Volume 5, Issue 8: Do Not Resuscitate

"Who ate the last piece of cake?"

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The first Website I ever wrote for, when I was 21 years old, was UMagazine.com. It was the official website for U! The National College Magazine, a publication based in Los Angeles that was my first job out of college. This is what the UMagazine.com Webpage looked like in 1997.

(That was my cover story, by the way. Amazingly, you can still read it on archive.org. That cover story is old enough to run for the House of Representatives.)

To load that Webpage, back in 1997, required a huge computer that took up most of your desk, Netscape Navigator and a dial-up connection that worked fine as long as no one called your apartment. I had a computer, but it didn’t connect to the Internet; any time I wrote something, I had to save it to floppy disk, take it to a Web cafe and email it to my editor, who would download it when she checked her email, probably a couple of days later. I’d only had an email address for about a year back then, filmcritic@hotmail.com. I used it to correspond with my friends back in the Midwest, where we’d write each other 2,000 words emails updating each other on everything that had happened the last time we were on email, likely a week or so ago. The tone was often that of a Civil War soldier writing from the battlefield, I pen these words today because I do not know when I will be able to write you again.

And that UMagazine.com Website, put together 27 years ago by a couple of assistant editors studiously plugging in basic HTML, was easier to navigate, simpler to understand and about 4,000 times less infuriating to read than every website we all read on a daily basis in 2024. And it loaded, even with that dialup, about three times as fast.

This morning, I attempted to read a story on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a newspaper Website I pay 15 bucks a month to read increasingly bad news about my favorite baseball team. This is what it looked like:

Two videos pop up and play automatically before I can even scroll down to read the story. The page got stuck twice as I tried to load it, requiring me to hit refresh twice before it asked me to just log in again. Halfway through the story, as I attempted to close two video windows playing two different videos at two different volumes, this “ad” popped up:

And this, as you and the rest of us all know, is the case for nearly every Website on the Internet, and they all get a little bit worse every time you visit them. The unofficial term for this is “enshittification,” invented by the writer (and early Internet maven) Cory Doctorow. His definition of the term that the American Dialect Society called 2023’s “Word of the Year:”

Here is how platforms die: 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 call this enshittification.

Earlier this month, Doctorow, writing in the Financial Times, expanded the canvas on enshittification in a way I think is important and instructive. Doctorow basically makes the argument that, as historical constraints on companies (tech and otherwise) have been lifted or eliminated entirely in recent years, enshittification is coming for everything. It is not just about the Internet anymore: It is about institutions—corporations, sure, but anymore any sort of overarching power structure or expanding organization—ignoring the very idea of quality when it comes to making their strategic decisions. As we see more and more consolidation and “partnerships,” everything—by design—is getting shittier. Things are getting worse because it’s essential to the business plan. Enshittification is simply efficient.

You see it in essentially every field. Obviously, we’ve seen it vividly in media, both online and print, where a company (often private equity; look out, college football) will buy a brand name (Newsweek, Deadspin, your local newspaper), slash its budget, load it up with ugly ads (and debt), milk every penny it can out of the publication’s slow death-spiral inertia and then finally just lay off the entire staff entirely. (This gives them the exit strategy of them gutting a beloved product and then claiming that the reason the publication they just murdered actually fell apart is because of a “changing media industry.”) But it happens everywhere. You know all those 737 Max planes that keep losing their doors mid-flight because there are random bolts floating around? That doesn’t happen because the people making the planes are lazy or stupid. It happens because the Boeing corporation realized two things: 1. The airlines had no choice but to buy their airplanes; and 2. Boeing made more money for its shareholders if it focused more on shaving operating expenses rather than focusing on the built-in (and costly) failsafe redundancies the company had historically used to ensure safety. As James Surowiecki put it in an excellent breakdown in The Atlantic, executives “turned it from a company that was relentlessly focused on product to one more focused on profit.” Boeing recently fired the head of its 737 Max program, but not because of the accidents themselves, or because he hadn’t carried out its exact wishes: It’s because the company’s stock price was plummeting, and they had to scapegoat someone so it would stop.

You see it everywhere, from baseball uniforms to sweaters to airport security to sunscreen to, ominously, Amazon, which, as my New York colleague John Herrman has noted, has a business plan increasingly reliant on trying to encourage you to buy its junkiest products and hide its highest quality ones. And competition won’t help us. The new competition coming from Temu and companies like it, as Herrman also wrote, is accelerating this issue, which is pretty scary when you think about it: Competition was once between companies trying to make a better product. Now it’s about who can make a worse one.

