I had heard of the memorable term “enshittification,” which describes how platforms or services that had previously been functioning smoothly and effectively are gutted, made less useful, or simply shut down. One example is Microsoft shutting down Skype; another is the obvious way that google searches have become crappier while pushing up results that are attempting to sell me something even when my attempted internet search is completely unrelated to purchasing anything. In the US, the postmaster appointed by a president with a lot of threads about him on this site systematically removed letter collection boxes to make using the USPS more challenging. Enshittification: perhaps the key term to understand life in the 2020s.
Hold on, not so fast. I have now come across a related term: sludge. In the context of North America (that is why I have placed this topic in “Greater Forumosa”), “sludge” refers to a corporate and/or bureaucratic strategy that, as Chris Colin at the Atlantic puts it, “leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen.” Hellish mazes of calls, dropped calls, emails, chat boxes, referrals, promises to call back, starting all over again . . . all intended to make people give up and/or say Fuck it. Sludge is not based on incompetent individuals or mismanaged bureacracies; it is a carefully calibrated and engineered corporate stategy that has taken hold across a range of industries, especially in North America. Personally speaking, it’s such a pleasure dealing with businesses in Japan compared to dealing with this soul-destroying trend.
For forumosans interested in reading more, the aforementioned Chris Colins has this great piece in the Atlantic as he tracks a maddening experience dealing with the Ford Motor Company in the US while figuring out he’s not alone. It’s a great read, and cements my hope that North American corporate culture never takes hold here in East Asia.
This is nothing new. Though the technologies may evolve, businesses, and especially bureaucracies, have always been in the business of providing shitty service.
Hospital phone trees (any doctor’s clinic really), WIC and SNAP programs, Comcast (now known as Spectrum), Waste Management, Compaq Tech Support, HP Tech Support, Wells Fargo Customer Service [driving to the branch location 45 minutes away was still faster than waiting on the phone], Medicaid, Medicare, IRS, and most infamously Social Security (a record 3 hour hold for me waiting for the operator to “get back to you in a minute or two").
Then add the frustration of an outsourced operator who - despite best attempts - I could not understand and ended up just hanging up and trying again with another operator.
Companies are doing what they should be doing: cut costs and maximize profits. Squeeze the customer dry, so the S&P500 index goes up. The investor class gets a nice 1099 or K-1 tax form.
Now, the government is supposed to step in and protect “the people” from the above companies via regulation.
But the problems: (1) those same companies bought out the politicians, and (2) the people are not voting with their wallets (and apparently, nor with their political ballots).
More like the regulations that are implemented intentionally raise the bar for smaller companies that don’t have the cash to compete, but big box mart can pay the licensing and regulatory fee schemes just fine.
Is Yahoo messenger still going ? I thought it was excellent, I got no bugs and it worked well. The Yahoo chat was fun , anyone old enough to remember that ?
So good that it didn’t make enough money for the owners
Anybody remember when Google search came? It was awesome and their mission was to deliver a search free from algorithms steering the content, the pure search engine … Until they got enough customers so they found and used every way to make cash
Google search has clearly become shittier, sending me recommendations that are clearly not what I asked for, and burying what I asked for.
I’ve heard duckduckgo is an improvement. It seems to provide a richer and more helpful set of results—at least, one presumes, until google purchases it to effectively shut it down.
Google reminder: using https://udm14.com instead gives you Google disenshittified, with AI stripped away. It’s like Google, oh, six or seven years ago.
… Until they got enough customers so they found and used every way to make cash 
