Séamas O'Reilly: The tech that runs our lives is waging war against us

"Ensh*ttification is everywhere. It’s in the degradation of social media platforms and the ubiquity of crap customer service bots, it’s in the robotic voices incapable of answering your queries on the phone to your own bank."

Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

As a dad of two young kids, ‘spring cleaning’ has lost some of the meaning it once did. 

Certainly not since those halcyon days of my grubby 20s, when tidying up was something I’d have reliably informed you I did once a year, “whether I need to or not”.

I now tidy obsessively, since failure to do so would result in my entire family being suffocated by the avalanche of detritus we generate on a daily basis. 

Roughly three years ago, I started getting targeted with ads for cleaning utensils. Worse, I discovered I enjoyed these ads, contentedly scrolling scouring brushes, dreamily imagining the gleam and shine they’d add to my many precious surfaces.

Nowadays, the only spring cleaning I have to force upon myself, and will delay as long as humanly possible, is in the digital realm. 

There is no chore I loathe more, especially since I hit a recent event horizon I can barely contemplate without panicking: the total collapse of my online storage. 

Just typing those words fills me with anxiety. Across all devices and platforms, I have mountains of data that is soon-to-be homeless, and no way of moving it anywhere without selling a kidney, almost all of which were sold to me as “unlimited”. 

I blink and sweat at the idea of having to move these mountains of data somewhere, anywhere, that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and shudder with the unfairness of my plight.

There’s a word for this. 

In 2022, Canadian tech writer Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification’ to describe the process by which tech giants play bait-and-switch with their users, resulting in the dysfunctional, predatory services that now control our online lives. 

You’ll recognise the pattern; a startup boasts great features which attract a large user base, which they immediately monetise, while simultaneously stripping said features away, plank by plank, until users are shuttered out of those original benefits and, finally, milked for paid upgrades which promise a return to the service they once enjoyed for free.

Except, those original features can never be recouped. Take Prime Video, for example. If you’ve used Amazon’s streaming service for a while, you’ll have noticed its functionality has changed over the last few years. 

Its big appeal at launch was its award-winning original content — included in the monthly fee — and an unsurpassed catalogue of additional TV and movies you could pay small amounts to watch, made by external producers. 

This was an offer you couldn’t get anywhere else; the chance to buy very nearly any film or even single episodes of most TV shows, for a couple of quid on top of the content you were already getting with your subscription. 

Even then, of course, there were wrinkles, as anyone who groaned at their automatic attempt to make you stump up for HD versions of said content can attest. (The mental state of someone who’d voluntarily choose to spend an additional €1.50 to watch Friends in 4KHD doesn’t bear thinking about).

And then the streaming boom arrived, and competing providers started withdrawing their content. Soon, it was harder and harder to find anything you wanted, much less to buy and watch it in the few clicks that had once proved Prime’s defining benefit. 

The One Stop Shop had become a harrowing labyrinth of dead links and “How Do I Watch This?” prompts, usually suggesting you sign up for additional streaming services elsewhere, on your own dime. 

It was a little like browsing the aisles of Blockbuster and suddenly finding that 60% of the DVD cases you picked from the shelves contained nothing but a map to your nearest Xtravision.

Before long, certain shows were included but only with unskippable ads embedded in the stream and, finally, this year, a two-tier system was established, whereby you can now avail of your original, decade-established, no-ads experience for an additional surcharge of around €3 per month, or else enjoy embedded ads on the smaller number of shows you’re still able to watch on the service you’re already paying to use.

Enshittification is everywhere. It’s in the degradation of social media platforms and the ubiquity of crap customer service bots, it’s in the robotic voices incapable of answering your queries on the phone to your own bank. 

It’s in the Google search that reveals a dozen garbage results before it finds the thing you actually mentioned, or the low-cost airline that makes you pay that extra special little surcharge, just so you can sit with your family. 

It’s in trying to book an appointment at your local leisure centre, only to find they’ve franchised their web service out to a third-party booking app, which refuses to allow non-standard characters because, well, honestly Mr. S€amas O&#39Reilly, how many people in Ireland are likely to have either a fada or an apostrophe in their name?

And so it is now with my “unlimited” storage. Its capacity will be kicked down to 5GB at the end of this month, and since it contains no less than 126GB of emails, photos, files and documents accumulated over two decades, my entire online life will be deleted unless I pony up an eye-watering amount to maintain a service that was explicitly marketed as limitless. 

Either that or I start offloading things to external hard drives like some sort of Dark Web freak, and that’s simply no way to live.

I know you’re currently frothing with anger on my behalf, perhaps applying rosin to the strings of that tiny little violin you keep at hand for such grave injustices. But you’ll likely be where I am before long. 

The tech that runs our lives is waging war against us, collapsing into a pit of its own rotted wealth and picking our pockets while it does so. 

And, just like the photos, documents and messages decaying within my Google account, each of enshittification’s tiny little morsels of contempt will soon amass into something way less manageable — and many times harder to spring clean.