There's this one popular term used to describe the vast majority of seasons of The Simpsons; namely, how it has become Quite Bad in Really Specific Ways. This term, used by fans of the first six-to-seven seasons, dubs the majority of the following seasons as "Zombie Simpsons". A shambling, increasingly rotten corpse of an IP puppeted around by its corporate owners for aimless profit - ones who are clearly using "Weekend at Bernie's" as a guidebook.
It's bleakly amusing, then, that this 'Zombie Simpsons' idea has kept floating to the top of the stagnant pond of my mind these past couple of years, right as the show has apparently had some kind of comeback. For me, however, the term currently rises to the surface when I am looking not at media, but at software and services of pretty much any kind - everything from lynchpin websites to specialty software. Specifically, when I look at their ongoing decline in quality.
Cory Doctorow coined the term 'enshittification' last year to describe something very close to this - a cycle of platforms gaining user trust via excellent services, and then chipping away at those services over time, 'enshittifying' themselves, for profit. It is an excellent term, and it is also very specifically used as describing part of a cycle where companies are born, grow, shrink, die, and are then replaced.
Unfortunately, that "death" part feels a little bit. Delayed. For quite a few of the ongoing enshittifications. Doesn't it? I ask, because I'm pretty sure you've been thinking about this. These tools you use are bad, getting worse even, but they're still around and we're still using them.
It's also notable that a lot of these companies aren't currently achieving larger market shares or profits during their enshittification. Hell, it could be argued that some of them aren't even trying to do that. They're just... changing for the worse. Rotting, so to speak, because they've been around for too long or have grown into something different - perhaps Ship-of-Theseus-ed several times over, such that not a trace of the original goals or founding staff remains.
These spectacles of disintegration aren't as rapid as self-immolation, nor as swift or intentional as something one would call "self-sabotage". This is why I like the term "self-zombification". These platforms are not bitten. They are not caught unawares. These companies look at the several-hundred-strong horde of zombies making a nuisance of things for them and their currently functional peers, and think:
"Hey. That looks like a pretty good move, being a zombie. There are a lot of them, and they seem to last a pretty long time. A lot less effort than trying not to get bitten. I don't think they're going anywhere, either. In fact, now that I think about it, if it were all that bad to be a zombie, there wouldn't be so many of them, would there? It's probably good, actually. Why don't we just... check it out? Go get zombified, see how it goes?"
And, quite quickly, without asking anyone else, they go and lick some open zombie wounds or whatever and bam, there's another shambler hanging around. Things get a bit worse for everyone relying on them, who most emphatically were not asked about this ahead of time. Now their most experienced plumber has gone and become a fucking zombie, which makes it much harder for them to do a good job (given how active decay often interferes with one's ability to function) and, just between you and me, last week they left a rotting finger in one of the clean-water tanks when they were replacing a section of piping, but there aren't a lot of qualified plumbers out here so, honestly, it could be worse. No, we're not sure if it was their own finger or a snack they were chewing on. No, we're not going to ask, they're a bit snappy (ha ha) in response to criticism at the moment. It's not worth the trouble. No, we don't have anyone who can replace them. Now shut up, stop complaining, and drink your water, it's only slightly rotten-finger-ey.
Nobody disagrees that Google provides materially worse results compared to a decade ago. Nobody really thinks Facebook is better at showing us things our friends want us to see compared to a decade ago. Nobody using the app asked Duolingo to remove so many of its less-used language courses. Nobody wants gig economy apps to provide us with the same quality of service we had from other businesses a decade ago, but with higher prices, worse-treated workers, and a far higher risk of horrible intrusions of the end-user's privacy. Nobody wants to consume media that overworked creators couldn't put care into making. Yet, of course, this and a dozen's dozen examples further are what we have. This, broadly, seems to be the current stage of the largest companies in every industry (particularly those who hold a monopoly or duopoly).
If you reading this, you're probably a friend of mine, and thus probably agree with me. This isn't because I've cultivated an echo chamber, per se, but because I don't tend to make friends with incurious, stunningly wealthy, or deeply insular people. As far as I can tell, those are the primary categories of people who think the economy is currently Working Really Well.
Isn't it a shame that we just. Keep on going? Keep relying on these zombies? Keep on holding our noses, rolling our eyes, picking bits of shattered teeth out of our now-required bite-resistant sleeves, and doing our best to make sure we wash off any bits of rotten flesh before we take off our shoes at the door and flop down on the couch at the end of the day?
It is a shame - even moreso that I don't really have solutions for the big-picture stuff. I can't solve Facebook or Twitter/X, sorry. Not building to any grand reveal like that, not this time. One of these days, maybe.
