Owning our own data is the only way to stop enshittifcation

It is a familiar pattern. A new website or app arrives that is so good you just have to try it. It’s free, so why not? You and millions of others quickly become hooked, using it every day. But then it starts to change.

Some of your favourite features can now only be used for a fee. Ads start to interfere with your user experience. It’s still the same thing, only now it’s a bit worse, a bit more corporate, a bit less fun.

What has happened, using a term coined by author Cory Doctorow, is “enshittification” (see, Has life today been enshittified? Cory Doctorow’s new book explores). Users are no longer the priority; shareholders are.

The internet is filled with examples of this, so much so that it now defines the story of the web itself. Most of us rely on just a handful of apps and websites owned by tech giants, many of which aren’t quite as good as they once were.

The result, according to Tim Berners-Lee, is that his creation, the World Wide Web, is “as likely to induce anxiety as joy.”

Damning words. But as he explains in ‘Most of it is good’: Tim Berners-Lee on the state of the web now, it doesn’t have to be this way. The problem is that we don’t control our own data. We give it up to tech companies. Leaving is hard; if you do, you lose that data.

His solution is something called a data pod. Whenever you generate personal data, it goes into the pod. You can then share this whenever you want, with whomever you want, but you can just as quickly revoke sharing permissions and take your data elsewhere.

Data pods would certainly make it easier to ditch tech companies that go down the enshittification route. Rather than being locked in, you could leave and simply bring all your data with you. A stick in the hands of users, to balance the carrot of shareholder profit.

But how to introduce such a thing? Berners-Lee thinks that a critical mass of early adopters will eventually be able to demand it, but tech companies are unlikely to voluntarily give up some of their control. That leaves the state. With governments increasingly looking at ways to reduce the power of the big tech firms, forcing them to hand back control of our data would be a good start.