The Enshittification of the Welfare State
Enshittification is an informal word used to criticize the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms over time, due to an increase in advertisements, costs, or features. It can also refer more generally to any state of deterioration, especially in politics or society. Similar forms include enshittify and enshittified.
‘Enshittification’ doesn’t just mean ‘getting worse’. In Cory Doctorow’s now well-known 2023 Wired article, it describes the collapse of social media platforms in three stages: at first, platforms attract users with high functionality and good content; then users pile in and create effective monopolies, allowing the platform to charge huge rents from small businesses with nowhere else to go. And when users and sellers are locked in, search results are given over to advertisements, peer-to-peer content is algorithmically squeezed out, ‘the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit’. Content gets emptied out in favour of algorithmically-determined attention capture, rewards for addictive scrolling, and postponement, and an automated surrogate of content now often called slop.
One of the big markers of 2025 – financial black holes, tinderbox summer, and so on – has been the ‘dead internet’ stories that channel the disorientation of slop, and resonate strangely with simultaneous stories of British decline that is different this time – ‘you can’t put your finger on it, it can’t be reduced to GDP, it’s about how people relate to one another’. Formally, the welfare state is still there, and the protection of the welfare state is paramount; in practice, the welfare state has the emptied-out feel of the enshittified platform. How well does the analogy pan out? The early welfare state, like early TikTok, offered substantial services to draw user-citizens, extending Second World War morale into a collective rebuilding with real content, promising real peer-to-peer communication – welfare. However, its legitimacy was based in a technocratic conception of government, one modernising the classic British liberal appeal to market-based belonging. On the welfare state platform, politicians building on the peer-to-peer promise tended to become technocratic managers delivering votes for their stakeholders; the citizen-as-owner tended to become the citizen-as-user; and government tended to become algorithmic management.
Although Doctorow’s enshittification happens to all platforms, TikTok was unusual in using a ‘heating device’ during its growth phase, manually boosting specific videos to make them ‘viral’, attracting creators and associating the platform with success stories. This kind of boosting was common during the ‘heating’ phase of British post-war consensus, with its tales of enfranchisement and mobility – the working-class grammar school kid ascending into establishment, the youth cultures that could express themselves above the safety net. So addictive were these success stories as social cohesion that, like enshittified TikTok, the cultural imaginary of the welfare state is still stuck in the growth phase: even in the 2020s, the inaccessibility of the NHS is an anomaly that will return to normal; unfair DWP exclusions will be fixed, and so on. Once this platform monopoly has been established, it can be asset-stripped by private actors, boosted by the legitimacy conferred by state organisations – the process from roughly 1980 to 2005. Neoliberalism came so naturally to the Brits because it wasn’t so much an unstoppable global wave as a native understanding of the social as a conglomeration of private interests legitimised by welfare state branding. During this great wave of asset-stripping, government would be first explicitly acknowledged as a form of cybernetics in which user-voters were customers of government (Stepping Stones, key influence on Thatcherism), then, under New Labour, would shrug off the stigma of ‘privatisation’ altogether to see credentialled private extraction as public.
After this point, the welfare state could candidly optimise for administrative metrics, rewarding the withholding of benefits and services. Processes could be automated and a chaotic assembly of algorithmic barriers erected, and peer-to-peer communication replaced by welfare state slop – pseudo-content running on its own in a thin performance of participation. Welfare slop is such a part of 2020s UK life that much of the time it’s barely even visible. Texts and notifications asking for duplicated information; appointment portals that time out and lose data; personalised support that is really outdated cut-and-paste advice; chatbots creating attritional loops; the repeated creation and cancellation of appointments; speculative refusals that set appeals as a real entry point; increasingly punitive demands for proof of eligibility; promotional content and ads; and planned dysfunctionality acting as disincentive to keep budgets down – this is the stuff of welfare slop.
