The Internet Ate Everything

Enshittification. Flattening culture. Limes. An Interview with Drew Austin.

This interview with Drew Austin, urban planner and author of a weekly newsletter called Kneeling Bus, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro.

My name is Drew Austin. I live in Brooklyn. I'm a freelance writer. I've had this Substack, Kneeling Bus since 2017 – before that, I had been blogging on the side, really for sort of my whole adult life. My background is in urban planning. I worked in a variety of transportation-related jobs until I switched over to writing. My main interest has evolved into how cities and the internet affect each other; how we all live in both physical and digital space and what that means for culture as well as for us as individuals. I'm also interested in how you can design physical environments to better accommodate our dual existence online and offline. 

It's so interesting. Could you give some examples of how you view the internet intersecting with physical space? 

Yeah, a really tangible one is just Google Maps. We navigate with smartphones which means we always have this computer with us that gives us access to everything. It kind of negates the importance of space in some ways. The same thing with something like Uber. I could basically step out of my front door and get whisked off to the other side of town without really ever really having to think about the layout of the city. I think that has incredible implications for how we use space. 

If you land in an airport somewhere where you don't speak the language, if there is Uber, you don't really have to figure as much out. You just have this infrastructure in place that makes it really easy to show up anywhere and have the same experience that you would have at home.

I think sometimes about my dad, who immigrated from Brazil to Boston in the 60s. And I'm like, how did you get to your apartment? How had you arranged that? It’s so crazy to me. 

I know. It's amazing. It's easy to be nostalgic for that too. 

There's a piece you wrote that I really liked that talked about the two types of jobs that could exist in the future. I think you said it's people who use computers and people who bring things to people who use computers. And you gave some examples too — like ghost kitchens. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about labor and how you see that working into this. 

In the pandemic, delivery apps introduced the thing where you could have a delivery person just drop your food off at your door without ever seeing them. It completed the process of making that labor invisible to the end user. And I think that's kind of a desirable outcome on the platform's part. They want to minimize the presence of a human delivering your food and it kind of leads toward actual automation.

And in a lot of cases, automation is not as technical as you are led to believe. There are a bunch of humans under the hood doing the work. I think about it with Amazon Prime a lot. We think of Amazon Prime as something that magically delivers everything we want to our front door. But again, there's not only human labor, but a massive built infrastructure that's required to get that to our front door. Things like shipping. We think about these things only when they break down.

Like, when that ship got caught in and blocked the Suez Canal, suddenly everyone was aware of this part of the supply chain. And I mean, it is certainly rational to not think about it, but there are all these climate complications and geopolitical situations that will disrupt these things, and if we are just expecting everything to be brought to our front door, we might be in for some unpleasant surprises.

Yeah. You talked a little bit about Shein too, which I thought was interesting. 

The loop of picking up on trends that can be digitally observed is tighter and tighter and faster and faster. Shein is super fast fashion to the point that it's almost automated. And, you know, with AI, you would think now that like a lot of that stuff's happening without even human design involvement. You could just have AI throwing up thousands of products for sale and drop-shipping them without really ever having to have human intervention. 

You also wrote about the life cycle of apps or platforms and how they function and how they treat their users. You had a specific term for this — “enshittification.” 

That's one I've been coming back to a lot lately. It's interesting because we're all just using the internet all the time and it's such an ingrained habit that these things get worse slowly enough that we don't really change our behavior. Like, you know, you see people try to quit Twitter and then they come back. I mean, I'm still on Twitter, but I'm very aware that it's getting worse on a consistent basis. And enshittification is the perfect term for that, which Cory Doctorow coined. It is this idea that something starts out amazing and it then becomes a way to like milk value out of people using the platform. 

Do you think that that's just like how it goes now? Like that's just the future of the internet?

The whole generation of products including, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more recently, TikTok are built on models of trying to maximize attention and maximize eyeballs usually for ad revenue. I think that this model is kind of inherently stuck on this addiction process. I don't see that recovering. But, there are new paradigms. People are talking about, maybe over-optimistically, a lot of the crypto and like Web3 stuff, which stalled out when the bull market ended, but is still going.

I think that that's gonna be the future of, of what's good on the internet is, you know, you actually have to pay for it. And if it's free, then it is usually free because it's being enshittified and that's where the money is being made.

The news will probably have to do something like that too. 

