Enshittification: When Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow
Big thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and NetGalley for
allowing me to preview Cory Doctorow’s necessary new book Enshittification: When Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Doctorow, who
coined this term that identifies the ways in which products and services
decline in quality and offerings over time, shifting the benefits from end
users to shareholders, develops an argument that identifies several examples of
online products that have degraded over time and how users are often helpless
or trapped in using these services. Enshittification is defined as the process
of collapse or worsening of the internet and its services for users while
profits for corporations and its shareholders are prioritized. Enshittification
is a complicated process, but Doctrow uses real and familiar examples from big
technology companies as well as examples from previous companies and services
to explain how we got to this point and why customers are stuck with these piles
that were previously fun and useful. Throughout the book, Doctorow makes an
impassioned case that is at times both funny (maybe in an absurd way) and
provocative. Although I felt myself growing angry at many of the instances he
analyzed in Enshittification, I also recognized that there are
alternatives and hope, even if they often come at a cost for users and
consumers like us.
I probably became aware of the word “enshittification”
sometime at the end of last year, when lists with new inclusions in the
dictionary are included. As Doctorow notes, “It’s a funny, naughty word, and
its funny and naughty to say,…But that’s not why the American Dialect Society
named it is word of the year…The Reason for enshittification’s
popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of
the things that matter to us.” I appreciate this distinction, and Doctorow’s
book is thoughtful and well-researched with examples to further highlight the
ways in which these services and platforms begin as useful and fun spaces for
people to connect or solve problems, but eventually corporations find ways to
maximize profits, especially after people begin to show an interest or need for
a certain service. While Doctorow uses some well-known examples (like Facebook,
Twitter/X, and Apple), there were other examples that might not be as well
known, but help to highlight the enshittification. One example was the SNOO
Smart Sleeper from the Happiest Baby, an expensive ($1695) self-rocking cradle
that plays the sounds of the womb. This rocker recognizes when babies begin to
cry, and will rock the baby back to sleep once the crying activates it. In
order to extract new revenue from new parents desperate to sleep, Happiest Baby
decided that these advanced features would cost $20 a month. This expensive
rocker becomes merely a rocker that could have probably been bought for much
less but will require an additional $240 a year to utilize sounds and
self-rocking. As Doctorow notes, many baby devices, clothing, and toys are
often passed down or re-used by the same family after their child grows out of
them. This $20 per month charge is a way for the Happiest Baby corporation to
find some additional money for those that are gifting or passing on their
rockers. I had a similar experience when I purchased my home about 4 years ago.
The home had a generator, and I was able to register the generator in my name. However,
the generator company kept sending me information about a monitoring
subscription—an app that let me track whether my generator was online and if it
needed any tune-ups or anything. The generator has lights that indicate this,
and if one of the lights is not green, I can look up what the color or code
means. However, the app makes it easier to monitor. Yet, the app subscription is
about $7 a month. I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t just a normal
feature included with the generator, but an added cost. Even though the company
has the ability to share the status with me via an app, it will cost me extra
money per month to monitor that. Furthermore, the company sends out emails that
claim that my generator requires an update for the new monitoring system, a 4G
LTE connector. At first, I thought that the message was letting me know that
some valuable piece of my generator was going to be obsolete, but after doing a
little investigation, I realized that they were just trying to get me to purchase
the new connection that would enable a more expensive app subscription.
“Enshittification is when you combine the banality of evil
with an internet-connected device and a federal law that criminalizes doing
anything with that device that the manufacturer dislikes.” We can see other
examples of this online and in other platforms like Amazon, Facebook/Meta, and
Twitter/X, where verification was once a kind of crowdsourced effort, but now
can be purchased for a monthly charge, which invites new levels of fraud and
abuse among users, as Doctorow explains. However, Doctorow not only examines
the instances of enshittification, but also many of the factors that have led
to enshittification over the years. Sadly, our government and the unfettered
capitalism that limits regulation and competition are some of the ways that
corporations are allowed to become too big to care. Furthermore, Doctorow
explores how the process of enshittification not only hurts consumers, but how
it affects workers. He uses examples of Uber drivers and Amazon and DoorDash
delivery drivers to show how these corporations are able to skirt legal
protections for employees when work is conducted “through an app”, which was
surprising to learn about. Furthermore, the apps for Uber and DoorDash,
according to Doctorow, will often push workers to lower fares, with DoorDash
never indicating how much of a tip their dashers will receive for their
efforts. Interestingly, some workers have created other apps that help the
workers out, learning whether to decline jobs that might not offer as much
money. It’s interesting to see these kinds of battles between workers and major
corporations, or between end users and corporations, as they try to battle the
enshittification. Doctorow refers to the “old, good internet” throughout the
book, and these examples of people pulling resources and knowledge together for
improvement for workers or consumers is a good example of that kind of
community that builds out of these steaming piles.
