Markets are the cure for this, not the cause

The new thing the cool kids are saying about the internet:

…what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that.

Examples? Everywhere you look. Take Google search that, once upon a time (1998), was elegant, efficient and a massive improvement on what went before. You typed in a query and got a list of websites that were indicated by a kind of automated peer-review called PageRank. Now, the first page of results from a search for “high-quality saucepans” produces a myriad of “sponsored” items, ie advertisements.

….

Thanks to Cory Doctorow, the great tech critic, we now have a term for this decay process in online platforms – enshittification. “First,” he writes, “they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” Enshittification results from the convergence of two things: the power of platform owners to change how their platforms extract value from users and the nature of the two-sided markets – where the platforms sit between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other and then raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

No. Well, yes and then no.

This isn’t about a particular type of market - the two sided of Jean Tirole and all that. Nor is it something about capitalism, the owners deciding to grab as much value as they can.

This is about organisation. As the late, great, C Northcote Parkinson pointed out, or Pournele’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Organisations, by their very nature, become established and then they are run to maximise the utility of the organisation and the people in it. That just what happens among human beings.

Getting this right is important. For it happens to bureaucracies, political parties, entrenched class interests (if we want to take it that far) too. There is also no real cure for the problem. Organisations just do that.

Therefore what we need is a method of getting rid of organisations that become so. Which is why markets are the cure. Any organisation that stops pleasuring its consumers will, eventually at least, go bust in a competitive market. It is only those which do not face competition and thus the threat of replacement who can continue in this manner down the decades.

That is, there’s a truth to Doctorow’s observation. But the implication of it is not that there’s something wrong with companies for that can take care of itself. Rather, how do we subject bureaucracies to the only known cure, the threat of extinction?