. Preti was a nurse who worked with patients at the VA. Former patients wrote publicly about what a caring and dedicated nurse he was.

There is a video of him directing a brief moment—not silence, because he is speaking—but a short pause as a person who had died at the VA is wheeled out. He stops everyone and says a few words about the deceased’s importance. This is on video.

There have always been bad cops who do bad things. There has not always been video.

There have also always been good cops. I recently read an article describing how long-time ICE personnel—who may not be admirable, but are reportedly far less extreme than recent hires—are furious about the newer recruits and current leadership. They were speaking off the record.

He was a regular guy: a former high-school football player, widely liked and respected.

He had a gun in a holster and never drew it. One of the border enforcement agents removed the weapon from the holster and ran off with it. Only after the gun had been taken did they shoot him ten times, including at least three shots in the back. Before that, they had tear-gassed him, despite there being no evidence that he acted aggressively toward the agents.

There are many elements of who he was, and of the available video record, that make it very difficult to argue that this was a justified shooting. Trump removed the local head of Border Patrol enforcement, Greg Bovino.

Bovino is a small man who reportedly enjoys dressing in Nazi-style stormtrooper gear and who publicly claimed that the real victims in this incident were the Border Patrol agents who were being yelled at. That position was widely criticized. His removal may indicate increased accountability. With public outrage running high, authorities are likely to be forced to conduct a serious investigation into this shooting, and probably into the Renee Good shooting as well, which initially was not being investigated.

Renee Good did not have as many factors working in her favour in public perception. Even so, roughly two-thirds of people still believed her killing was unjustified. But she had characteristics that apologists used to rationalize her death. She was driving a vehicle, which allowed bad-faith actors to claim she tried to run over an agent, despite substantial evidence to the contrary. If you were inclined to defend law enforcement unconditionally—particularly in MAGA circles—that argument was available.

She was also married to a woman, had a very short haircut, and was bantering with the agents. All of that weighed against her in the minds of people inclined to excuse police violence.

That is how this works. It is a well-known principle that people who “check certain boxes” are more likely to receive fair treatment after a questionable police shooting or other abuse. Everyone in America knows that a missing young, attractive white woman will receive far more media coverage than almost anyone else.

That is where things stand. Trump has recently recorded the lowest approval ratings of his second term, and possibly of his presidency overall, though comparisons are difficult because the polling landscape has changed. There are now more intentionally right-leaning pollsters who tend to produce friendlier numbers for Trump. Even so, their numbers are poor right now.

He has also partially backtracked regarding Minneapolis. After publicly attacking Governor Tim Walz, the two spoke by phone and agreed that federal agents would back off. That is the current situation regarding the two shootings—or more accurately, nine shootings—because seven of the victims were not white and therefore received far less media attention.

It is not just nine shootings. It is roughly thirty-three deaths connected to ICE—either in ICE custody or involving ICE—since Trump took office. 

Jacobsen: That raises obvious questions: how many killings involved weapons, how many involved physical force, and how many involved neither?

Rosner: Many of those thirty-three deaths were people who died while in ICE detention facilities. In many cases, medical conditions were not adequately treated. People died of things like uncontrolled diabetes or sepsis—conditions that are ordinarily preventable with basic medical care. These are the kinds of deaths that happen when people say they are in pain, say they need a doctor, and are ignored.

There is also a budget vote that has to be completed by Friday, or the government will shut down again. The ICE budget is part of the overall spending bill. Before Trump took office, ICE’s budget was around $9.5 to $10 billion per year. Under Trump, it expanded dramatically, reaching roughly $85 billion annually when combined with related border enforcement funding. Many lawmakers—essentially all Democrats—are now arguing that ICE should not be funded at current levels given its conduct.

If no agreement is reached with Republicans, the government could shut down again, further damaging Trump’s approval ratings.

There is also the Greenland episode, where Trump claimed he obtained concessions from Greenland despite not actually negotiating with Greenland’s government. He spoke instead with a UN-affiliated official, yet implied that the United States could do whatever it wanted militarily in Greenland. That implication is largely accurate.

Under agreements first made during World War II—beginning in 1941 and updated in 1951—the United States has broad rights to establish military installations in Greenland. In 1945, the U.S. operated seventeen military bases there. Greenland is the world’s largest island, yet only about 57,000 people live there, almost entirely along the coast. The interior is covered by a massive ice sheet roughly a mile thick, and most of the island lies above the Arctic Circle.

Even the coastal areas are extraordinarily harsh. Most of the time, temperatures approach minus 40, whether in Fahrenheit or Celsius, since they converge at that point. You do not need to convert.

Despite how difficult it is to live there, the United States maintained seventeen bases in Greenland at the end of World War II, and during the Cold War, that number likely exceeded twenty. Today, there is only one significant U.S. base remaining. Still, under existing treaties, the U.S. could expand its presence again if it chose to do so.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Grigorii Shcheglov on Unsplash

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