As a whole, welfare slop inculcates what is sometimes called ‘burden tolerance’, or the willingness to accept administrative punishment for services in fact already contracted and paid for. As enshittified social media platforms demand payment for boosting messages in order to become visible, so the enshittified welfare state demands professional, or at least highly-educated, help to gain access, and leverages peripheral costs – parking for hospitals, time off work for appeals, and so on – with those unable to pay for boosting effectively ‘shadow-banned’. All this is part of the grain of the official communal of twenty-first century Brit life, though one rarely described culturally (with exceptions – James Kelman, Ken Loach, Lynsey Hanley). Burden tolerance in turn creates what some have called a general ‘bureaucratic personality’, a kind of public sociopathy reflected in the disorientation of the 2020s, and irreducible to the pragmatism shoulder-padded entrepreneurs of the ‘expansion’ phase of the platform, the point when businesses pile in and the asset-stripping begins. In this ‘moral inversion’, destructive administrative processes seen as a public good, and proprietary algorithms that deny access are protected because of platform loyalty – they’re ‘ours’. Meanwhile the demand to download the app, presented as a convenience and a money-saving means and therefore a public good, leaks into services still described as welfare, including an NHS that forces users in England to work to produce data (to act as ‘cloud serfs’, in Yanis Varoufakis’s term), for, amongst others, software licensers and data analysts including Egton Medical Information Systems and The Phoenix Partnership, under the notorious aegis of Palantir.
Welfare slop then is experienced as a nutrition-free communication in a pseudo-public, demanding a perpetual postponement of provision, one that operates near but just under consciousness and keeps hope alive as a kind of addiction. Under these conditions, access to due services is reduced to a kind of doomscrolling. Slop takes the place of content/ care, forces emotional investment in barriers that reduce the cost of welfare, and leaves a strange shared sense of exhaustion. If TikTok users keep scrolling in low-level stimulation, welfare claimants cycle through repetition and disparate messages, building in planned dysfunction in low-level hope. TikTok algorithms selectively withhold quality content; welfare algorithms insert arbitrary sanctions, malfunctions, and all the other punishments covered by the key British term ‘unfortunately’. Both exploit psychological vulnerabilities to maintain engagement, and both build in learned helplessness and gradual adaptation to an impoverished experience. Both hold user-voters hostage while extracting value for shareholders – the political class or rentier platforms – in the form of data and expressions of consensus.
Crucially , though, the awareness of enshittification is uneven across national lines. The uneven perception of enshittification was a feature of 2014 independence referendum, when senior Labour politicians like Ed Balls could appeal to platform addiction and the boosted success stories of the post-war welfare state even while they promised a slowed decline – over the fear of abandoning the platform altogether in pursuit of a more legitimately shared peer-to-peer – provision. This appeal made more sense in rUK than in Scotland; but it was still worth trying because of the level of built-in addiction – the real meaning of the phrase ‘Jockholm Syndrome’, and something that will come up in any independence campaign.
Fine, but – the obvious objection goes – none of this strained analogy takes account of how citizens, unlike the users of private platforms, are protected from enshittification by democratic accountability. Governments, ultimately, are surely answerable to the people. But this objection reckons without the unusual British form of the public, which is only public through private property. The legitimacy of British government established from 1688 across the eighteenth century understood citizens primarily and – in the absence of any popular sovereignty, solely as financial stakeholders; and a whole constitutional machinery from civil service inertia to the archaic channelling of voice in first-past-the-post is dedicated to protecting the citizen-as-owner as something naturally occurring. In this unusual constitutional situation, democratic accountability doesn’t interfere in the career of enshittification that much, except in conferring a special kind of legitimacy to certain private concerns.
In the apparent hardwiring of this dissonant experience of a welfare public is a key to the Brit disorientation of 2025 sharing so much with the ‘dead internet’, and this isn’t something that can be reduced to the old battle of a social-democratic public versus evil privatisation. So what, in Doctorow’s model, about platforms that have become irretrievably enshittified? The challenges would be to stop participating in your own disenfranchisement, to recognise the real barriers erected by welfare slop; to aim for a democratised tech or at least a tech not wilfully top-down, and remember the case for peer-to-peer transmission, or meaningful shared provision, while exercising ‘freedom of exit – the right to leave a shrinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities you left behind’.