Enshittification: The Book

I've followed Cory Doctorow for a few years now, and was certainly among the masses of people who, when he coined "enshittification," pointed and hollered "That's it!"

What Doctorow has explained is the process by which the once-bright promise of the internet has been turned to crap. And now, rather than hunting down the various articles and posts in which he has elaborated on his idea, you can get it all in one book-- Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.

The process by which so many services have been degraded is not, he argues, "the Great Forces of History bearing down on our moment," but a bunch of deliberate, purposeful choices that people with power didn't have to make. And it has a very clear pattern. Doctorow's simplest explanation of enshittification boils down to four steps:

1) First, platforms are good to their users.

2) Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.

3) Next, they abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

4) Finally, they beconme a giant pile of shit.

Doctorow lays out the specifics by looking at several case studies-- Facebook, Amazon, iPhone, and Twitter. All once brilliantly important; now just a pain in the ass.

There are more details to understand. How competition is killed, and then regulation is also gutted, making it both impossible to enter the marketplace and to police that one monolith controlling the sector. Why everyone wants you to use their app instead of just accessing via web browser (nobody is regulating what they can do on an app with your info or money). Why you aren't allowed to fix anything yourself (because "fixing" might involve third party circumnaigation of what the techno-bros want). And how AI is so very useful for twidlling the dials so that our tech overlords can determine just how bad they can make things without losing customers over it.

There are applications for education here-- read enough about the digital publishing biz and digital textbooks will not seem like a remotely good idea. 

More importtantly, I think that should school choice ever reach a tipping point, it would be ripe for its own version of enshittification, where captured families and gig working teachers and even education vendors could be squeezed dry as investors profit.

But mostly this is a book that helps explain why everything is so crappy, and the broadest definition of enshittification-- actively and purposefully making a product worse so that it will be more profitable-- seems to be everywhere.

Doctrorow has some ideas about how to make things better. The bad news is that making your individual consumer choices aren't high on his list of Likely To Help Actions. The solutions are mostly political and regulatory, and that part of the book is well worth reading as well. This is a book that has an awful lot to say about why we are where we are right now. If you have been following Doctorow on this, you won't find anything new here, but you will find all of his ideas on the topic in one convenient location. An excellent holiday gift for people who are generally angry at the techno-world but haven't figured out what's wrong yet.