In a previous blog we introduced Cory Doctorow’s concept of ‘enshittification’ to capture some of our concerns with the ways that social, cultural, economic and political processes appear to be increasingly characterised by various forms of racism, misogyny, the demonisation of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), gender and sexual fundamentalism, white nationalism, proto-fascist, totalitarian, ‘strong man’ politics, and denials of the climate crisis and mass extinctions associated with crises in the dominant model of neoliberal global capitalism.
In these contexts, we are exploring what it means to do the difficult work of developing critical forms of public pedagogy that can create and address ‘publics’ or audiences – particularly as they can inform what we can imagine as regenerative and just futures for different groups of young people in different places.
In this blog we want to take a deeper dive into what this metaphor offers for thinking about a range of things beyond Doctorow’s original coining of the term.
To recap, in a commentary in The Guardian Tory Shepherd provided a useful way of illustrating what Doctorow had in mind in coining this term:
Think Twitter, a once useful and often fun microblogging site twisted by a tech bro into X, a post-truth swamp.
Or Facebook, where you’re now more likely to be presented with crocheted arseless chaps from Shein than a humblebrag from a dear friend.
Or Instagram, where cute dog videos once reigned. Now, yet another unfathomable algorithm serves up a diet of tradwives, gym bros and uwu girls.
The Enshittification of…Politics
The idea has been taken up, translated and used by a number of others to capture what it is that they see as being the corruption, decay and dysfunction of many aspects of public, social, cultural, economic and democratic practices and processes in the high-income economies of the OECD and EU. Though many of my colleagues from Pakistan, for example, see little that is ‘strange’ to them when they compare our concerns with much of what they understand as governance and social, cultural, economic and political practices and processes in the history of postcolonial Pakistan.
However, in The Enshittification of Government Christian Sarkar (2025) argues that we should apply the idea ‘more broadly to institutions – like governments, think tanks, universities, and even non-profits’. For Sarkar:
The enshittification of government refers to the decay of government systems and institutions that were originally designed to serve the Common Good. Over time, they become corrupted, dysfunctional, and, in many cases, exploitative — benefiting a small elite while abandoning the needs of the public.
Sarkar identifies 9 key elements of the enshittification of government in the liberal democracies – with an unacknowledged focus on the US context. Briefly, these include:
- Elite Capture: The Interests of the Few Over the Many
Governments, over time, become tools for special interests and powerful corporations, pushing the agenda of the wealthy few…
- The Erosion of Trust: Government as a Legitimacy Crisis
When people can no longer trust that their leaders are acting in their best interests, the very legitimacy of the system is undermined…When trust falters, so does democracy…
- Short-Termism: The End of Long-Term Thinking
Enshittification thrives on short-term political gains — policies that win elections but sow the seeds of future crises. Politicians prioritize immediate re-election over long-term sustainability…
- Inequitable Resource Distribution: Wealth in the Hands of the Few
A central tenet of the enshittification process is the concentration of wealth and resources. Governments begin to act as tools for the elite…while essential services like healthcare, education, and welfare are neglected…
- Decreased Accountability: A Government That No Longer Serves the People
As governments become less accountable, their legitimacy erodes. This is evident in corruption, lack of transparency, and the weakening of independent institutions designed to hold the powerful to account…
- Suppression of Dissent: The Erosion of Democracy
Governments that descend into enshittification often resort to authoritarian measures. Dissent is suppressed, and freedoms are curtailed. The right to protest, to speak freely, and to assemble is threatened…
- The Broken Social Contract
At the heart of the enshittification of government is the breakdown of the social contract— the idea that citizens agree to follow the law in exchange for protection, justice, and the advancement of the Common Good…A broken contract…leads to populism, violence, and social unrest.
- Global Implications: A Disconnect from Global Standards
Governments that fail to protect the most vulnerable…are disconnected from the global conversation on climate change, social justice, and human dignity…
- The Rise of Authoritarianism: Dictators, Thugs, and Tyrants
The enshittification of government leads to the rise of strongmen– people who promise to fix things and in the process take over the government…and can lead to the rise of extremist political movements or authoritarian regimes…
In his Substack ‘The Future of Everything’ Tim Dalton (2025) picks up on a number of these themes in The enshittification of Australian democracy. In echoing many of Sarkar’s concerns, Dalton focuses on recent legislative changes to Federal campaign financing regulations in Australia which, he claims, seek to reinforce the two-party duopoly that characterises political systems in Australia, and in many of the high-income liberal democracies.