What I can do, however, is ask myself a pretty important question: Why?
Why do I keep using these things?
The answer is that it seems like an unsustainable amount of work to find and use an alternative, and any alternative seems unlikely to provide everything crucial that the current option does.
The key word there is "seems".
I let go of Twitter a while ago. I have not missed it one bit. Mostly, because I was not correct in my assumptions about what it was giving me or even what I wanted from a micro-blogging platform.
I kept using it, for years, not because I wanted what it provided me, but because I wanted something it used to provide me and thought it was still doing so. It was not, which became apparent as soon as I stopped.
Everyone has their own remarkably specific wants from social media. Suffice to say that a key want, for myself and many others, is the idea of "visibility". I want interested people to see what I offer up. A unified, easily searchable, feed-customisable town hall seems a perfect option.
Except, of course, that Twitter was increasingly difficult to search accurately. Increasingly filled with people who I did not want to interact with me. Increasingly incentivising look-and-pass-on behaviour that diminished the quality of interactions from people I did want to reach. And, it goes without saying, it was becoming increasingly hard to actually view what you wanted to view. More a 'Times Square' than a 'Town Hall'.
I want friends to see when I post. I want specific types of strangers to occasionally find me. I want total control over how I present my thoughts and works. I want to be sure that what I publish cannot be trivially removed, undermined, or lost to backwards-incompatibility. It is currently an incredible amount of effort to get those things from social media I am currently on.
It "seems" like a lot of effort to move away from current platforms. However, in actuality, there is a lot of effort required to maintain them, un-ideal as they may be, as they currently stand. A great deal of this unpleasant experience is shaped by the contortions required to fight the wants of each platform and get even a tenth of what I want.
Again, I think you might agree.
So, I'm taking the boring, easy route out. I'm pruning. I re-learned basic, basic HTML. I started my own website - this one. A glorified blog, really. There's almost nothing on it. It's quite a refreshing, minimal experience, actually. I look at it, and there's the stuff I wanted on there. Literally nothing else. I like that. This all seemed a lot more daunting than it ended up being. It costs me nothing but time - and less time, at that, than I've spent grappling with Facebook or just feeling bad about how it feels to use the bloody thing.
I'll put things on there when I want people to see them. I'll cross-post links to the places where my friends are (POSSE is a reasonably good approach). I'll check the personal websites of people I know (there are a few, currently). I'll keep checking my inbox and event notifications regularly. But, other than that?
I don't think I have wanted to be posting at length, or primarily, on social media for years now. I've just wanted to easily connect with my friends.
It's bleakly amusing, then, that this 'Zombie Simpsons' idea has kept floating to the top of the stagnant pond of my mind these past couple of years, right as the show has apparently had some kind of comeback. For me, however, the term currently rises to the surface when I am looking not at media, but at software and services of pretty much any kind - everything from lynchpin websites to specialty software. Specifically, when I look at their ongoing decline in quality.
Cory Doctorow coined the term 'enshittification' last year to describe something very close to this - a cycle of platforms gaining user trust via excellent services, and then chipping away at those services over time, 'enshittifying' themselves, for profit. It is an excellent term, and it is also very specifically used as describing part of a cycle where companies are born, grow, shrink, die, and are then replaced.
Unfortunately, that "death" part feels a little bit. Delayed. For quite a few of the ongoing enshittifications. Doesn't it? I ask, because I'm pretty sure you've been thinking about this. These tools you use are bad, getting worse even, but they're still around and we're still using them.
It's also notable that a lot of these companies aren't currently achieving larger market shares or profits during their enshittification. Hell, it could be argued that some of them aren't even trying to do that. They're just... changing for the worse. Rotting, so to speak, because they've been around for too long or have grown into something different - perhaps Ship-of-Theseus-ed several times over, such that not a trace of the original goals or founding staff remains.
These spectacles of disintegration aren't as rapid as self-immolation, nor as swift or intentional as something one would call "self-sabotage". This is why I like the term "self-zombification". These platforms are not bitten. They are not caught unawares. These companies look at the several-hundred-strong horde of zombies making a nuisance of things for them and their currently functional peers, and think:
"Hey. That looks like a pretty good move, being a zombie. There are a lot of them, and they seem to last a pretty long time. A lot less effort than trying not to get bitten. I don't think they're going anywhere, either. In fact, now that I think about it, if it were all that bad to be a zombie, there wouldn't be so many of them, would there? It's probably good, actually. Why don't we just... check it out? Go get zombified, see how it goes?"
