Enshittification
Google Drive will stop backing up photos to Google Photos in August. The replacement requires your browser to stay open - a quiet downgrade that shows how platforms erode trust one email at a time.
Enshittification.
A few weeks ago, I got a slightly cryptic email from Google.
Turns out, starting August 10, the Google Drive desktop app will stop backing up photos to Google Photos.
The replacement they point to? The Google Photos web app. Which requires your browser to stay open. Which is missing basic features like status monitoring and filtering out raw files.
This is how enshittification actually works. It rarely arrives as a dramatic announcement. It arrives as a quiet email. A feature quietly removed. An inferior workaround quietly offered in its place.
Cory Doctorow described the pattern precisely: a platform first provides genuine value to users. Then it builds dependency. Then, once you’re reliant on it, the thing that made it worth relying on becomes optional. Google Photos earned trust through seamless, reliable background sync across devices. Now it’s asking users to leave a browser tab open and hope for the best.
What makes this frustrating isn’t just the inconvenience. It’s that the change doesn’t add anything. It doesn’t improve the product. It removes something that worked and replaces it with shit. The platform gets slightly worse, and users absorb the cost.
The word enshittification - vulgar, precise, and necessary - was the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year in 2023. It earned that distinction because the pattern it describes keeps repeating. Not in catastrophic ways. In quiet, cumulative ones.
What’s your backup plan when a platform you rely on starts pulling the rug out?
Originally published on LinkedIn.
The Shift, in your inbox
Occasional essays on AI, cloud, and the systems shaping what comes next. Subscribe on LinkedIn — no spam, unfollow anytime.
Keep reading
Should AI Reflect the World as It Is, or How It Should Be?
The recent controversy surrounding Google’s AI model, Gemini, has reignited the flames of debate around how artificial intelligence should depict and…
Will AI Take Your Job?
When word processors arrived, typists did not become ten times more valuable. They disappeared. The real AI risk is the same - the person who knows what needs doing skips the middle.
You Can Outpace a Ten-Person Team. Alone.
AI dissolves the bandwidth constraint that made cross-functional teams necessary. One high-context person can now run the full loop - but only if coordination becomes architecture, not meetings.
