Turning the world to shit

A long time in the making, a right-wing resurgence went global in the twenty-first century. From Putin in Russia and Modi in India to Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S., from anti-democracy tech oligarchs funding candidates to others buying up major journalism outlets, fascist-embracing authoritarianism has been battling to reestablish power around the world.

A core part of this phenomenon is that for many people in affected countries (and even some neighboring ones), nearly every part of daily life becomes worse. Bystander casualties and the deliberate targeting of functional elements in a society combine to damage the world in terrible ways.

Cory Doctorow invented the term enshittification just a few years ago to describe the process that unfolds when tech companies plan a functional product for everyday users which they then make worse by trying to expand it to appeal to businesses, before ruining it even more as they attempt to bleed it for profit without regard for long-term usability. The product is kept at the minimum level of functionality that will retain enough users to continue baseline operations, but there is no real attempt to improve it. (I’m simplifying the concept mightily here, but bear with me.)

Doctorow wrote a book—not surprisingly titled Enshittification—that came out last year. In the window between when he first described the term and the book’s arrival, the concept expanded in popular use beyond just a description of tech company tactics. It’s now used to describe everything from planned obsolescence to government strategy under Trump. Like the rise of authoritarianism, enshittification is also a global phenomenon.

One by one, tech titans and political actors are ruining much of the promise of modern life. Pick a thing: television, science, news, college, the internet—anything, really—and there are powerful people who could be making it better but instead are actively ruining it.

This goes for the planet as a whole, from governance of societies to the material world itself. We appear to be destroying human possibility even as we’ve arrived at a seemingly unprecedented moment in history, in which we would be capable of providing for everyone and protecting the planet. Yet those in power are doing the opposite, as if embracing the barely functioning parts of modern life and degrading them further.

If businesses can profit—at least in the short term—from enshittifying things, why would governments do it, too? Why enshittify everything? Corrupt governments can also reap financial windfalls from it, but another key reason is that it reduces public expectations. And more importantly, it destroys people’s independence. So today, I’ll write about the deliberate worsening of government and the abandonment of any pretense of stewardship of humanity’s future in society and on the planet as a whole. At the end, I’ll look at how pondering all this might help us think about what to do to meet the moment.

First, this rise of a kind of fascist enshittification parallels the growth of authoritarianism a century ago. Fascism relied on mass communication technology and platforms to secure its base through propaganda, but fundamentally rejected government in the form of a hopeful positive development in human society for one that had punishment at its baseline, reflexive policy. It frequently refused to serve its supporters except for solving the problems that aspiring authoritarians had themselves created or exacerbated. Authoritarianism involves the creation of a police state to force a population to settle for substandard governance and be grateful to survive.

A century ago, the fascist approach was experimental, and it wasn’t yet clear exactly where new ideologies would lead. Many around the globe believed that capitalism was a failed economic and governing model, so either fascism or communism would be its natural successor.

The twentieth century offered a few models on which to run the experiment, providing a good sense of how fascism plays out. And so, as I’ve mentioned before, what we’re seeing now is not any kind of novel exploration of a political future, but a return to one in which the outcomes were globally devastating. I want to look at a few specific areas in which enshittification of existing systems and approaches in an attempt to return to fascism’s twentieth-century debut are especially dangerous.

The enshittification of detention

A comparison can be made here to concentration camp history in relation to policing and detention. Concentration camps themselves were the deliberate remaking of tools taken from military tactics and law enforcement, while doing an end run around restrictions on both. After dismantling any theoretically socially productive ideas underpinning the concept of good policing or a just war, those in power instead embraced instead the institutionalization of violence and incarceration on a mass basis without due process against their own citizens, residents, or subjects—again, at a tremendous cost to the general populace, but with the argument that this pain was necessary for the country’s survival.

