Reclusive Libertarian

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The Enshittification of Government

· 8 min read

You are not your government’s shareholder. You are its user. If the last decade of city council meetings, DMV counters, and school board sessions has felt less like being served and more like being tolerated, you already know this in your gut. You just did not have a word for the demotion.

Here is the word, borrowed from an industry that has nothing to do with government. In 2022 the writer Cory Doctorow named a pattern anyone who has used the internet for two decades already felt: a platform is good to its users first, to build the audience, then squeezes them to please the business customers who pay the bills, then, once switching costs are high enough that nobody can leave, turns on those business customers too and claws back everything for itself. He called it enshittification, a word ugly enough to be memorable and precise enough that the American Dialect Society made it their 2023 word of the year. Everyone who has watched a search engine bury the answer under five paid placements recognized the shape instantly. What almost nobody did was point the word back at the institution that invented the pattern long before any platform existed: the one that taxes you whether or not you are satisfied, and that you cannot simply stop using.

Who the shareholder is supposed to be

A republic’s founding theory is not complicated. Government exists to do a short list of things individuals cannot do well alone, pave the roads, police the streets, adjudicate disputes, defend the border, and it draws its authority and its funding from the people it does those things for. In that theory the citizen is not a customer choosing among competitors. He is the shareholder, the party in whose interest the whole apparatus is supposed to run, because he is also the one who funds it and cannot walk away from it the way a dissatisfied customer walks away from a bad restaurant.

Somewhere between that theory and a Tuesday night council meeting, the roles quietly swap. A resident who stood up during public comment at his city council put it more plainly than most policy papers manage: residents are not the shareholders of the city. They are the consumers. The shareholders are city hall and the government sector unions that negotiate against it, and who also fund the campaigns of the people supposedly negotiating on the public’s behalf. Whether or not every detail of his particular city’s story checks out, the structural claim is exactly right, and it is the same claim that applies, at greater scale and higher stakes, to a state government or a federal agency. The people who are supposed to be the shareholders have been demoted to users, expected to feel gratitude for services rendered at a price they did not set, from a provider they cannot fire.

Why this is not a story about villains

It would be more comfortable if enshittification, in government or on a platform, required a villain twirling a mustache somewhere in the org chart. It does not, and the theory that explains why has been sitting in the economics literature since the 1960s. Mancur Olson called it the logic of collective action: a small, organized group with a large stake in an outcome will reliably beat a large, diffuse group with a small stake in that same outcome, even when the diffuse group’s total stake is bigger, because organizing is itself costly, and the small group can afford it while the large one cannot. A public employees’ union has a full-time staff, a dedicated budget, and a single, sharply defined interest, better pay and benefits for its members, that never changes from one contract cycle to the next. The median taxpayer has a job, a family, roughly two hours a month to spend on civic life if he is unusually engaged, and a hundred other things competing for his attention besides the exact language of a pension formula. He is not outvoted. He is outorganized, structurally, before a single vote is cast, and would be even if every person involved were perfectly honest.

Layer onto that James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s public choice insight, that the people who staff and administer government are not saints on loan from the private sector, but ordinary self-interested actors who respond to incentives exactly like everyone else, and the picture completes itself. A council member who accepts a union’s campaign support and then, in the next budget cycle, treats that union’s position with unusual deference is not necessarily corrupt in any sense a prosecutor could touch. He is responding, entirely rationally, to who actually shows up, organizes, and funds his side of the next election, which is very rarely the taxpayer who will spend forty minutes reading a bond measure passage he stumbled across the night before voting. Nobody has to conspire. The incentives alone are sufficient, which is precisely what makes the pattern durable, deniable, and almost impossible to shame out of existence with a single scandal.

The tell is the double standard

There is one reliable symptom that separates ordinary democratic disagreement from an institution running this pattern: officials who invoke “the will of the voters” only in the direction that funds them. A council that watches its own sales tax measure fail at the ballot, then approves the spending it was meant to cover anyway on the theory that money would turn up somehow, has already told you what “trust the voters” means to them in practice. It means comply when we win, ignore when we lose, and ask again later using the same language of civic reverence either way. The tell is not that officials sometimes override an inconvenient vote. Every system faces genuine emergencies that can justify exactly that. The tell is the asymmetry, reverence for the electorate exactly when the electorate might approve more revenue, and total indifference to it the moment it withholds that revenue.

The same asymmetry shows up at federal scale, just wearing different clothes. This site has written before about the hundreds of billions of dollars a year the federal government loses to improper payments on systems nobody with real authority had seriously examined in a generation, and about the one serious recent attempt to go looking for it, which both parties, for their own reasons, preferred to see wound down rather than made permanent. The waste at the federal level and the missed budget deadline at the municipal level are not two different stories. They are the identical failure at two different zoom levels: an apparatus that answers, structurally, to the organized insiders who staff and fund it rather than to the diffuse public it was built to serve, and that reaches for the language of democratic legitimacy only when that language happens to be useful.

What the fix is not, and what it is

The fix is not moral exhortation. Telling public officials to simply care more about the diffuse public than the organized interests actually in the room asks them to act against the incentive structure they operate inside, indefinitely, on willpower alone, which is not a policy, it is a hope. It also is not the abolition of public sector bargaining or the caricature of government as inherently and irredeemably corrupt, a conclusion that proves too much and explains too little, since plenty of public institutions do function well, and the theory above explains exactly which conditions make the difference.

The fix is structural, because the problem is structural. It means transparency detailed enough that the diffuse public can organize cheaply instead of expensively, real-time budgets instead of documents that surface weeks after a legal deadline has already passed, so that noticing a problem does not require the sustained attention only an organized interest can afford. It means separating, wherever a legislature will actually do it, the officials who negotiate a contract from the campaign apparatus that contract’s counterparty helps fund, so the negotiator is not structurally invited to go easy on the party bankrolling his next election. It means permanent, statutory audit authority answering to no single administration, the DOGE model made durable, at every level of government, not just the federal one, precisely because a temporary watchdog is exactly what everyone with something to hide can simply wait out. None of this requires believing government is uniquely evil. It requires believing what public choice theory has shown for sixty years, that any institution insulated from the discipline of its actual principal will drift toward serving whoever is close enough, organized enough, and patient enough to capture it instead, and that the drift is corrected by rules, not by asking the captured institution to notice its own capture.

Doctorow’s word caught on because it named something people had felt for years without a term for it. Government has needed that word for far longer than social media has existed, because the enshittification of a search engine costs you a worse afternoon, and the enshittification of the institution that pays for your roads, your courts, and your children’s schools costs you something you cannot simply switch away from. The citizen was supposed to be the shareholder. Until the incentives are rebuilt so that is true in fact and not only in the pamphlet asking him to vote yes, every appeal to trusting the voters is a line item in somebody else’s business plan, one that already assumes, correctly, that he will not notice until the bill arrives.

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