Post date:September 28, 2025

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Screenshot I was going to title this post Word Of The Year but I just learned that enshittification was selected as the 2024 Word of the Year by both the American Dialect Society and the Macquarie Dictionary. I first heard the word a couple of years ago and thought it referred to the state of the world in general and I’m not convinced it doesn’t as it continues to gain traction and describe more and more. Its usage was initially more limited but the word captures so well the feeling that not only are our daily lives being slowly degraded but also the feeling that all the enshittifiers have something in common, as if they’re all part of some strategic plan. We’re obviously not living in a Renaissance. If I was asked what the opposite of a renaissance was I’d say Doom Loop. It’s that feeling that everything is getting worse and more fastly. The rapid spread of the word enshittification probably has something to do with it being a pretentious-sounding word for something blindingly obvious to everyone who needs to articulate this new reality and the awareness of it. People wrote about this well before I felt I had to. The first person to identify enshittification as a thing and to name it was the author and tech critic Cory Doctorow here in February 2024. This is a definition.

There’s no end to the list of enshittifiers but where to begin? The answer was right in front of me.

Google Verify

Google Verify has become more frequent, more persistent and more time-wastey. Sometimes it looks fraudulent itself, as if it’s harvesting clicks while pretending to legitimize your accessing some website. Sometimes the asks are easy, as with the fire hydrants. Sometimes they’e meaninglessly numerous as with the motorcycles. And sometimes they take a while because every image has to be parsed, as with the stupid car one. I don’t use Chrome but it makes no difference. Google Verify pops up wherever you go. Gr.

Google Drive

I try to avoid Google products. After being tempted by the initial offer of 1GB storage back in 2005 or so, I no longer have a gmail account so I can’t avail myself of the Login with Google option. Even so, Google never forgets. I’m sometimes presented with this message telling me my workspace is full. The funny thing is – there’s nothing stored in my workspace. It doesn’t make any difference. These messages arrive every time I start or restart one of my three devices. I feel no urgency to contact my Google Workspace administrator whoever that would be. These people seem to think you rely upon their services and you are made to think you actually do. Recognizing you have a problem is the first stage of recovery. I know I’m being childishly defiant but I’ll continue to ignore these desperate warnings so I can feel I have a degree of agency. If GoogleDrive disappeared tomorrow I wouldn’t miss it. Even if I were foolish enough to store my entire photo archive on it, I’d probably see its loss as a small price to pay for the eradication of Google Drive. Memories should remain memories. The ability to forget them may have a purpose.

I’ve redacted my email address somewhat pointlessly as I’m not that difficult to find. Microsoft Exchange

Every time I open Microsoft Exchange, I find it increasingly difficult to find messages received. This was supposed to be the point of email. Instead, trash notifications arrive as “Focussed” and important messages arrive as “Other”. I must sift through it all. Thanks. I have about 350 unread. One recent innovation is to make it more difficult to send messages by offering me scheduling options while making the Send button more difficult to find. I’m not using Microsoft Exchange by choice. And as for OneDrive …

DeepL

DeepL is enshittifying at speed. Around 2021, it was a new entry in the field of translation applications and I was an early adopter because it wasn’t a Google product. I wanted them to succeed. I thought the quality of the translation was very good and I still do. Sadly though, I had to delete the app (on all devices) because an “improvement” about a year ago made the thing open every time every time I pressed CTRL+I, a key combination used in many other programs and that also has meaning in my OS. Once open, it would refuse to close, asking me *“Do you really want to quit DeepL or would you like it to keep running in the background?”*OPTION+ COMMAND+ESC= FORCE QUIT. And then came the updates. Every third day it seemed, there came a centre-screen notification of *“An important update is ready to install. Do you want to install and restart now?”*The terrifyingly-named update 25.8.12525829 pushed me over the edge. I now use Google Translate because it is less (obviously) intrusive.

