The enshittification of API conferences
Lately, I’ve been getting this feeling that API-related conference talks are mostly sales pitches. Many talks I listen to are about some new product that’s going to solve a new problem that doesn’t exist yet. Sometimes the presenter even tries to create a sense of urgency by showing there’s an imminent danger on the horizon. And their product will fight that urgent danger and fix things for you. Where’s the innovation, the collaboration between adjacent disciplines? Where are the new ideas being shared and discussed, the demos of unthinkable new prototypes? Instead, there seems to be an urgency to make money and sell. At all costs. Is this the enshittification of API conferences? It looks like we’re in stage 2 now, where “they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.”1
Cory Doctorow popularized the term enshittification in 2022, referring to a “process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time” (Wikipedia, Enshittification). According to Doctorow, enshittification consists of three stages: “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 to themselves.” (Cory Doctorow, “My McLuhan lecture on enshittification,” January 2024.) ↩︎