This feels more and more like the late-stage capitalism endgame encircling everything, the get-everything-you-can-while-you-still-can (again, college football pops up) end-of-days mindset combining with the realization that the only real superpower in American life is complete, total shamelessness (which I described in perhaps the only prescient newsletter I’ve ever written) to allow a very small number of people to greatly enrich themselves by forcefeeding the majority of us something that we demonstratively do not want … in the name of efficiency and “scale.” It is the tyranny of the minority, extremists getting what they want simply because they are extremists and therefore, while the rest of us are being normal people trying to live normal lives, wearing us down with their sheer relentlessness.

And that’s what I find most alarming about this: Our collective resignation, the sense that there’s nothing we can do, that we just have to accept it. You see this in all fields too. I wrote a piece many years ago for Deadspin about Guy Fieri and what I called “the tyranny of stupid popular things.” The point of the piece wasn’t that Guy Fieri was a terrible guy. It was that he was so ubiquitous in food culture that the food itself stopped mattering; to point out his food didn’t taste good was somehow snobbish … that we had all started asking so little of the products we are fed and sold that pointing out that they were in fact terrible was somehow churlish, even snobbish. (Like Anthony Bourdain.) Life’s too short … stop complaining … just deal with the terrible food, all that matters anymore is that he’s so good at selling it. The idea that we, as a populace, should hope, even, lo, demand, things to be better is pointless—a waste of energy, even making an unnecessary pest of yourself. It’s better to give up. Nothing’s going to change. Forget it, Jake: It’s Flavortown.

I’m not sure there’s a more vivid illustration of this than the current political climate. There is a small minority of people who want Donald Trump—the man who incited an insurrection, the man who has sexually assaulted multiple women, the man who historians agree was the worst President of all time, the man who drew on a hurricane warning map with a Sharpie and tried to pretend he didn’t, the guy who tore countless families apart, the man with his own Atrocity Key, the man who was told repeatedly not to stare at the eclipse but still stared at the eclipse—to return to the White House. This is not the majority of people; it’s not even close to the majority of people. But it’s still 50-50 odds—at worst—that in 11 months, he’s going to be the President again. (Only worse this time.) This is a five-alarm fire emergency, but this time, unlike 2020, the energy we have to fight him has undeniably waned. As The New York Times put it this week, the resistance is exhausted. Sixty-five percent of Americans use that exact word when asked about the political climate today: Exhausted. I’m not sure there’s a better quote that sums this up, not just with Trump, but with all of it, the enshittification of everything and how we’ve lost the will to fight it anymore, than this, from a woman in that story: “We’re kind of, like, crises-ed out.”

She’s right. Everything now feels like a crisis. Which means now we feel like nothing is. Even if all of it, uh, is.

TRAGEDY IN ATHENS

Photo from The Red & Black, which has done a fantastic job covering this story.

It has been an awful few days in the Athens community in the wake of the murder of a student on Thursday morning. The student was attacked and killed when she was out on her morning run around Lake Herrick, which is less than half a mile from my house. It was the first murder on campus in more than 30 years, and it has left everyone stunned, scared and deeply, deeply sad. It is the sort of crime that strikes at the very heart of what it means to feel safe, here, or anywhere. I cannot fathom what that poor woman’s family is going through. Hug the people close to you, right now if you can.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and the Impending Women’s Sports Explosion, New York. This one turned out exactly the way I wanted it to.

2. MLB Season Preview: Must-See Players on Each Team, MLB.com. I am absolutely addicted to Spring Training videos right now.

3. They Asked Some MLB.com People To Name Their Best Five Players in Baseball, and I Was One of Them, MLB.com. Everybody picked Ronald Acuña Jr. except for me and one other person. (I did have him second.)

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discuss “Madame Web,” “Bob Marley: One Love” and “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I are one week away from weekly shows through the season, but this week, we discuss Nolan Arenado and my worries about the rotation.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Inside Twelve ‘Oppenheimer’ Scenes With Christopher Nolan, Cillian Murphy and the cast and crew,” Tim Grierson, Los Angeles Times. Grierson’s everywhere these days—he’s suddenly writing everything at RogerEbert.com too—and this is a terrific interview with the whole Oppenheimer crew.

Also, this in The Atlantic looks smart and reasonable to me.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers! I am caught up on anything sent in 2023 now, so if you haven’t gotten a response, it got lost, send me another one!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“I Don’t Care (So There),” The Donnas. I’m writing a big car chase scene in the new book this week, and, perhaps surprisingly, The Donnas are an absolutely fantastic background soundtrack. It’s driving, upbeat and fun—like a good car chase!

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

It was the 20th annual Barrow Boogie here in Five Points in this morning, and all four people who live in this house ran in it. There was a time I pushed two of these people in a stroller in this race. Now they’re winning awards.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will