We’re living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralising. Even terrifying.” - Cory Doctorow
What is it with technology companies that start out wanting to be good to their users with great services and products, and then begin to rot from within after their initial success, and become grossly abusive rent-seeking enterprises of amorality?
That is what self-professed online activist Cory Doctorow explores in his book, Enshittification, providing some horrifying examples of what it entails.
By and large, Doctorow nails it with Enshittification, and offers pointers to how we can get out of the situation.
The book grew out of a series of essays Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic.net blog, from 2023 and onwards. Tying a string of blog entries into a cohesive book isn’t easy, but Doctorow remains consistent and refers to earlier essays as contrapuntos, to build a narrative throughout the book.
Where the book excels is how it turns what could’ve been a dry treatise on decaying business practices and faltering customer service by giant tech companies abusing their market powers into a hard-hitting polemic written in very direct language.
Enshittification is a word minted by Doctorow; it conveys perfectly what is happening with technology platforms.
Many of the big familiar names in the tech industry are skewered in the book. Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Doordash - and of course, Uber. It would be impossible to write a book about enshittification without mentioning Uber, the arguably undisputed leader in the area.
Although the European Union and the United Kingdom earn mentions in the book, mainly due their regulatory efforts to rein in the tech giants, Enshittification is very much focused on the United States.
Which is fair enough, as that is where the true power of technology is concentrated. Due to the global nature of the US tech companies, their enshittification is a problem for everyone.
It’s one that smaller nations like New Zealand find imposslble to counter. We can’t even tax the multinational tech giants properly, so it seems wistful thinking that we could make them abide by our rules.
Google is a great example of an organisation that created genuinely useful technology, search and the adjunct PageRank system to determine which web pages are authoritative, and which aren’t. Such “good to users” innovation was exactly what people wanted, and the very reason Google became top dog for Internet indexing and searching.
That was in Google’s heyday. It’s hard to recognise today’s tech giant that exists in a virtual sphere of its own, collecting users’ information to trade for enormous profits, while its innovation attempts consist mainly of buying companies to add to the growing list at Killed by Google.
Owned these days by holding company Alphabet, Google’s even tinkered with its fundamental value proposition, its great search engine. Doctorow describes the inflection point at Google when Ben Gomes, Google's head of search, lost an internal power struggle to executives prioritising advertising revenue over search quality.
Why? So that people would try searching again which in turn brought in more advertising revenue. Such is enshittification, and it takes different forms with some companies diving head-first into that decay.
By collecting multiple examples of enshittification in a book, and cross-referencing them with each other, you are reminded that the tech giants have been rotting from within for a while now.
Much of that is otherwise forgotten in the flood of public relations designed to polish away the tarnish on tech and sanitise abuses like Facebook in Myanmar, a deadly enshittification that Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote about in her book Careless People, on her time working in a senior role at the social network.
It's nigh impossible to keep track of everything being perverted massively, and scaled up by the Internet. Take "copyleft" trolls for example, which is a new take on intellectual property rights and licensing enforcement abuse. A German photographer would seed the Internet with images that were licensed under the Creative Commons (CC) agreement.
The particular version of the CC license used by the photographer contained a bug that meant the text for it had to be quoted accurately. If not, the license was not valid and the photographer could entrap people whose picture use was found with automated image recognition, and launch scads of big copyright infringement claims. This despite CC licenses normally being used so that people could safely reuse pictures, with or without attribution to the creators.
Can we undo the enshittification?
Clearly, giant companies with locked-in markets that transform from being good to users to squeezing them for whatever profit possible while offering worsening service - because they can - is suboptimal for society as a whole.
It’s not in the best interest of the companies themselves to become sclerotic rent seekers either. Doctorow could perhaps have mentioned how Apple enshittified just nine years after being founded, by dumping founder Steve Jobs and then completely lost the plot with laughably bad products over the next decade and a half.
Apple nearly went under in the process, until Jobs returned, took over, and unshittified the company with an unyielding focus on quality and original design. And, the iPod inspired iPhone of course.
That’s a rare example of successful internal change however, and Doctorow can hardly be said to be a fan of Apple. He gives Jobs’ successor Tim Cook a serve for setting in motion Apple’s transition to outsourced manufacturing in Taiwan and China, using contractor assemblers with brutal labour practices.
In recent times something was done in the all-important home market, the United States, Doctorow writes. There, the newly appointed Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan took legal action against several tech giants for monopolistic and abusive practices during the Biden era.
For that, Khan won praise from unexpected quarters, such as the current US vice president J D Vance.
Khan has left the FTC and there’s no indication that her unfinished work will have any lasting effect. Regulation really has not kept up with information technology. In fact, you could say “there’s an app to bypass that”, as you read about how companies like Uber circumvented regulation and labour market rules with programs running on smartphones.
Fixing the enshittified platforms would require a huge effort across several areas. That effort involves regulation, re-empowering labour (not through corrupt unions, which Doctorow abhors), and legal reform to weed out laws that enable and reward abusive behaviour.
What enables, or invites even, the abuse is that there is a cost to leaving the companies that abuse you. Rage quit Facebook, and you can no longer see and hear about what your family on the other side of the globe is doing.
Sick of Musk pulling “Roman salutes” and pushing fash trolls into your timeline on Twitter to “debate the issues” with name calling? Leaving means saying goodbye to others that you care about, the very reason you joined the social network.
While you prevaricate and are reluctant to close your enshittified social media accounts, their owners relish in being the purveyors of misinformation that weaken democracy, serving only their own never-ending growth imperatives.
It’s not going to be easy to “unshittify” an entire economy that has restructured since the 1990s. The first step is to create awareness around the phenomenon, and why it shouldn’t be shrugged off as capitalism naturally evolving into techno-feudalism where digital platforms call the shots, which former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (whose concept thereof Doctorow engages with) suggests is well underway.
To that purpose, Doctorow’s book is a great place to start. Particularly so for policy makers who pontificate about digitalisation of everything without understanding the consequences of it for smaller, vulnerable nations like New Zealand in which the populations and businesses are increasingly existing at the mercy of digital platform overlords.
Enshittification
Cory Doctorow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) and Verso Books (UK).
Available as hardcover, ebook and in audiobook format.
ISBN 9781250417602
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