Although Enshittification is filled with many
examples of how our experiences end up worsening over time with these
platforms, Doctorow presents some hope and this was another bright spot of his
book. For one, he noted that the Biden administration was one of the first in
over 40 years that began to take major corporations to task for their
enshittification. This is the second book that I’ve read recently that
acknowledged some of the work that the Biden administration did on behalf of
citizens to improve their digital and consumer lives. Cass Sunstein’s recent
book Manipulation frequently cited the Biden administration’s work
against corporations that practice a kind of manipulation that continues to
enroll people in services. Similarly, Doctorow noted many of the advancements
against enshittification that were led by the Biden administration including
the development of the CFBP and Lina Khan’s promotion to lead the FTC after
writing a popular legal review of Amazon’s practices. Although it seems like a
long time ago, Khan was confirmed with a large majority (only 28 Nay votes), and
JD Vance and Matt Gaetz said they approved of her work (although apparently the
Wall Street Journal wrote many pieces that criticized her work).
Additionally, Doctorow notes the historic cases anti-trust cases against Google
and Warner Brothers that were brought during the Biden administration. These
kinds of legal actions pointed to a new direction that listened more to the
will of the people and recognized the issues that were occurring due to corporations
becoming too big to care. Although Doctorow notes how the CFPB has been
ultimately rendered useless by DOGE, there may still be some hope in Trump’s
administration for continued pushback against big tech corporations. Yet, this hope
is also tempered by the fact that the current president is the most incompetent
leader of all time, who also now owns a social media company that is built on
the same Mastodon servers that Twitter/X used and now owns a large stake in a cryptocurrency
“company”. Doctorow quotes the writer William Gibson “The future is here. It’s just
not evenly distributed yet,” to note that we are experiencing what has happened
online IRL, but not all at once. Trump’s “famously chaotic governance style and
self-contradictory bluster make it hard to predict what Trump will do about
competition, antitrust, interoperability, and labor law,” yet Doctorow has some
hope that Trump will end up listening to some of the Trump coalition that is
advocating more for labor rights and antitrust measures, although it may come
as a result of advantages for his own companies and interests. Nevertheless,
the Google antitrust case was initiated under Trump’s administration, and there
is support from others for Lina Khan’s actions against supposed monopolies. “This
enforcement will be corrupt in the sense that Trump will be picking companies
that he, personally, hates the most, rather than the companies whose
lawbreaking represents the greatest threat to the American public. But it will not
necessarily be corrupt in the sense that Trump will bring cases against
innocent companies. Nearly all big companies are guilty.” It’s
interesting to consider, and I appreciated Doctorow’s somewhat humorous look on
the sunny side of this current administration. Among these final thoughts are looking
at how other countries manage to wrangle the vast reach of big tech companies
and seeing their moves against privacy overreach as a model of getting big tech
companies to respect customers and their rights, rather than finding ways to
exploit and work around them. However, I also appreciated Doctorow’s views on
the resurgence of unions and the important role that unions have played in
shaping better living and working conditions for Americans. Although worker
rights have been eroding, Doctorow notes that now is the best time to advance
membership and continue to organize for more rights. Like enshittification,
organizing for labor is also a complex process that is largely influenced by
environmental and social factors, and it seems like the time is right since
people are angry and desiring better conditions for their work and their lives.
It’s interesting that Doctorow can spend much of the book noting how conditions
continue to get worse in our lives due to our reliance and use of technology
but end the book with hope and a call to action.
Enshittification is an important book that many
people should read. It provides a useful insight into the problems that we
encounter on a daily basis, and how we feel so stuck in these services and
platforms we use (or maybe we don’t even notice their worsening conditions, and
we are just conditioned to accept them as they are). It not only presents the
reasons why things are continuing to grow worse, but it also explains the
stages that these companies go through to progressively pass the benefits from
users to companies to eventually bypass all benefits to only the corporation or
shareholders. This is a great book to use for a course, where students could use
Doctorow’s theory/framework to examine their own experiences with platforms or
companies, and try to propose solutions or their own call to action to improve
conditions or services. Highly recommended!
