Enshittification- How it Happens and What Can Be Done

 Enshittification: When Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow

Enshittification book cover

Author and advocate 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!