What happens when we stop caring?

Thoughts on the enshittification of the world

This is not a post about the tech industry. However, I have been thinking a lot lately about an experience I have had a few times, and it usually goes something like this.

You join a company that has a culture you genuinely like, and you think you will be happy there for at least a few years. After a year, company leadership cuts out the all-company retreat, and you no longer get to know your coworkers in person. (The executive retreat in Hawaii is miraculously unaffected, however.) Open enrollment comes around, and you learn that your health insurance plan has been downgraded from Blue Cross to United Health Care. Suddenly, your medical coverage has changed, or you need to go through a frustrating pre-approval process to get the same care you were getting before. The promotion process is “streamlined,” but in practice, it is even more convoluted and difficult to navigate than it was before. Your workload starts ticking up as people are leaving, and their roles are not being filled. If you work in a client-facing role like I did, your clients seem to get more out-of-touch and demanding every year as your sales and management team gets less picky about who they will sign on to work with.

Over time, the culture you came for is lost, and it feels like you’re working for an entirely different company than the one you joined in the first place. This is the enshittification¹ of the workplace.

This can happen even when things are going well financially because the demands of constant revenue growth in the capitalist system mean squeezing more and more value out of the same employees every single year, even when your business is good. If the slow enshittification doesn’t cause the good employees to check out or quit, the layoffs and acquisitions and endless restructuring that come next definitely will.

One day, you look around, and nobody around you cares anymore. Nobody is planning lunch dates. Nobody is mentoring the junior employees. Nobody is giving talks or participating in company events. Nobody is picking up the slack while you’re on vacation, so you come back to a pile of urgent requests and an aggravated project manager. If someone on your team is dealing with discrimination or unfair treatment, nobody says anything about it. We all become so de-sensitized and focused on the work of not caring that we forget about the people around us.

This process isn’t “efficient” and doesn’t “drive productivity.” In fact, I have seen multiple good and profitable companies go under because of this pursuit of endless cost-cutting.

Photo by Jonathan Lusilva: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-pot-with-wilted-flowers-14345269/

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My friend Hannah works for the U.S. State Department, and she sent me a copy of the email she received from Elon Musk’s team. It was a Q&A about the (questionably legal) deferred resignation program, where they were pressuring federal workers to accept a “buyout”² in exchange for resigning from their jobs.

She was particularly incensed about this part of the email, which encouraged federal workers to leave their “lower productivity” jobs and pursue “higher productivity” roles in the public sector.

Q: Am I allowed to get a second job during the deferred resignation period?

A: Absolutely! We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so. The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.

Anyone who has worked for the private sector would find this sentiment laughable if it were not being sold as the truth. If the book Bullshit Jobs has taught us anything, it is that the pressures of capitalism do not automatically create a “high productivity” workforce.

However, when Hannah tells me about her coworkers (both at the State Department and in her previous role in FEMA), she describes people who care. She describes people who have jumped through all the hoops necessary to get and maintain government clearance so they can keep doing their jobs. She describes people who have turned down the opportunity to work in higher-paying private sector roles because they want to work in a place where they can do good for other people. Are there inefficiencies? Sure. But in general, there is important work to do, and people care about doing it.

In fact, they care so much that only about 3% of workers accepted the “buyout”. Federal workers who took an oath to serve the American people are rallying to hold the line in the face of endless bullshit. 22-year-old tech dudes are showing up to their meetings and asking them to explain the purpose of their own jobs, and they are still showing up. Their data has been leaked, and they are getting threatening spam emails from random strangers in their work inboxes, and they are still showing up. Just this week, Elon Musk sent out another email asking workers to send him a report on their work or resign, and they are still showing up. Unfortunately, a lot of people are being laid off because the destruction of the American civil service was never intended to be voluntary.

After all is said and done, government workers will still exist in some capacity, but they will be more burned out, disillusioned, and uncaring. Anne Helen Peterson writes about this, comparing what is happening to federal workers today to what has already happened to teachers, journalists, and other workers who are generally passionate about their work.

So why have teaching and so many other federal jobs remained tenable when journalism and the vast majority of the arts have not? Public funding and unions. Get rid of the public funding, defang the unions, and these jobs become the new journalism and career non-profit work: available only to a select few who can shoulder the costs, which means they’re usually privileged, usually partnered, and equipped with private personal safety nets.

When that sort of change occurs across an industry, you don’t just change who can do the work, but the character of the work itself. And when a civilization is limited to work that produces profit, we don’t just lose the artistry and texture of everyday life. We distance ourselves from the values of care and generosity — and the simple but profound belief that what happens to one of us affects all of us. We become further atomized, cruel, and careless with others, incapable of planning any further than our own lifetimes. We fall out of love with the world.

We fall out of love with the world. This is one of those phrases that feels so profoundly true to my experience that it has been stuck in my head since I first read it.

Despite all the claims that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is making, cutting back public sector jobs and moving more responsibilities to the private sector doesn’t make us more “efficient.” The enshittification is the point. Stripping government agencies of their resources and mining government data is intended to further destabilize our democracy and sow chaos. Maybe if we are all arguing with each other about government efficiency, we will stop noticing the Nazi salutes.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m falling out of love with the world. I’m having a hard time waking up every day and trying to get on with my life when 77 million fellow Americans voted for this kind of chaotic evil. I have a three-month-old baby, and these days, I think a lot about the poem Good Bones, which says:

Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world.

Once she is old enough to know, how will I sell her this world?

The only thing I know to do is to push back on the systems that lead us to stop caring about one another. I am trying to show up and fight the despair that tells me to check out and stop paying attention. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to convince her that life is better without USAID, Medicaid, and adequately funded national parks, but I can introduce her to the people who care enough about these things to show up together and protest.

It’s not enough. It’s so far from enough. But if showing up and offering to help in whatever small way I can is the best way to care about other people today, I will keep showing up, and I hope you will show up with me.

1. Enshittification is a term first coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the way that online platforms and services decay over time.

2. I am putting the term “buyout” in quotes because we are hearing reports that federal workers who accepted the deferred resignation program are being terminated without severance anyway.