A great video this from the Norwegian Consumer Council on enshittification. They’ve also released a report on enshittification and how to resist it, and written to Norwegian, EU, UK and US authorities on reversing the trend.
Enshittification, a term first coined by Cory Doctorow, is the gradual process where online platforms draw users in by providing a useful product before declining in usefulness and quality as they monetise their services. Functionality gets worse, ads invade, the product becomes shitty. The most heinous examples of enshittification are social platforms like Facebook that trap people by making it difficult to leave without losing their connections to friends.
Our online lives are increasingly being mediated by bad products being run by people who do not have our best interests at heart, all the more galling when we’re paying for them. Subscription-based models for software usage have proliferated meaning that you will often keep paying to access a service that gets worse with each new update. Recently the trend has been to add AI into everything, whether you asked for it or not. Microsoft, in an astoundingly brazen move, recently hiked the cost of Office 365 renewals by around 30%, purely to pay for AI features. Without asking users, they proceeded to make the AI version of Office the default, with the only opt-out being to cancel your subscription and switch to a version without AI features.
I’m finding opting for alternatives easier all the time when even the products that I have been using for many years are becoming shittier all the time. Google is a case in point. Google Search, the original that was the best, has become progressively less reliable and the omnipresent AI summaries are often comically bad.
And now we have the problem that so many of these technologies are owned by US companies run by men doing the bidding of an insane president. The problem has moved beyond poor quality products to protecting your online life and privacy from genuinely unpleasant people who will not just do the bidding of a megalomaniacal, racist despot, they’ll actually give him money.
Here’s where I’m up to with opting out of the enshittification:
Social
I’m only now active on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Bluesky. I use Instagram with a client that blocks advertising – if I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t be on it any longer. Bluesky is my main social network, and I’ve recently moved my profile so that it is hosted on European infrastructure using Eurosky. Bluesky uses the AT protocol, and data portability is built into the system, meaning that I could easily shift off the US-hosted platform and onto a European alternative without breaking my connections. Alternatives to Instagram are also developing using the same protocol.
Search
I’m weaning myself off Google with DuckDuckGo (American but privacy-focussed) and Kagi. I haven’t found a single daily driver yet.
Photos
I’m migrating almost 200GB of photos and videos from Google Photos to Ente‘s encrypted, open-source photo storage. So far it has been a delight and does everything I valued in Google Photos.
Browser
I keep coming back to Firefox as a solid choice – their latest update smartly includes an option to block AI functionality in that and subsequent versions of the app, and it still supports uBlock Origin, about the best thing for dealing with ads and other annoyances there is.
For a Chromium-based browser, I’ve tried most of the alternatives to Chrome and still find Edge to be the best option – if you turn off the Co-Pilot option.
Email, calendar and storage
I use Proton Mail (Swiss) for work, and am slowly moving more of my personal mail over to it. Good handling of multiple addresses and support for my own domain name. The suite of accompanying products including Calendar, Drive and VPN is improving with decent premium features covered by a single subscription. I’ve also switched to Proton Authenticator from Google Authenticator and use Proton Pass across my phone and various browsers for passwords.
Try Proton for free for 2 weeks and get a credit on a paid plan with my referral link.
Others
- For time tracking, I use Toggl Track, which is Estonian.
- For to-do lists, I use the brilliant TickTick, having moved to it from Todoist.
- For video conferencing I try to use Crewdle (Canadian).
- For notes, I’m trying Craft (British), Supernotes (British) and Joplin (French) as an alternative to Google Keep and Notion.
- For chat, I like Beeper which acts as a client for several messaging platforms including WhatsApp.
- For maps, I’m trying Organic Maps and OsmAnd, HERE We Go (Dutch) for navigation, and still use OS Maps.
A useful list of European alternative apps.
It’s probably a bit hopeful to expect to be able to break away from enshittified and American tech completely, particularly when so many businesses and organisations are stuck with it, but it’s easier all the time to find a genuinely good alternative. I’m less motivated by privacy concerns than many, I just want apps and services that work, don’t piss me off, and don’t force functionality on me that I don’t need – and if I do want to leave them, I want them to let me go by giving me a way to export my data elsewhere.
It’s work in progress to find better tools online, and also useful to remember that, like pubs that go off the boil, you need to be able to go to new places and not get trapped – and to be able to step outside and leave them all behind to touch the grass.