I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but it is clear something similar is happening in our political sphere. Political parties form, in the first place, to aggregate and represent particular sections of the community, and they compete against each for our vote. There is always room for other players, including smaller parties and independents, but in most countries that democratic practice is gradually diminished as parliaments and congresses consolidate into either a straight two-party arrangement (literally two parties) or, as in Australia, the formation of two major blocks that act as a two-party system.
It should be remembered that a two party duopoly is one party away from a one party, totalitarian state. The idea, promise and practice of democracy exists on a knife-edge in many contexts that love to congratulate themselves as being ‘free’ and ‘democratic’.
Dalton argues that in these duopolies:
Once that two-party dominance is normalised, the stage is set for the sort of platform decay that is currently threatening Australia, which manifests in the sidelining of the common good in favour of consolidation of the power of special interests that major parties come to represent.
As he describes this duopoly and its impacts on our lives, and what we understand as democracy, freedom, the common good, and – often very narrowly – ‘self-interest’, Dalton suggests that:
It is actually worse than enshittification.
We aren’t just talking about some social media platform that delivers a degraded experience online; we are talking the entire operating system of our nation, and this new legislation is designed to undermine the democratic wishes of a significant section of the country.
There are many useful things in Sarkar and Dalton’s identification of the enshittification of the institutions, systems, agencies, processes and practices that seek to govern and manage the diverse problems and challenges that shape the lives of billions at the start of the 2nd quarter of the 21st century.
Of course, the disciplines of political science and political sociology would approach the history and contemporary practice of liberal democracies, and the challenges and opportunities, the limits and possibilities of government of the people, by the people, for the people from a diversity of perspectives. They would, likely, provide further detail and complexity to how we might understand the electoral success of Trump and the Republicans in the US elections of November 2024.
Why Enshittification Then?
In Australian English we have a variety of terms that suggest why ‘enshittification’ captures something productive about the zeitgeist.
I feel shit!
Things have gone to shit!
That’s bullshit!
At the same time, we acknowledge that the concept does not provide a theoretical or methodological framework in and of itself.
What is of interest to us at this stage is how we can use aspects of the concept to connect to the work we are concerned with in the Young People’s Sustainable Futures Lab.
A sense of why this is important is indicated by the following two stories that we want to explore in greater detail in the coming months.
The Battle for the Bros. Young men have gone maga. Can the left win them back?
From The New Yorker
In last year’s Presidential election, Democrats lost support with nearly every kind of voter…But the defection that alarmed Party strategists the most was that of young voters, especially young men, a group that Donald Trump lost by fifteen points in 2020 and won by fourteen points in 2024—a nearly thirty-point swing. “The only cohort of men that Biden won in 2020 was eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds,” John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a former adviser to Biden’s Presidential campaign, told me. “That was the one cohort they had to hold on to, and they let it go.”
Candidates matter; so does the national mood, and the price of groceries. Yet some Monday-morning quarterbacks also noted that, just as 1960 was the first TV election and 2016 was the first social-media election, the 2024 Presidential campaign was the first to be conducted largely on live streams and long-form podcasts, media that happen to be thoroughly dominated by maga bros. The biggest of them all, Joe Rogan, spent the final weeks of the campaign giving many hours of fawning airtime to Trump—and to his running mate, J.D. Vance, and his key allies, such as Elon Musk—before endorsing Trump on the eve of the election.
Adolescence
From The Guardian
The arrival of searing new series Adolescence could hardly be more timely. The drama dropped on Netflix just as it emerged that crossbow killer Kyle Clifford had searched online for misogynistic podcasts and watched Andrew Tate videos hours before murdering three female members of the Hunt family. Then again, such stories hit headlines with depressing regularity. Perhaps Adolescence would have felt unnervingly on-the-nose whenever it launched.
Adolescence lays bare how an outwardly normal but inwardly self-loathing and susceptible youngster can be radicalised without anyone noticing. His parents recall Jamie coming home from school, heading straight upstairs, slamming his bedroom door and spending hours at his computer. They thought he was safe. They thought they were doing the right thing. It’s a scenario which will ring bells with many parents. Some will be alarm bells.
We take pains to teach them how to cross roads and not talk to strangers. We rarely teach them how to navigate the internet. There is often a glaring gap between parents’ blissfully ignorant image of their children’s lives and the truth of what they get up to online. We think they’re playing Roblox but they’re actually on Reddit. We think they’re doing homework or innocently texting mates. They are watching pornography or, as DS Frank pithily puts it, “that Andrew Tate shite”.