WordPress

WordPress has been generally good to me. Its autocorrect feature is the best I’ve ever seen. But with the ongoing enshittification of content it’s only natural that the means for producing it will go down with it. It’s as if all content has no need of meaning anymore and that it’s only function is as some sort of space filler from which to hang advertising off. “What are the Best Ten AI–Designed Houses in Argentina?” With WordPress, I can ask for Writing Assistance (beta). I switched it on and asked it to find issues with the previous paragraph and this is what came back. I seem to have too many long sentences despite my 9.82 Reading grade score.

I can also ask WordPress to Optimize Title (i.e. generate title options on the basis of my “post content and SEO best practices. SEO btw is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. There’s also Get Featured Image. I can also Get Feedback on the structure of content. Getseems to be an abbreviation for Generate. I can also ask requests but, despite having used it maybe once, I’ve already reached my free requests limit I need to upgrade. I don’t even know what I’d want to ask. I’ll try to live without it.

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop already has a captive market so it’s not as if they need to enshittify their product. The only scope for further profit in the short term is to make users dependent upon it for base images but, even now, other AI-driven products are able to produce visuals much faster. I can now imagine a day when Photoshop will disappear. The bar for what counts as creativity in the fields of graphic design and image manipulation is lowering fast.

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat has become a bit more bossy recently. Attempts to set another pdf reader as default are continually questioned, and force quitting it prompts a bug report. More annoying are messages like this one. In answer to the question “What would make you more likely to recommend ACROBAT to others?” I could say something snarky like “Fewer messages like this” but, somewhat menacingly, I’m told that that response will be associated with my Adobe ID. Notice that the Never show again checkbox is checked.

ArchDaily

This is the only website I’ll mention but it’s a good example of “the gradual deterioration of a product or service brought about by a reduction of the quality of the service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit seeking.” The curious thing about ArchDaily is that nobody has to rely upon it for information but they’re led to believe they do. In 2008 it was a breath of fresh air compared to snotty magazines that thought they were opinion formers while being a platform for targeted advertising. Online architectural “news” providers didn’t exactly eliminate that hypocrisy. They just made shit news and shit advertising more available to everyone. Daily.

ArchiCAD

ArchiCAD is another application that’s been good to me and the only gripe I have is the frequency of updates. There are major updates that usually occur once a year and that usually have some useful additions and welcome changes and fewer of the old bugs and hassles. However, there’s also a steady stream of new ones that require sub-updates that are probably patches to tide users over until the next major update. However, recent update 28.03.0 was such a disaster that I’m thinking of rolling back. First, there were incessant prompts to install this latest update but, even when I did, the prompts would continue. Either the update didn’t install or the update didn’t know it had already installed it. I forced quit the app so the Graphisoft Bug Reporter sprang into action, asking for information about what happened. I then waited a while, while it rummaged through my system for information. The whole process takes what seems like an eternity, but more so if ArchiCAD froze and you had to force quit. It’s not great to have to wait for all this fingers crossed wondering how much work has been lost. That feeling is enshittification in action.

Another enshittifying thing about this Update 28.3.0 is how much it degrades the 3D modeling performance. I checked the user support groups and found I wasn’t alone. One user support person “advised” (grrr) that the performance of ArchiCAD increases when there is less modeling to process. This is the human enshittification of user support. What I was hearing is that ArchiCAD performs better if you don’t *use it for the tasks it was designed for and that are the reason you are using it.*We are truly on our own. I discovered that the ArchCAD rendering window now works better if you close it (without trying to orbit or pan), hit Hardware Acceleration and then click on the 3D view icon to open a new window. It’s a defiant workaround and not ideal but at least ArchCAD is not making suggestions like “Wouldn’t it be better if that was on the other side of the building? Perhaps a little taller?” If that happens, and there’s no reason to think it can’t or won’t with ArchiCAD or Rhino or Revit or whatever, then it’s back to pencil and paper. Clearly, in the future, everybody will be an architect and it will have the same amount of meaning as everybody on Pinterest being a curator.

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It may be a coincidence but, while I was writing this post, the following advertisements were playing out on my browser, suggesting I master AI tools and take control of my life. I can’t take anything written in Head Caps seriously.

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Revisited this week:

• [Revisionist History](http://Revisited this week:)
• Detective Story
• Misleading Narratives

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