Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow
Once upon a time, there was “the old, good internet.” Cory Doctorow remembers those pioneer days of the worldwide web for “a succession of search engines that each improved on the last,” with hundreds of small-to-medium companies “that vied for our business,” aided by “hackers, tinkerers, and entrepreneurs” who “built interoperable tools that plugged into dominant services and defended value for users and business customers.”
And then a handful bullies knocked the smaller kids off the jungle gym and seized the playground. Doctorow calls this process “enshittification.”
A journalist and longtime activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Doctorow minces no words about what happened to the dreams of those ‘90s-Y2K futurists who predicted a brave new world based on digital communication. His harshest remarks are directed toward Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Initially, Zuckerberg’s Facebook enabled “his creepy pals” to “rate the fuckability of their fellow Harvard undergrads.” When going public, he dubbed Facebook as the alternative to Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace and pledged, “We will never spy on you.” How did that turn out?
As for Musk, by firing the moderators, “he made Twitter instantly, permanently, significantly worse for both users and advertisers.” Under X-Man’s rule, “Twitter speed ran the exodus of advertisers and a collapse in revenue.”
Major companies that began with a better ethos, such as Apple, maybe even Amazon, gradually succumbed to the temptation to become lords of all they touched. Doctorow describes an elaboration “enshittification” process by which Amazon gouges vendors and contributes to long-term price inflation. The greasy fingerprints of Big Tech are everywhere. When the Biden administration threatened to apply anti-trust laws, the ostensibly “liberal” tech tycoons pivoted to the right. The current administration is working fast to reverse four years of progress.
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What’s to be done? Doctorow sees Facebook users as hostages to their network of “friends” and dependent on that platform for contact and communication. He praises foreign governments that have taken steps to curb online monopolies and calls on “people like you and me, who create the political will for big, ambitious regulatory adventures.” He urges the creation of “new coalitions” to fight for privacy and making it easier to exit platforms without severing social connections. We should demand interoperability and the right to repair devices. We should work together—unionize, he urges. Don’t buy “smart” appliances that mine your data (and are all expensive pieces of shit anyway).
Doctorow calls for a “genuine, spontaneous groundswell of popular rage at the enshittification of everything.” He misses an obvious set of options: disconnect from the internet as much as possible, stay in touch by phone, Y2K email or even old-fashioned USPS, congregate in person not online. Shop locally, boycott the techno cabal if you can.
