Things Really Are Getting Worse
The American Dialect Society named “enshittification” as its Word of the Year for 2023. The term had been coined by Cory Doctorow in an essay describing the specific phenomenon where an online platform becomes progressively worse over time. This happens not because of neglect or incompetence, but as part of an intentional business strategy.
An obvious example of this is Facebook. After its public launch in 2006, the social media site quickly rose to prominence by providing a useful (and free!) online space for friends and family to connect. But after establishing itself as the dominant social media site in the 2010s (remember Friendster? MySpace?), Facebook began prioritizing its business customers by introducing "sponsored content" into the feeds of its users. By the 2020s, these paid advertisements increasingly crowded the posts of friends and family that originally attracted users to the platform. It may be an oversimplification, but Facebook enriched itself by making things worse.
Doctorow's thesis goes into considerably greater detail, but one reason why his term has resonated is that it does seem many things (and not just Facebook) really are getting worse. I fully acknowledge that rosy retrospection is a thing and I'm certainly not the first middle-aged man to declare things were better “back in the day,” but it’s nice to have an intellectual backing for a subjective feeling. Technology has certainly made some things easier and faster, but the promise of things such as frictionless online interactions has its limits. Yes, I can quickly place an online order for a chicken shawarma pita from CAVA. Yes, the online interface can instantly charge my credit card and send a confirmation email saying my order will be ready at 5:17. But it won’t be ready at 5:17. It’ll be another 15 minutes before the paper bag containing my order will finally be handed to me and it will contain not a chicken shawarma pita, but a vegetarian Greek salad.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor inconvenience (it also isn’t the specific scenario Doctorow described in his article). Still, “enshittification” encapsulates perfectly the growing disconnect between the promise of the technological future and the reality of what it has become. Frictionless online experiences have inherent limits. Ordering a pita online may be easy, but someone still has to wrap the chicken, hummus, tomato into the flatbread (and that someone is probably overworked and underpaid). Similar forces are at play when ordering an outfit from SHEIN or constructing a building designed by an architect.
Computer aided design (CAD) and digital rendering tools have certainly made some aspects of an architect’s job more efficient. As part of the last generation of architects to be taught how to draft and label drawings by hand, I can say that construction drawings are quicker to create digitally (and certainly easier to edit) than those drawn on vellum using Radiograph technical pens or 2H lead pencils. But a more advanced tool doesn’t always render a better final product. A good design can be drawn by hand and a bad design can be modeled using the most cutting-edge BIM program created by the industry-dominating software corporation (whose subscription rates were unilaterally increased, see technical definition of “enshittification” above). Regardless of what is used to draft the drawings, the person creating the design must be knowledgable of materials and structures as well as space and movement. They must understand how the design will ultimately be constructed, and that is no less true today than it was 100 years ago when draftsmen (and a century ago they were almost exclusively all men), toiled for long hours using nothing more sophisticated than a T-square and a couple of triangles.
But even if current technology allows for faster or even better design, but someone still has to build the chicken shawarma pita. Someone has to read and understand the drawings that communicate the design intent and have the knowledge and skill required to translate that abstract representation into reality.
That knowledge and skill seems to be increasingly short supply. And so even as architect’s designs can be incredibly accurate and precise, none of that matters if those entrusted with building that design are unable or unwilling to execute that design. As a result, the construction process that remains, at least for now, as enshittified as ever.