This was a key way that law enforcement and detention—flawed institutions in every country—were enshittified. Warped entirely out of any productive goal, they were bent to serve only the powerful in new, expanded, and weaponized forms. They eventually required millions around the world to settle for not even surviving, all so that the government in its authoritarian-led form—whether Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Serbia under Milošević, or Pinochet’s Chile—could continue.

The enshittification of immigration

I’ve focused a lot previously on the longstanding, pre-Trump dangers of the U.S. immigration system and the ways it’s been warped. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has flourished in other places around the globe, too, from Myanmar to the U.K. But the U.S. has been leading the pack on large-scale demonization and abuse of refugees and those dreaming of economic migration.

What has been extraordinary to witness during my lifetime is the dismantling of even programs that had been functional, or effective parts of immigration policy that had been developed in ways that benefited both the U.S. as a whole and those who wanted to be here. Over the last three decades, the idea of immigration as an avenue of possibility, health, and wealth for every party involved was deliberately destroyed.

It’s not just an American phenomenon. Europe has been dealing with migration brutally as well, offering some pretense of care for humanitarian ideals even as the European Parliament just last week voted to force the return of rejected asylum seekers. Plans include the prospect of Trump-style tactics to formally institutionalize deportation to third-party countries like Rwanda, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

The Spanish government denounced this approach from the beginning and stood against it. French president Emmanuel Macron recently declared the new policy "neither effective nor consistent with our principles.” He has said that France will not use this approach, but it remains to be seen whether his government will take any action against implementation.

This active enshittification of immigration policy has had political benefits for leaders and political parties in any number of countries—though not for the countries themselves. And there’s likewise been a vast expansion around the world of human degradation where countries have combined punishing immigrants with expanded detention. It’s no accident we see mass detention as a border-region response in Xinjiang by China, in the Indian state of Assam, on the southern border of the U.S., and in Europe, too.

The enshittification of climate policy

And due to the deliberate dismantling of effective climate policy, as the planet continues to warm, we can expect to see a lot more immigration crises, border crises, and detention crises. In January, the United Nations announced that the world should acknowledge that we now live in an era of “global water bankruptcy” and move for realistic management of this critical resource.

Water access (and the collapse of agriculture, due to its dependence on water) are often key drivers of border crossings. Lack of food and water also often spark violent conflict, which leads to further migration. We’re already witnessing the creation of a supercrisis through the deliberate dismantling of effective immigration, climate, and detention policy—all at a moment when we need them most.

The enshittification of healthcare

As with each of the examples I’ve already given, aspiring and current authoritarians also tend to target healthcare. The U.S. is leading the way on this front, causing the deaths of perhaps a million people by now through DOGE cuts to U.S. Agency for International Development programs overseas. In addition, the Republican-led congress has voted to slash state Medicaid funds by $665 billion in the coming years. An already janky and outdated system is being rendered nonfunctional and enshittified—in part, so that party leaders and their cronies can pay one another off in the forms of tax cuts or grift no-bid contracts in other arenas, like immigration detention.

And just as leaders in the U.K. have injected both homegrown xenophobia and Trump-style immigration rhetoric into their political races to secure power, they’ve also attacked the National Health Service there, attempting to enshittify it to be more like the U.S. system.

What it all leads to

When a government manages to enshittify widely, it breaks down services in a number of sectors. Even if it winds up losing in its authoritarian bid in the long run, the corruption and dysfunction often lead to poor outcomes across the board going forward: society toggles between reformers and extremists, volleying between polarized outrage and fury over the government’s failure to function. Eventually, reformers may be tempted to embrace the authoritarian model in an attempt to try to fix the system quickly enough—or simply fail to have enough time to correct entrenched problems.

Propaganda is how political actors convince people that something bad is good. And the fact that we’re seeing a global return to fascist-style governance—even as some peoples manage to successfully fight the trend—underlines the effectiveness of propaganda over time. Once the cult of personality is established, it’s hard to undo; witness all the former Iran hawks reversing themselves and lining up to praise Trump’s war there.

