The Festive Period is a Reminder that Enshittification is Inevitable – But There is Hope

Just for a moment, the vicar became the embodiment of that most useful of recently coined words: enshittification. This normally excellent woman, who runs her numerous parishes with passion and aplomb, had donned a squishy poo emoji hat. She stood within the nave of her 800 year-old church, next to the Advent candle, with a brown coiled fake turd on her head. The enshittified vicar explained to the congregation that the message of Christmas is that God visits us in our “poo-ey lives”. Like the Christ child in the “poo-ey stable”, God becomes manifest in our stinking world. The congregation looked ahead glassily. Perhaps somewhere deep in the recesses of the collective unconsciousness, they knew that sermons, the church, Christianity, vicars, hadn’t always been this way, that there had once been a reverent majesty to a Christmas carol service. Thankfully the sermon ended, she took off her scat hat, and everyone sang the remainder of the carols with gusto.

This primary school level of Church of England sermonising, on the one day of the year when the church was full to bursting, is not the only aspect of Christmas that has been enshittified. Though petty – it was only a hat – she was trying to make a joke, I think – this and other small degradations add up to incrementally wither the glory of Christmas. Festive corruptions include:

• The barcode on stamps
• The plastic tat of a once enticing tin of Quality Streets
• The persistent inability of Evri to deliver the correct parcels to the correct houses
• The shrinkflation of selection boxes and the chocolates therein
• Ugly ad hoardings around town Christmas trees
• The disappearance of fortune-telling-fish and jumping frogs from crackers

And significantly less petty:

• Anti-terrorism barricades at Christmas markets

Whether caused by profit margins, greed, carelessness, misplaced care, ease or accessibility, decisions made initially to improve things inevitably lead to enshittification. Indeed, Plato warned millennia ago that the material world, including societies and peoples, is inherently unstable and subject to flux and decay. In The Republic he outlines how even the most perfect of city states will change and decay:

Hard in truth it is for a state thus constituted to be shaken and disturbed; but since for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved.

 Of men themselves he writes:

Of such offspring the previous generation will establish the best, to be sure, in office, but still these, being unworthy, and having entered in turn into the powers of their fathers, will first as guardians begin to neglect us, paying too little heed to music and then to gymnastics, so that our young men will deteriorate in their culture.

Whether it’s graffiti on the Tube, the impossibility of using Google, ads on Amazon Prime, illegal migrant hotels, online tutorials at once great universities, digital menus at once cosy pubs, ‘verifying you’re human’ pages, chatbots, shabby high streets, CCTV everywhere, the elevation of Bonnie Blue to a political commentator, self-checkout tills, men spitting and shitting in public, and literal sewage spills, the enshittification of Britain is all around us.

For those of a non-progressive outlook, none of this should be a surprise. The instinct to conserve things that are good is a straightforward recognition that without strenuous effort, societies, institutions and the common culture are all subject to the law of entropy. Plato’s answer to all of this was to look instead to the immutable abstract Forms. Concepts of beauty, justice and goodness are only perfect in abstract form, with the physical approximations on earth inevitably flawed and subject to decay. The highest of these forms is the Good, that illuminates the intelligent world: “That which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower is what I would have you term the idea of Good.”

Various politicians cleave to others forms of abstract truth. For Starmer and gang, it’s international law. For the Greens, it’s Marxism. And so on.

During this Christmas season, it’s the perfect time for we sceptics to contemplate the foundations on which we seek to find firmness, when all else corrupts. Scepticism derives from the Ancient Greek skepsis – to enquire. If nothing else, we shall at least keep on inquiring. For me I’m rather partial to Lancelot Andrewe’s Christmas sermon where he mentions faith as “the star rising in our hearts”. Though he helped translate the King James’s Bible, he too wore a silly hat!

Merry Christmas.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.