There’s a brilliant writer, Cory Doctorow, who coined the term “enshittification”. It’s when something awesome or neutral turns to utter shit because of capitalism and ever-monetizing our societal rot.
We’re talking microtransactions and subscriptions replacing singular licenses in games and software, dating culture being reduced to a few swipes instead of just meeting people in the wild, and Netflix wiping away god knows how many movies because of the emphasis on watch numbers.
And few things embody enshittification as thoroughly as this motherfucking pivot to video for things that don’t even MAKE SENSE for video, let alone need it at all.
We can’t even get peace from it in historically sight-unseen professions like writing now!
I’ve done my share of Zoom and phone calls for my writing and consulting clients. But I recently had an editor send me edits through video instead of a few notes in our DM thread or leaving comments on the Google Doc. Like everyone else does because it’s so much faster.
I have ADHD and am hard of hearing. Video is torture for me. It takes up too much headspace, and I’m straining to understand even with the volume cranked up. I can’t fidget, I can’t stim, I can’t get up and move around unless the camera is off. I now staunchly refuse to put one in my desktop setup after my last webcam died. Video edits took me SO much longer to do than if I got “fix this on page 3” in the chat.
Y’all do not need to see my face that badly. My best clients in nearly 10 years of self employment never even picked up the PHONE, let alone made me sit through a Zoom meeting. I think they were so lucrative because they knew that meeting could’ve been an email and acted on it. I wouldn’t be shocked if they also had ADHD and were better medicated than me.
Anyway, this is severe enshittification. I saw a freaking copywriter job ad saying “must be comfortable recording yourself”. COPYWRITER. Why do you want to watch me write in my pajamas, you weirdo?! Huh. Maybe that’s an under-explored category on OnlyFans.
I hate this pivot to video and streaming in the workplace because it’s often this annoying intrusion. I’ll do it for my consulting work because they’re explicitly paying for my time, but half the time they too hate video lol. And just want their consult over the phone.
It’s also enshittification from an accessibility standpoint. AI transcripts and closed captions are often horribly inaccurate for HOH users and this shit is torture as a neurodivergent person. And while I get the value in screen sharing and video being better than text in some tutorial applications….this pivot seems too on the nose with pushing more people with disabilities out of even self employment, let alone regular jobs.
Gee…how’s that DEI initiative going!
TL;DR: I fucking hate the overuse of video/streaming in the workplace, it’s intrusive, ableist, and 9/10 times it could’ve been an email.