Well, yeah, I mean it's amazing how quickly the existing media infrastructure is melting down. You hear about big media layoffs weekly and major publications shutting down left and right and they're not being replaced by new things that are the equivalent. Investigative journalism costs a lot of money. You can't do that easily with a Substack. I mean, maybe there will be emergent ways of funding that with a Substack-like model, but right now I think we are lacking in the types of journalism we need. 

Things cost money and they take a lot of time. It seems like to do anything you sort of need a VC backer and that seems to create a weird division of who gets through being all based on who knows VC. 

That model is also based on the assumption that 99 out of a hundred things fail and you just need the one to be a home run to make up for the other 99. That is fine in some ways, but leaves a lot of wreckage in its wake. It's kind of weird to live in a world where like most things are failing. There’s that joke about the millennial lifestyle subsidy where in the heyday of the late teens, we were getting all these cheap Uber rides and promo codes for all these DoorDash-type products. We were just getting free stuff constantly because the VCs were trying to make it grow as fast as possible. It was a weird time because a lot of that stuff wasn't actually sustainable. I think the image of all the Lime scooters and Bird scooters everywhere in cities is the perfect symbol of that. There was so much waste generated. And the whole point of that waste was trying to get maximum market share as fast as possible. So then you have like, reservoirs and ponds where there's a hundred lime scooters dumped into them. 

I read this tweet or essay that called lime scooters a physical meme. They're mass-produced in China, shipped over here inexpensively, and just like digital objects, they're worth very little and can be discarded just as easily.

Yeah, it feels like those little robots that deliver Postmates. They're really trying to push those in Los Angeles. 

They're everywhere. I don't think I have seen them in New York at all. They'd probably get destroyed here. But it would be funny to see. 

It's because no one walks in LA. Do you find yourself being prescriptive or placing limitations on how you interact with the internet, especially in terms of how you interact with your own city? 

I try to use delivery apps as little as possible. I feel really grateful to live in a really dense, walkable area in a vibrant city. I can pick something up about as easily as I can have it delivered to me. I'm also aware that many people don't live in places like this. And maybe that's by choice, but I mean, it's also more expensive to live in a place like Brooklyn or Los Angeles. So not everyone has the privilege of doing that, but because I do, I take full advantage of it.

Yeah, it all feels just, sort of infantilizing. I was thinking about how when I was in middle school and my mom had to drive me places, she also had to put two toddlers in the car also and it was such a to-do — now she’d probably put me in an Uber. Or, you know, cooking and Postmates. We have cut out a lot of the annoying parts of adulthood. And it seems like we need to think about, whether convenience is the best motivator to live our lives by?

I've always noticed when people talk about feeling like an adult, it's so often couched in terms of consumption. Like, I bought nice furniture finally, so now I'm a real grown up. I try to resist that. What you said about cooking is spot on. It’s hard to find the time to cook, but I enjoy it and find it to be fulfilling or something. 

Yeah, I think I agree with you too that we have to admit it's our own desire to participate in the tech as much as it's being put onto us.

It is especially true with the stuff that is purely digital. When you complain about things on Twitter or whatever, it often comes down to the fact that we're showing up every day to use these things and no one's making us. And in fact, it's distracting us from things that we need to be doing. Maybe we just need to take more responsibility for our own behaviors. That's, kind of annoying, and I may need to look for a better way to phrase that, but that is really what it comes down to.

There is this whole discussion of algorithmic recommendations and how algorithms are flattening culture. All of that presupposes that we're just sitting and passively receiving what the algorithms give us. But we have all the tools we need to push against that. With music as an example, I could just put Spotify on shuffle and let it feed me whatever music it wanted to. Or, I can use the same tool and curate music. I can’t really blame Spotify if I am listening to bad music. I can't really blame the algorithm. It's more that I didn’t spend time or energy finding something different.

It's interesting to think about our own personal responsibility. With some things like film, cost is such a huge barrier to entry. And you think about what gets made and what is allowed to get made. But, maybe we are rewarding Netflix by watching trash and we should refrain or demand something better. 

Yeah, the movie example parallels the investigative journalism example. Things like that really do cost money and those are probably the hardest hit by this digital flattening paradigm – the internet eating everything that existed in the 20th century and replacing it with a platform version of it. But if I need something and I know that Amazon has it and a store in my neighborhood has it, I can go and spend 10 bucks in the store and there are positive externalities to doing that.

Maybe it helps a small business a little bit. Maybe me being on the street makes me think about the city a bit more. Me just being out on the street I think makes the city marginally better. Like every little thing like that kind of adds up to the world that I want to live in.