The Relentless, Eroding Death-Spiral Efficiency of Enshittification
Everything’s getting worse, by design.
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…
