Most sustainability campaigns look the same. A melting glacier. A sombre voiceover. Piano music. The Norwegian Consumer Council does not make those campaigns. In March 2026, it introduced the Enshittificator, a professionally dressed character whose job is to make digital services gradually worse for users while better for corporations. The film went viral, generated millions of views, and triggered a lobbying campaign across 14 countries involving more than 70 consumer organisations. In September 2026, the Enshittificator returned with a new business partner.
Death.
The Character and the Problem He Addressed the First Time
The term “enshittification” was coined by author Cory Doctorow to describe the documented pattern by which digital platforms and services begin by serving users well, then progressively degrade the user experience to extract more value for advertisers and shareholders. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and virtually every major platform that has reached scale have followed some version of this trajectory.
The Norwegian Consumer Council’s first Enshittificator film, written and directed by August Jorfald at NewsLab Oslo, dramatised that process through a single deadpan character: a professional, businesslike man whose job is to systematically make things worse. Bjørn Asgeirsson played the Enshittificator with the bland confidence of someone who considers product degradation a service to the economy. The film was funny, pointed, and structurally unusual for a consumer rights organisation that might otherwise have produced a report and a press release.
The response was not a report’s response. The film reached millions of viewers globally. Over 70 consumer groups across Europe and the United States used it as the foundation for a coordinated lobbying campaign spanning 14 countries. A short film made by an Oslo agency for a Norwegian government-funded consumer body had become international policy infrastructure.
The Second Film
The Life of Death and the Enshittificator shifts the same creative team’s attention from digital services to physical products. Where the first film was about platforms becoming gradually worse, the second is about products becoming unusable before they should.
The film introduces Death as the Enshittificator’s new business partner. Frida Homlung plays Death as a figure of quiet professional authority, a partner who handles the final stage of the product’s life while the Enshittificator accelerates the journey toward it. The two characters explain their collaboration with the calm logic of a management consulting presentation. Death takes care of the ending. The Enshittificator helps products get there faster. Together, they represent a system that is currently operating at scale across every electronics category in every consumer market in the world.
The film accompanies the Norwegian Consumer Council’s new report on circular consumption and the systems that encourage replacement over repair. The report’s findings are what give the comedy its material. Two-thirds of consumers have thrown away a product because spare parts were unavailable. Three-quarters have experienced electronic products becoming unusable because software support ended or compatibility disappeared. These are not edge cases. They are the designed outcome of a business model that profits from replacement rather than longevity.
Why the Format Works
Planned obsolescence is a documented corporate practice with a long history. The first deliberate product obsolescence strategy was recorded in the 1920s, when lightbulb manufacturers agreed to limit bulb lifetimes to increase replacement purchases. The practice has since been identified across consumer electronics, textiles, software, and home appliances. It is the subject of academic papers, European Parliament resolutions, and national legislation in multiple countries.
It is not, typically, the subject of darkly comic short films with two professional characters explaining their business model in deadpan Norwegian.
August Jorfald’s creative approach, continuing the register established in the first Enshittificator film and in NewsLab’s previous work including the Visit Oslo anti-ad, treats policy arguments as entertainment without reducing the argument. The Enshittificator and Death do not need to be explained. Their professionalism is the joke. Their collaboration is the indictment.
Elin Volder Rutle, Head of Sustainability at the Norwegian Consumer Council, described the policy position the film supports: “Quality must become the norm. Both consumers and the planet benefit from this.” The Council is calling for longer consumer guarantees, cheaper and more accessible repair options, and stronger regulations against products designed to become obsolete. The film does not make those demands directly. It makes the current situation visible in a format that people watch to the end and then share.
The Track Record of the NewsLab Approach
The Enshittificator film series is the most internationally recognised work in a pattern that NewsLab and the Norwegian Consumer Council have developed across several years. The Visit Oslo anti-ad, which went viral for honestly presenting Oslo as a city with not much particularly special to recommend it, established the same approach in a tourism context: take the thing a conventional campaign would treat with promotional seriousness and present it instead with complete deadpan honesty.
The approach works for a specific structural reason. Consumer advocacy and environmental communications face a documented trust problem. Audiences have become resistant to earnest, issue-led communication from organisations whose stated purpose is to change behaviour. The Norwegian Consumer Council’s films earn attention because they are not trying to change anyone’s behaviour directly. They are simply describing, with complete accuracy and zero piano music, what the system is doing and who benefits from it.
When the audience laughs and then thinks about what they just laughed at, the campaign has done what no report and no glacial footage could achieve.
Campaign Name: The Life of Death and the Enshittificator
Agency Name: NewsLab, Oslo / Written and Directed by: August Jorfald / Cinematographer: Adam Enochsson / Editor: Nicolai Gundorff Asmussen / Death: Frida Homlung / Enshittificator: Bjørn Asgeirsson
Brand Name: Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet)
Location: Norway (digital and social media; September 2026)
