The Enshittification of Netflix

Netflix's DVDs-by-mail service is coming to an end.

Many people out there have reacted to this news by going, "That still exists?" Well yes, it does. I am the last man alive with a Netflix DVD-by-mail account.

My roommate and I first subscribed to Netflix when we were in college. We went in on an account together, and because it was two-at-a-time, we alternated who put what in the queue. He was usually busy over the summer, so over the summer it was all mine: I would binge my way through shows like Veronica Mars and Jeeves and Wooster and The Last Detective and Seven Up. I think it came to an end when I moved in with my parents after college—and soon, of course, Netflix got into the streaming business.

A decade later, shortly after my wife and I moved to Florida, I picked up a subscription again. There's just lots of stuff that is hard to find streaming, or you have to pay money to stream it. Right now the next ten films on my queue are GoldenEye, Be Kind Rewind, the reboot Planet of the Apes trilogy, The Thin Man, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Mouse That Roared, TiMER, and Lady Bird. None of these are available on Netflix streaming. All but one are on Amazon Prime streaming, but all are movies you have to pay $3-4 to rent; we pay $5 per month to get two DVDs a month, so we come out ahead. TiMER doesn't seem to be on any streaming service at all!

Not sure where its red envelope is, to be honest...

Also I am honestly pretty bad about watching movies, so having a physical DVD sitting in front of my tv is a good spur to action. (That said, don't ask me how long my Netflix copy of Logan has been sitting there. I definitely would have saved money if I'd just bought it.)

I listened to an episode of WNYC's podcast On the Media last week where they interviewed Cory Doctorow about a process he calls "enshittification." It's worth a listen, or if you prefer to read, Doctorow explains it in detail in a blog post. Basically it goes like this:

1. A new platform debuts on the Internet and does something no one else does, and does it really well and gives the user something they needs.
2. Having locked people in, the new platform then makes things worse for users by selling access to the platform to other businesses. Those businesses have to come because it's where the users are, and the user experience gets worse but the businesses benefit.
3. Then once the businesses are all there, they get locked in, and now all the benefit accrues to the platform itself... but the thing that initially attracted the user is much worse than it once was.

It's a process Doctorow and host Brooke Gladstone trace across a number of platforms: Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter. At first Amazon is great, but now it's not... but where else will you go? Facebook was once an essential part of our social lives, but I have basically given up on. Like, I read it everyday still, but there's not much to read, and I've stopped posting because it's clear to me no one else reads what I post. Is that because the algorithm hides it from them or because there's just no one there to read it? Either way, what's the point?

I've been mulling over enshittification a lot since first hearing about it, because it really speaks to my experience as an adult Millennial. It seems to me everything has gotten worse and has made everything else worse. I miss LiveJournal, you know? Where on the Internet of 2023 can you get that sense of community and intimacy? But there was no way to make money from it. LJ gave way to FB which gave way to Twitter which is turning into a platform for white nationalists and contributed directly to the erosion of American democracy. But we were all complicit in this, we all left LiveJournal. Well, or rather as Doctorow explains, Facebook made things easy for us to encourage transition, and then got us all on board, made itself worse.

It dawned on me that the end of Netflix was a clear example of enshittification, and indeed, Doctorow actually discusses this in a Twitter thread. Netflix gave us something no one else has: easy renting, unlimited access to anything that was on DVD. You could easily watch any movie or tv show you wanted on Netflix in the 2000s. But because we all went to Netflix, the video store died, and because we were all on Netflix, they came up with streaming, and because streaming worked out for them, everyone went in on it. And now you can't easily watch any movie or tv show you want: there's no video store, there all on different streaming services, many of them aren't ever even released on DVD anymore, and now as the streaming market collapses, many of them are vanishing from streaming as well. We as consumers made a series of fairly rational choices, and probably the businesses did too in their own way, but I would argue that now we are all worse off.

Enshittification.