Bevlin Blog

If you’ve ever looked at your phone—or your laptop, or whatever allegedly “smart” device you happened to be using—and wished that things were how they used to be, you certainly aren’t alone. You aren’t imagining things, either… this perception of the products and services we rely on getting worse over time is widespread enough to have its own term, which has expanded beyond its social media-specific origins to all technologies, regardless of whether it's hardware or software. This term was actually named to be 2023’s Word of the Year (per the American Dialect Society), beating “AI” in relevance.

That word? Enshittification, as coined by tech critic and author Cory Doctorow. Let’s explore the concept and what it inevitably leads to.

Ah, the Internet. Connectivity issues aside, it’s a wonderful tool that helps you get more work done. But what happens when those connectivity issues do cause problems for your business? What if you have a strong signal, but you keep getting booted from your virtual meetings for seemingly no reason?

You’ve likely felt it: that uncanny sense that your phone is eavesdropping or that the Internet is feeding you exactly what you love and everything you hate. We call it the Algorithm; the thing that decides what we see, who we talk to, and what we believe.

The algorithm isn't a single entity; it’s a hyper-focused, data-driven librarian with one specific goal: to keep you engaged longer and longer so the company can make more money. By treating your attention as a currency, platforms have built sophisticated engines that don’t just show you content; they predict your future behavior. Here is how the world’s biggest digital companies are shaping your worldview.

Tell me if this has ever happened to you: you invest in a high-priced technology solution, only to find that the solution isn’t what your business needs. The technology is effectively a “lemon,” where it costs your business a lot of money without any real return on the investment. This sometimes happens when you use technology to fix a short-term problem without a clear long-term strategy; you lose money and productivity due to incompatibility issues, and without a strategic roadmap to move forward, you’re left wondering where you’ve gone wrong.

Remember Tay? Microsoft's 2016 AI chatbot that the internet turned into a wildly offensive, racist mess in just 16 hours? It was a spectacular, public failure that proved one thing: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Today, the garbage isn't just on Twitter. It's the highly sensitive, proprietary data your own employees are accidentally leaking into the public domain.