The power of propaganda is one of many reasons I’m reluctant to see the use of artificial intelligence expand among the general public, where it’s perceived almost as magic. The people running AI companies are dedicated to the enshittification of humanity. Holding the levers of power on a society dependent on AI tools for basic information and facts about the world is an extraordinarily dangerous position for the human race to be in.

Today, this enshittification approach is one that gets sold to us in a number of ways by actors who present themselves as the only serious, sane adults. We’ve seen ostensibly liberal thinkers—people concerned about the abundant creation of basic human goods and services—who have been going to secret meetings (apparently paying to do so) with open opponents of democracy and human rights like tech-surveillance baron Peter Thiel.

We see people asking us to give up principles—not to reset priorities through protracted negotiations of how best to codify laws or seek accountability or to balance community needs—but through mercenary attempts to squash any calls for an actual better world. These people tell us that we have to preemptively enshittify our political platforms and the planet and give up any vision for a better society, and settle for the tradeoffs that they have determined are valuable—all of which involve throwing critical things under the bus in unnecessary ways to fit their vision of politics.

Don’t settle for shit

Beware those who claim we have to give up on protecting other humans or preserving the planet against the current violence being inflicted on both. Ask who gains from demanding that those who want change have to settle for a shit world. Ask yourself who benefits from the encouraging the idea that people cannot have expectations that society is capable of managing diverse and complex needs but has to default to corporate and police power in order to survive.

The right understands that it isn’t a question of moving to the middle but one of moving the political valence of the conversations and perhaps the whole political framework closer to you. Don’t let those who claim to be your allies talk you into giving up before you’ve even tried. We do need to be thinking in world-changing terms that also take into account what work has to be done to accomplish our goals.

In the U.S., Black activists and their allies did this during the Civil Rights Movement in astounding ways, facing challenges that could easily have led them to settle for mere survival, rather than making huge demands on an unjust society. If the far right has a vision of power taken from history that it’s now trying to more on the country, so do we.

Hope is not lost

Despite all this churn toward the degradation of human beings, the world has given us tremendous examples of how to resist. But we have to consciously look specifically at how to counter the enshittification default.

When extremists and their collaborators destroy the guardrails and protections around functioning government institutions, the government becomes incapable of producing anything useful for citizens in terms of services, and people stop expecting government to meaningfully address society’s needs. It isn’t possible to undo all the harm that the enshittification of any of these policies have inflicted on the country and the world, but we have tools at hand to put an end to the current nightmare. We don’t have to imagine significant goals and invent pie-in-the-sky ideas about how to reach them; in some instances, the tools to build a better future already exist.

And in some cases, our moment in history (backed by a lot of research and scientific work) has provided us some solutions. Renewable energy production is ramping up mightily. This, of course, is another arena in which the Trump administration has been sabotaging human progress by trying to shut down and limit solar- and wind-powered energy production, while promoting coal and oil.

But the world is not waiting. And though the U.S. will be behind because of the Trump administration’s sabotage, these technologies continue to grow. Reducing the power of fossil fuel companies will lead to a more stable world and help in slowing climate change, and giving us more opportunities to preserve as much as possible here on Earth.

In healthcare as well, though Trump and his allies have directly targeted technology like mRNA vaccines, scientists are still using them to make miraculous new discoveries day by day. We can demand the reprioritization of merit-based research funding and government support for research projects.

Insisting on facing local issues around detention, around improving healthcare, on effective water policy, on addressing the nuts and bolts issues of climate change right where you live is revolutionary. It’s world changing.

I’ve talked before about Hungary, South Korea, Brazil, and other places that have demanded government remain accountable to the people. None of them are perfect movements, but they have shown how here in the U.S., imperfect as we are, might also take our country back. Not by listening to those who tell to settle for mere survival, or for the degraded life they would provide us if only we keep them in power, but an existence that respects the dignity of everyone.

You don’t even have to wait for the November elections. You can tackle one small part of any one of these issues in your city, your county or your state, and push for a program that would help people right now, today.

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