Have you noticed that America has become a shittier place to live lately? Of course, much of the recent escalation of shittiness is a direct result of the Big Beautiful Baby who spends his days in a dirty diaper turning the Federal Government into his personal playpen, but enshittification was going on for a long time before Big Baby began his daily twitter tantrums and flinging of ketchup covered nuggets against the walls of the White House.
Classic enshittification begins with big corporations ruining all their smaller competition. A perfect example is Amazon, which started out as a mail order bookstore. Their long term strategy was to sell books cheaper than other bookstores could even buy them for and thereby gain larger and larger market share. Funny Times knows this from personal experience, because we used to have a mail order humor bookstore, featuring a hilarious selection of our cartoonists’ and writers’ books, until Amazon turned that enterprise into a real financial joke. It didn’t matter that the company lost billions of dollars doing business this way and didn’t turn a profit for nearly 10 years because eventually Penis Rocket boy succeeded in his goal of owning the largest bookstore in the world and was well on his way to double-parking his fleet of vans on every side-street in America.
Lots of new start-ups have perfected enshittification. First, they offer lower prices, better customer service, and more convenience. What’s not to love about getting free next-day shipping at lower prices for things that you were going to have to wait in line at your friendly local store to buy? Everyone is happy to save a few bucks and a few minutes time finding a parking space that isn’t blocked by a double-parked delivery van.
But before long your local store is a wasteland, frequented mostly by shoplifters and “savvy” customers looking to gather expert information from the knowledgeable sales staff before making their ultimate purchase from the online website with the cheapest price. Soon the locals offer all their remaining stock at close-out prices (even better bargains!) but then go out of business forever. Friends and neighbors lose their jobs, your community loses local sponsors of sports teams and neighborhood events, your city loses its tax revenue and everything gets shittier.
But that’s just the beginning of enshittification, because once the local competition is gone the big, networked business can raise prices, lower quality, and figure out new ways of maximizing profits. How many of these techniques have you noticed lately: The sizes of packages get smaller, but the price stays the same. The quality of the product goes down and when you call to complain about defective merchandise the customer service representatives have been replaced by an Artificially Intelligent system that makes it impossible to ever talk to a human being. The customer service phone number gets replaced with a chatbot that is carefully designed to send you on an infinite loop of frustration. Checkout clerks are replaced with self-serve registers where you get to struggle with convincing a computer robot that your apples are the Honeycrisps that are on sale, not the kumquats that their evil little sticker insists they are.
Here’s Cory Doctorow’s pithy explanation of the enshittification of internet platforms: “First, 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. Then, they die.”
I’m still waiting for some of these crappy apps to die. Because now, instead of a couple of quarters, I need to download and decode an app that doesn’t work half the time to park my car. I need a smart phone if I want to view the menu at my local diner (which is no longer really local, since it was bought out by a chain owned by a billionaire from Omaha.) The local schools no longer have the tax revenue they need, so they got rid of the music, theater and art programs and are trying to pay for luxuries like new library books with a bake sale and bingo night. The city government can’t fix all the potholes, and the water department can’t repair all the leaking pipes. But the good news is that the city now has an app that tells you where all the leaks are located so that you can try to avoid driving through the flooding at those intersections.
Also, the stock market is soaring to all-time highs! There are more billionaires now than at any time in history! There are more hours of new TV programming available each day than there are hours left in most Americans lives! So, if you just keep subscribing to additional streaming services I’m sure you’ll eventually find a program that’s better than the shitty one you’re currently watching (but also specially designed by Our Banal Corporate Overseers to provide more pablum for Big Baby and his followers).
You want to stop enshittification from making more skid-marks in our lives? Buy from local businesses. Shop at farmer’s markets and craft fairs. Go to see community theatre, local bands and amateur sporting events. Invite friends for dinner or a game night. Go to parks, garden, dance, sing and tell lots of jokes. We each have the power to change the conversation and flush the shitty world of the oligarchy down into the sewer where it came from.
Read the October 2025 issue of Funny Times
Dear Ray,
Even as a person who uses the word “shit” excessively in everyday life, it is boring to read the term enshitification repeatedly. Your points are right on, but you don’t need to use the same ungainly word to refer to the subject: try pronouns or other nouns to widen the field of meaning and buttress your point. It wears down even the sympathetic reader.
Thanks for a great mag and more power to you.
Enjoyed and understand your enshittification piece.
As a subscriber, I especially enjoy the painfully true cartoons that present the Toddler-In-Chief in a much truer light that mainstream media – which is terrified of the flabby felon who might send in the 17 IQ ICE goons to haul all their employees away for a harassment date before being released.
