Enshittification is a sobering view of the mechanics of the shitmachine whirring away under the hood
Coining ‘enshittification’ in a 2022 blogpost, internet activist and journalist Cory Doctorow here packages up his thinking as a book: a lively, snarky breakdown of how US Big Tech has managed to make all the products people used to like – Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Uber and so on – turn to shit, setting out how platform capitalism became so ubiquitous and why this has turned the experience of these platforms so toxic in recent years, while suggesting a few ways out.
For Doctorow, tech platforms exploited the early internet’s radical logic of ‘disintermediation’ to become intermediaries with huge and opaque power over both consumers and suppliers. Having piled vast sums into capturing users, Big Tech now gouges both sellers and buyers, content providers, workers and consumers. Doctorow is well-informed from years of reporting and campaigning, accumulating the grisly details of how these companies manipulate pricing, abuse workers’ rights and encroach ever further on privacy. He shows how the rise of the ‘enshitternet’ comes not from some rule-of-the-fittest principle of capitalism; rather, lax anti-monopoly enforcement, weaponisation of intellectual property law and Big Tech’s crushing of ‘interoperability’ have shut out healthy competition, in ways us ‘normies’ barely understand (a particularly good example: your branded printer-ink cartridge has a microchip in it, a ruse to shut out the makers of cheaper generic cartridges, since the chip’s software is ‘intellectual property’).
Where Enshittification starts to circle on itself is in Doctorow’s nostalgia that we could simply return to the days of the ‘good internet’, requiring only the (admittedly monumental) effort of reestablishing antimonopoly regulation, competition and worker power. Doctorow is hazy about the economics of the early mass-platform internet, during the long credit-fuelled boom of the 2000s, having little to say about how the power grab happened in the postcrash 2010s, when Big Tech was able to exploit the underlying stagnation and austerity that ensued. De-monopolisation is a great goal, but it won’t fix why we’re no better off than before the bad internet. Nevertheless, for those wondering why everything they look at on social media seems to be deranged, hateful, hallucinatory AI garbage, Enshittification is a sobering view of the mechanics of the shitmachine whirring away under the hood.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow. Verso, £22 (hardcover)
