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Hey fam: I’ve been noodling on this idea for a while and wanted to share it with everyone, so this is unlocked and free.
If you find value in this sort of deep thinking, I hope you’ll consider joining Bulwark+ to support what we do here. I try to use different lenses to understand the world in an attempt to help you see around corners.
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1. We’ve Got Spirit
Last week on Receipts Live with Catherine Rampell I said I was glad that Spirit Airlines was dead.
Let me clarify.
I don’t like it when people lose their jobs, so I’m sorry that the people employed by Spirit are out of work. But I’m happy that the corporate entity that was Spirit is gone.
Because Spirit sucked balls. And when a terrible company goes out of business, it’s a sign that the marketplace determined it wouldn’t tolerate their suckiness.
And I find that . . . hopeful? For America?
Today we’re going to have a high-concept conversation about business and airlines and tech companies and entropy and liberal democracy. It’s going to be a journey. I hope you’ll take the ride with me.
A few years back Cory Doctorow proposed the theory of “enshittification” to describe how Amazon had become significantly worse:
In Bezos's original plan, the company called “Amazon” was called “Relentless,” due to its ambition to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Today, Amazon is an enshittified endless scroll of paid results, where winning depends on ad budgets, not quality. . . .
Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads. One of them is an ad for a dog carrier, which Amazon itself manufactures and sells, competing with the other sellers who bought that placement.
Scroll down one screen and you get some “organic” results – that is, results that represent Amazon’s best guess at the best products for your query. Scroll once more and yup, another entire screen of ads, these ones labeled “Highly rated.” One more scroll, and another screenful of ads, one for a dog product.
Keep scrolling, you’ll keep seeing ads, including ads you’ve already scrolled past. “On these first five screens, more than 50 percent of the space was dedicated to ads and Amazon touting its own products.”¹ . . .
How did we get here?
The answer, Doctorow proposed, was that Amazon had built a $31 billion ad business inside its own retail platform. The incentives for Amazon went from “give customers the most helpful results so they’ll buy the most stuff” to “sell as many ads against products as customers will tolerate so that:
[ad sales profits] > [retail sales losses from abandoned searches]
Amazon got shitty because it got so big that it achieved both monopoly and monopsony powers: It had control over both buyers and sellers. Which allowed it to start extracting rents from each.
Which made Amazon worse, but also made it lots more money. When a platform is no longer beholden to either side of the transaction, the incentives change. Instead of aiming high to deliver better products, the platform aims low to find the worst pain threshold users will tolerate.
Doctorow expanded his thesis to describe how enshittification was eating the entire tech world and would go on to eat the rest of the world, too. Here he is in the Financial Times in 2024 inching toward a Grand Theory of Enshittification:
We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying. . . .
It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.
Spirit Airlines was not a tech company and it did not have a monopoly. But it was a company driven by the ethos of enshittification. Spirit’s business model was:
How much crap can we force customers to put up with before they are so annoyed that they pay us more money?
I am a fan of no-frills, discount air carriers. Southwest has been, for decades, one of the best airlines in the business. But Southwest’s strategy has always been:
How do we deliver the best-possible service for the lowest-possible price?
Spirit went out of its way to make the customer experience worse, hoping to inconvenience customers so much that they could upsell remedies—hiding the true cost of a ticket. Spirit’s secret sauce was disguising rotten apples as oranges to confuse shoppers.
This was an attempt to enshittify air travel. So yeah, I’m glad Spirit is gone. Because it’s a signal to other companies that, at least in the air-travel market, consumers still have the power to reject—and defeat—enshittification.