Welcome to the Enshittocene

When writer Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification,’ describing how every social media platform just gets worse over time, it quickly entered the lexicon.  Everyone who hasn’t been hiding in an underground bunker for the past 20 years knows this intuitively. We're living this, every moment of every day.

In January, Doctorow delivered a lecture in Berlin in which he elaborates on this concept, declaring that humankind has now entered the Enshittocene Era:

We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying. 

This is not, Doctorow assures us, an inevitable one-way road to complete societal collapse. Well, actually, it is, but he offers some strategies for making a U-turn before we all go flying off the edge of the cliff, Thelma & Louise style. [1]

But enshittification extends beyond Facebook, Google, Xitter, Tik Tok, et al. It’s consuming the web and what remains of digital journalism. And AI is at the heart of it.

The sludge also rises

Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer-winning national security journalist and author of the Forever Wars blog, recently observed that an obscure publication he’d worked for in the 2000s, which had gone under in 2010, was now back on the Internet. But the newly resurrected version of the Washington Independent was a little different. Some of the stories Ackerman had written had been republished, but with another name attached; there were also new stories bylined by people who do not appear to exist in corporeal form and were most likely composed by AI. 

For example, several stories on that page carry the byline of one Rhyley Carney. An archived version of the zombie site offers this author bio:

Rhyley Carney is a New York Times bestselling author, anthology editor, comic book writer, magazine feature writer, playwright, content designer, and writing teacher/lecturer who has won five Bram Stoker Awards. More than a dozen countries have purchased her novels. 

I’m sure it will shock you to learn that no one with that name has ever won any Bram Stoker Awards [2], and that “Rhyley” has zero digital footprint outside the WashIndy website, a rather unusual situation for a New York Times bestselling author. (But I am deeply curious to find out how a country goes about purchasing a novel. Did they buy one for every citizen, or just one?)

The WashIndy is not alone in being brought back to life and bastardized. A Serbian DJ named Nebojša Vujinović Vujo recently purchased the domain for The Hairpin, a popular woman’s site that went belly up in 2018, and has turned it into AI-generated sludge.

Vujo claims to have purchased more than 2,000 domains, which he hopes to extract advertising revenue from by using expired names that still have some Google juice left in them. That Vujo sounds like a real charmer. 

All goo, all the time

Scavenging once-popular domains and turning them into clickbait SEO farms for driving web traffic is nothing new, but AI makes the process of generating this sludge several orders of magnitude easier and practically free. That means we’re going to see a lot more it. 

A 2022 report by Europol, the EU law enforcement agency, predicts that 90 percent of web content could be AI generated by 2026. In other words: enshittification on a massive scale.

Ian Betteridge, fellow tech journalist and accidental author of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines (“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘No’”) [3], calls this “informational grey goo.” He predicts it will result in… 

“...an internet choked with low-quality content, which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public reliable sources for information because the tools we have been able to rely on in the past – Google, social media – can never keep up with the scale of new content being created.”

He’s not wrong. But the worst part isn’t so much that surfing the Net will be like slogging through goo, or that people will fall for this crap (well, except for the stuff about celebrities having rows of increasingly tiny teeth, which I totally believe). It’s that we will no longer know which sources of information we can trust, and thus end up trusting none of them. 

Fake news, the AI version

For example: Last May, independent media watchdog NewsGuard identified 49 news sites entirely generated by AI. As of this writing, the group’s Unreliable AI-generated News and Information (UAIN) tracker has identified 777 fake AI news sites. That's a growth rate of roughly 1500 percent in less than a year. If that continues, there will be nearly 57,000 of these by November 2024. [4]

Sites like the reanimated Hairpin have a clearly understandable (and despicable) economic motive. The economic motive of the zombified Washington Independent is less clear. It carries no ads, and has no affiliate or SEO links that would generate either revenue or traffic. There’s no visible means of support, no obvious business model. 

But I do find it interesting that it published a list of “Top Russian Lawyers” in December 2022, and there appears to be a Russian version of this particular page, from a website registered anonymously in Iceland. 

That domain name translates into "russian-lawyer.com." But the link redirects to Zombie Wash Indy. I wonder why the site’s editors thought that topic would be of interest to Americans? [5]

Got any burning topics you want me to cast my increasingly blurry gaze upon? Submit your suggestions below or email me: CrankyOldDan at gmail dot com.

[1] The strategies mostly consist of undoing Reagan-era belief systems that regulation is evil, monopolies are inevitable, anti-trust laws harm consumers, or that unions have sunk into the tarpits of history. We’ve been getting spoonfed this Ayn Rand fanfic BS for 40+ years. As Doctorow points out, union membership is growing, even inside the virulently anti-union world of tech. Privacy regulations with teeth are increasing, and AI legislation is inevitable. And as the DOJ's recent actions against Apple demonstrate, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act appears to have emerged from a four-decade coma. All is not lost.

[2] Actual awards given out for horror writing, not vampirism.

[3] This 'law' isn't actually true. There are plenty of examples in The Tynan Files that disprove it. But people love to quote this rule, almost as much as they love to use the term 'enshittification.'

[4] I used ChatGPT to calculate that, so feel free to check my math.

[5] On the other hand, Faux WashIndy also published a story on the best ways to use “Oil-Based Masturbation Cream,” which is service journalism at its finest.