And, quite quickly, without asking anyone else, they go and lick some open zombie wounds or whatever and bam, there's another shambler hanging around. Things get a bit worse for everyone relying on them, who most emphatically were not asked about this ahead of time. Now their most experienced plumber has gone and become a fucking zombie, which makes it much harder for them to do a good job (given how active decay often interferes with one's ability to function) and, just between you and me, last week they left a rotting finger in one of the clean-water tanks when they were replacing a section of piping, but there aren't a lot of qualified plumbers out here so, honestly, it could be worse. No, we're not sure if it was their own finger or a snack they were chewing on. No, we're not going to ask, they're a bit snappy (ha ha) in response to criticism at the moment. It's not worth the trouble. No, we don't have anyone who can replace them. Now shut up, stop complaining, and drink your water, it's only slightly rotten-finger-ey.
Nobody disagrees that Google provides materially worse results compared to a decade ago. Nobody really thinks Facebook is better at showing us things our friends want us to see compared to a decade ago. Nobody using the app asked Duolingo to remove so many of its less-used language courses. Nobody wants gig economy apps to provide us with the same quality of service we had from other businesses a decade ago, but with higher prices, worse-treated workers, and a far higher risk of horrible intrusions of the end-user's privacy. Nobody wants to consume media that overworked creators couldn't put care into making. Yet, of course, this and a dozen's dozen examples further are what we have. This, broadly, seems to be the current stage of the largest companies in every industry (particularly those who hold a monopoly or duopoly).
If you reading this, you're probably a friend of mine, and thus probably agree with me. This isn't because I've cultivated an echo chamber, per se, but because I don't tend to make friends with incurious, stunningly wealthy, or deeply insular people. As far as I can tell, those are the primary categories of people who think the economy is currently Working Really Well.
Isn't it a shame that we just. Keep on going? Keep relying on these zombies? Keep on holding our noses, rolling our eyes, picking bits of shattered teeth out of our now-required bite-resistant sleeves, and doing our best to make sure we wash off any bits of rotten flesh before we take off our shoes at the door and flop down on the couch at the end of the day?
It is a shame - even moreso that I don't really have solutions for the big-picture stuff. I can't solve Facebook or Twitter/X, sorry. Not building to any grand reveal like that, not this time. One of these days, maybe.
What I can do, however, is ask myself a pretty important question: Why?
Why do I keep using these things?
The answer is that it seems like an unsustainable amount of work to find and use an alternative, and any alternative seems unlikely to provide everything crucial that the current option does.
The key word there is "seems".
I let go of Twitter a while ago. I have not missed it one bit. Mostly, because I was not correct in my assumptions about what it was giving me or even what I wanted from a micro-blogging platform.
I kept using it, for years, not because I wanted what it provided me, but because I wanted something it used to provide me and thought it was still doing so. It was not, which became apparent as soon as I stopped.
Everyone has their own remarkably specific wants from social media. Suffice to say that a key want, for myself and many others, is the idea of "visibility". I want interested people to see what I offer up. A unified, easily searchable, feed-customisable town hall seems a perfect option.
Except, of course, that Twitter was increasingly difficult to search accurately. Increasingly filled with people who I did not want to interact with me. Increasingly incentivising look-and-pass-on behaviour that diminished the quality of interactions from people I did want to reach. And, it goes without saying, it was becoming increasingly hard to actually view what you wanted to view. More a 'Times Square' than a 'Town Hall'.
I want friends to see when I post. I want specific types of strangers to occasionally find me. I want total control over how I present my thoughts and works. I want to be sure that what I publish cannot be trivially removed, undermined, or lost to backwards-incompatibility. It is currently an incredible amount of effort to get those things from social media I am currently on.
It "seems" like a lot of effort to move away from current platforms. However, in actuality, there is a lot of effort required to maintain them, un-ideal as they may be, as they currently stand. A great deal of this unpleasant experience is shaped by the contortions required to fight the wants of each platform and get even a tenth of what I want.
Again, I think you might agree.
So, I'm taking the boring, easy route out. I'm pruning. I re-learned basic, basic HTML. I started my own website - this one. A glorified blog, really. There's almost nothing on it. It's quite a refreshing, minimal experience, actually. I look at it, and there's the stuff I wanted on there. Literally nothing else. I like that. This all seemed a lot more daunting than it ended up being. It costs me nothing but time - and less time, at that, than I've spent grappling with Facebook or just feeling bad about how it feels to use the bloody thing.
I'll put things on there when I want people to see them. I'll cross-post links to the places where my friends are (POSSE is a reasonably good approach). I'll check the personal websites of people I know (there are a few, currently). I'll keep checking my inbox and event notifications regularly. But, other than that?
I don't think I have wanted to be posting at length, or primarily, on social media for years now. I've just wanted to easily connect with my friends.