Encitification

[Meta: now that I’ve departed Facebook, I’ve (slightly) lowered the bar for what I consider worth sending out through Substack; some of the longer and more philosophical things that were previously my longest FB posts will now become my shortest Substack posts.]

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“Enshittification” is the term for how social media platforms and other excellent services degrade over time as they follow incentives down into … well, shittiness.

Facebook (for example) discovers that it can earn more revenue if it provides a lower-grade service that reaches more people and farms more ad-clicks, and so Facebook becomes worse.

I’m going to piggyback off of that to introduce the term “encitification.”

Encitification (en-city-fication) is the vector that points from the rural, pastoral existence to the modern, urbanized existence. It includes trends like:

• Being surrounded by more people more of the time, but knowing fewer of them, and knowing many of the ones you do know less well

• Having access to more technology, but also more pollution (both literal and metaphorical, as in “light pollution” and “noise pollution”)

• Having a higher ceiling on how awesome and transcendental your best experiences can be, while also having a lower floor on how crummy your most common everyday experience can be (think about the life of a cubicle worker who can afford to go on really excellent vacations once or twice a year but whose average day sucks pretty hard)

I’m making a pretty strong claim about encitification in the above—that it’s sort of inextricably good-and-bad-at-once. I model “progress” in the sense that Western civilization uses the term as looking basically like:

…in essence, every step between [the way we used to do things] and [the way we do things now] came along with increases in both awesomeness and awfulness.

Furthermore, as far as I can tell, roughly every step came along with an increasing gap between how awesome and how awful. This is basically what you’d expect, in order for progress to be incentivizing, and for people to keep doing it; the reason people want more of the-thing-called-progress is because it keeps seeming like a good idea. Every local decision is sound, and reasonable, and defensible—“would you like to make thing X much better, even if it will predictably make thing Y somewhat worse?”

The hidden, underlying assumption of encitification: as long as the delta between good and bad keeps growing, there’s no amount of total badness that makes the whole proposition a bad idea.

How much (of the bad stuff) is too much? Nobody really knows. And we’re not really slowing down to find out. We keep accelerating in the “city” direction (especially in the digital realm, where social media continues to become more and more powerful and a larger and larger share of where our attention is spent and where the actual “living” of our lives plays out).

I like the term “encitification” because its very nature promotes the question to attention. Facebook and Twitter enshittified pretty hard, and are plausibly just now realizing that they breached the trust thermocline and won’t be able to claw their way back (although possibly they screeched to a halt just shy of it).

It seems to me that there is probably a too-much limit for healthy, happy humans on any of the many axes that I’m collapsing under encitification. There is probably such a thing as too much noise. There is probably such a thing as too many strangers in too-close proximity. There is probably such a thing as too much exposure to an attention economy that wants you to behave as much like a consumer and creator of content as possible, even though in strict evolutionary terms “consuming and creating content” is probably supposed to be a pretty small fraction of how a healthy, happy human spends their waking hours.

(Analogy: there is probably such a thing as too much delicious food, in that it’s easiest to create extremely superstimulatingly delicious food with ingredients that are not, in fact, good for you!)

(Analogy extended: it’s also possible to correct for the drawbacks of extremely superstimulatingly delicious food; we can in fact make healthy versions of extremely superstimulatingly delicious food, with enough work. Yesterday’s Y-that-got-worse is often tomorrow’s X-that’s-being-made-better, as was the case with industrial pollution. But it takes more time and effort and care to do the better version. You need a higher level of technology and a higher expenditure of attention. It’s usually easier and more lucrative to just take the next step along the deliciousness axis than to slow down and figure out how to filter out or fully compensate for the badness.)

Encitification does sometimes entail slowing down and figuring out the badness. Often the solution to the problem of today’s technology is tomorrow’s technology; cities are in fact much cleaner than they used to be and that’s in part thanks to more progress. c.f. drastically reduced rates of death-in-childbirth or death-before-age-five, or things like “most people don’t have to perform literally backbreaking labor 17 hours per day 7 days per week, which is a thing people did have to do for a while back in the day.”

(Although that was also the result of encitification! Stuff is complicated.)

Taking the next individual step in the “city” direction is almost always a clearly good idea, and the main thing is zooming out to ask “ah, but is it Molochian on large scales, though?”

Or, to put it another way: Is it enough?

Are we filtering out the badness fast enough, relative to how quickly we take each next step (a process that is only accelerating)?

I think the answer is “probably not,” and that even if we set aside concerns about technologies that are likely to bring about literal extinction, we’ve still got A Really Big Problem, Actually.

(For more on that, watch this entire video. Yes, I know it’s 2.5 hours long. I’ve watched it five times through anyway.)

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That’s it for this one. As I mentioned above, this is a new type of essay I haven’t previously Substack’d before. This sort of thing will not replace the longer, more in-depth explorations, just supplement them. I’m curious (if you feel like dropping a comment) to know what your experience of “Duncan goes much faster and says things without as much background and explanation and justification” was like in this case; I could have fleshed this out into a Full Duncan Essay in the more usual style, but my guess was it was stronger/better in this more approximate form.

See you soon,
- Me

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