An enshittification story

And why I'm our in-home IT expert

So there’s another Super Bowl story from last weekend I didn’t tell you because it’s infuriating and grumpy-making and has to do with enshittification, but here it is, even though just the telling of it is bringing back all the rage.

When we turned on the NFL AFC playoff game on our TV a month or so ago, the picture was, well…fucked. Truly. Like, when the players ran down the field the people in the background blurred in a way that made me want to throw up. If anyone moved too fast—like by, you know,  running or even waving their hands—the picture looked like frames of movement were missing. This was not, “oh, that’s mildly annoying” picture problems. This was just totally unwatchable.

I assumed it was our TV, which is over ten years old and probably the last dumb (as in, not-smart) TV ever sold. We stream through a Roku which is not as old as the TV, but which had started over-heating. So clearly the problem was on our end. CBS, the network broadcasting the AFC playoff game, was sending some signal our very old TV and overheating Roku could not process.

On Saturday, we went to Louisville and bought a new TV—a smart one this time. We assumed our problem would be solved. We were wrong. We set up the TV and turned it to CBS, where the UK-Gonzaga game had all the same problems as the AFC playoff—a vomit-inducing picture. Commercials? Fine. Other channels with live sports? Fine. Just CBS live sports looked gross.

So I did some internet digging and sure enough, the problem was CBS and not our old TV or our new TV. I am not a tech expert, but as far as I can tell, CBS, for their live sports broadcasts, was reducing the frames per second rate of their broadcast. I checked in with my tech nerd friend who was having the same problem and in all his superior tech knowledge could not solve the problem, either.

There was some comfort in knowing that there was nothing I could do. I get very, very stubborn about tech problems. In our house, I am the designated IT expert. That’s my job while my husband takes care of doing the dishes, cleaning, emptying the litter box, taking out the trash, handling our finances, mowing the lawn, cooking about half the time, and a whole bunch of other things I cannot remember right now (sorry, Jeff! Love you!). You can see how being the IT expert in this situation is a pretty good deal.

There was comfort in knowing this was a problem I could not solve but, also, What. The. Fuck. How could more people not be complaining and absolutely losing their shit about the fact that a major sports network was just fucking dialing it in on their live sports broadcasts? Like, oh, sorry, that picture makes you want to puke and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Ha, ha. That’s capitalism, suckers.

My super-tech friend spent a lot of time trying to come up with reasons why CBS would reduce their frames per second rate, knowingly creating an unwatchable product. But what answer could there be besides that it saves them money somehow?

So come Sunday, our plan was to have the Super Bowl on, but not really “watch” it, because of the whole puking factor. We’d read our books and glance up at the screen from time to time, but not for too long. Which is exactly what I did for the first one and a half quarters of the game.

It didn’t look quite like this, but you get the idea. Photo by Lucas Hoang on Unsplash

Then magically about halfway through the second quarter, the image finally got better. The weirdness went away. I texted my super-tech friend (okay, Eli) who told me people had been losing their shit on Twitter about the CBS stream. And so someone somewhere flipped a switch and the game became watchable. Again, friends, What. The. Fuck.

As a writer and a storyteller, I have so many questions. What exactly was going on inside CBS? Was there a room full of executives (I imagine them as all white men and they probably are) just shrugging their shoulders and laughing at all us dupes? A room full of old white men assuming that there’s no overlap between people who stream their TV and people who love sports? Was there some tech geek deep in the bowels of CBS who just fucked up? I’ll probably never know.

As a sociologist, I’m like, well, I knew capitalism sucks, but this feels next level. Or maybe just more personal. Capitalism sucks so much that a major corporation could not even bother to produce a decent product for the Single Biggest Sporting Event in the United States, until some people on Twitter got loud.

Obviously, there’s a lot to unpack there. I mean, I should be enraged at capitalism every time I pass a homeless person on the street (yes, we have homeless people in our tiny, rural town). Or every time I see a new fucking Dollar General opening up precisely three miles away from another Dollar General. Capitalism kills people daily. This should make me enraged and it does, but I guess that rage is harder to sustain than the very specific rage at not being able to watch my fucking football.

In the midst of our texted conversations about the CBS phenomenon, my super-tech friend sent me the link to Cory Doctorow’s essay on enshittification, which I have seen referenced a lot lately, but had not actually read. It’s interesting in and of itself that no one really needs an explanation for the word enshittification as applied to online life. We get it, immediately. Yeah, it’s all gone to shit.

What Doctorow adds is the specific reason that everything online eventually goes to shit. Platforms start out super fun and friendly and easy because they’re trying to attract users. See the cheap, cheap ass prices on Amazon in the beginning. But once they attract the users, well, fuck them. Now it’s about the advertisers and then eventually, it’s about the shareholders. The experience for users becomes, you know, shitty, but as users, we can’t leave because we’re stuck. We’ve become dependent on the platform for buying stuff or for connecting with our friends or making money or, you know, watching football. So we have to just put up with the shittiness, even if it’s so bad it makes us puke.

Enshittification is not an accident. It’s not an anomaly. It’s built into the way platforms function. It comes with a lot of fucked up manipulation. TikTok, it turns out, has this thing called a “heating tool,” which employees use to tweak the algorithm so that videos from random users get pushed into millions of feeds. This a secret thing they’re doing—they don’t tell the users. So imagine you’re that person and suddenly your videos are getting all these views. You think you’re killing it! You are the god of TikTok! Only then they turn off the heating tool and it all stops.

You didn’t know about the heating tool so all you can conclude is that you’re doing something wrong now. It’s your fault. So you try harder, which is exactly what all the platforms want us to do. They want us to believe that there is a way to figure out the algorithm, but, friends, there isn’t. It is all fucked. It is all random or rigged or whatever. Our success or failure has nothing to do with what we are doing or not doing or how we are doing it.

Obviously, I cannot help but connect this all to Substack and the constant explosion of “how to grow your Substack posts.” What if, friends, there actually is no way to grow your Substack that is within your control? What if the algorithm makes no sense?

Doctorow doesn’t offer any solutions to enshittification. Maybe there aren’t any except to step the hell away from the online world, which isn’t an easy thing to do. This weekend as far as I could tell, the only way to solve my CBS problem would have been to go back to cable or satellite TV. Every streaming service was having the same problem. Or I could just give up watching any live sports broadcast by CBS. I could give up on football. And social media. And the internet. Maybe this is the ultimate message of enshittification—to start seeking our pleasure in other places.

Or maybe the solution is to stop ceding control to our corporate overloads. Maybe enshittification wouldn’t happen if we owned the things ourselves. Maybe what we should do is get together and start our own platforms. If random tech bros can do it, then so can we. I don’t want to get all communist on you here (who are we kidding, I totally want to get all communist), but what if the platforms were collectively owned, not by the handful of old white guys in a board room, but by the people who actually make the stuff? The writers. The creators. The influencers. Whatever we want to call ourselves, what if we were in charge and the point of it all wasn’t to make money for a bunch of withered dudes, but maybe, just maybe, to create community? Or you know, to do that really stupid naive thing of trying to make the world a better place?