VOTE 2026 – Flip Congress and the Senate – Let the trials begin!
Great post. I think Anti-Disneyism is now the good choice. Disney has long kissed orange ass long ago.
I’m glad to see more people promote the idea of enshitification (ie the consequences of the concentration of corporate power) but if you read more of Corey Doctorow’s work, you will see one of his major points is that individual actions (like shopping local) will never be powerful enough to overcome the stranglehold that large corporations have established on most sections of the economy. Corey advocates for collective action to force the passing of new public policy to curtail these businesses interests. Again, I love to see more publicity for Corey’s ideas, but please don’t promote people to take futile (and often frustrating) steps to try and solve the problem. Engaging with local businesses and organizations can be very rewarding but it’s not going to cause economy-wide changes; only government policy/lack thereof can do that (hence why it was also the cause of the enshitification in the first place).
Buying locally may do little to solve the corporate takeover but it certainly puts a smile on the local business owner. That’s worth something.
I was born in 1946 and I saw this shit coming in my high school locker room. There was no leader ship possibilities from my peers. Then white christian future fascists wanted me to die in Viet Nam. I was drafted 5 times and had 3 physicals but that is another story. The thing is I have been alive long enough to see these white christian hypocrites resort to lies and violence to protect their ignorance. I am ashamed of these white people. Being stupid is like being dead…You don’t know you’re dead. I think I got that from you. I am privileged to be protected from this white fascist ignorance because I am white. These stunted intellects have always thought I was one of them. MAGA-aats have always disparaged anyone who is not them. They don’t build bridges they blow them up. They are drawing violence to themselves. The second amendment is for us to bear arms AGAINST AN OUT OF CONTROL GOVERNMENT. The fore fathers knew that our system could be perverted by greedy, narcissistic, power hungry, morons who do not see value/profit in a beautiful peacefully FREE country. They can’t share because it might get them in trouble. They are under the thumb of an anti christ figure and they don’t care. They still pretend piety. Look at the runt christian Johnson who protects a child molester. Kirk was killed because he preached hate. I had a friend who used to say, “You play pussy, you get fucked.” Well, Charlie was proud of his hate. He should not have been shot but let’s READ SOME FUCKIn’ HISTORY BOOKs!!! You create hate does not mean you are protected. I heard plenty of disparaging remarks from MAGA-aats after the death of many on the left. They can dish it out but they can’t take it. It is why they are so obsessed about man hood. They are sooooo insecure. Any way… I saw this coming and in my way I have tried to make a different but I and my generation failed. WE had the money but it was stolen from us to finance depraved ideas for the future. Many can’t mend this broken chain of life. These greedy pigs will pay but unfortunately it looks like they will drag everyone DOWN with them. I am ashamed of these white scared, twisted, overly armed, warring, uneducated, anti christ worshiping pedophile supporting people. I have a sad smile hoping that I live long enough to see karma make all their filthy fears come true.
The sentence should be….. MONEY can’t mend this broken chain of life.
My husband, John, also graduated from New College (started in ’68, graduated in ’72) and we were both greatly distressed by DePanties’ raping and pillaging of such a fine institution.
Excellent publication.
Ray, I couldn’t agree with you more!
When corporations’ “customer service” departments shift you around just to frustrate you and hope you give up, it’s called, “sludging”.
My internet company tried this with me, but ultimately, I was able to get my problem solved, after almost an hour on the phone. I had two things going for me (besides the fact that I was right). One, I’m retired. I had all day, if necessary, to hang in there. Two, I’m a persistent New Yorker. When I’m right, I’m right! ?
Keep this funny stories, cartoons, etc. coming.
They help keep us all sane and laughing!
Patrice Yeatter
Humour will save the world- okay, that not guaranteed, but it certainly helps. Thanks for being there…
Now, I better go re-up my subscription.
Sad but true across the board. Still, we live in a small college town where the final paragraph way of living is stlll possible. I wish we could bottle it and sell it.
Although a bit harsh, I understand commenter Woodside’s complaint. Turning good ole “shit” into quasi-academic “enshittification” feels forced, something that maybe an alum of the old New School would avoid. Nounificationalizing is a drag on English, like a tractor beam pulling it back to its Germanic roots, where Betaubungsmittelverschreibungverordnung is an actual word.
Verbs and verb forms have more force than nouns. With that in mind, I suggest “dunging-up” as a synonym for “enshittification.” “Dunging-down” might also work, as a parallel to “dumbing-down.” “Fecalizing” is a bit dainty, but might fit some contexts. The adage that “shit flows downhill,” suggests “buried by a fecal avalanche” or just plain “avalanche of shit.”