Cory Doctorow. Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got a lot worse and what to do about it (Verso, 2025)
You must read this wonderful book
Argentine tango private lessons in Canberra. Friends there. Friends here. Art and collage-making. Writing poems and stories. Yoga. Walking. Too many things in my life, all wonderful and necessary but something had to give. And it was blogs. So after many months I must finally write this.
I read tons of books and every so often I want to tell everyone: ‘You must read this one!’ The following is such a book. And the author’s coinage, the title of this book, made it into the dictionaries and was the Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year for 2022. As we know from our bitter experience, it’s a definite phenomenon, a reality that detrimentally affects us all every day.
Cory Doctorow’s book defines enshittification as: ‘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.’ (p. 141)
He outlines the natural history of enshittification.
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 those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.
‘The pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you’ll start seeing it, too.’ (10)
He describes and analyses the process with corporations like Facebook, the iPhone and Amazon. Interesting that Jeff Bezos’ original brand name for Amazon was Relentless. How did it go from a company that got packages to people efficiently to what it is today?
The silken ribbon seducing us
Like Facebook, it started with a large surplus, some of which it allocated at first to customers. This was Stage One, when it’s good to users. First it’s the silken ribbon then it’s the iron chains to lock you in to that service. The Amazon Prime membership locks people in to Amazon. Products are sold with digital rights management (DRM), a form of encryption designed to force you to view or listen to these digital products using apps that Amazon controls. ‘Break up with Amazon and delete your apps, and you will lose all the media you’ve ever bought from the platform.’ (p. 21) It’s a high switching cost.
There is a trend to market consolidation across every sector. Sector by sector, the global economy has collapsed into inbred cartels.
Theft and deception from Tesla to inkjet printers
‘The digitization of every industry opens up new opportunities for twiddling and, with it, intensifying enshittification. Enshittification is coming for everything.’ (p. 320)
Digitised computation spies on you and rips you off. Tesla pioneered the idea of a car that had features you couldn’t access unless you paid a monthly subscription or onetime unlock fee. Some Tesla automation features (the deceptively named “self-driving” system) have to be bought as monthly subscriptions. ‘In some Teslas the battery will no longer power your car after it reaches 50% discharge unless you pay for it every mth. The battery still has charge; it just refuses to deliver that charge to the car.’ (p. 321-2)
And other car companies copied them. Features like this have been refined and normalised. All new cars come with surveillance technology that feeds your private information to data brokers. Their diagnostic systems are designed to extract rent from you by blocking third-party service and parts. Things are rented, not sold, and vanish when a car changes hands.
Cars, bassinets, gadgets, insulin pumps etc are all turning into inkjet printers, ‘the most extractive and depressing category of goods imaginable. Printers themselves are getting progressively worse, with HP now routinely tricking its customers into signing up for ink “subscriptions” whose terms of service allow HP to data-mine the documents you print on them and also brick your printer when the company decides it’s time for you to buy a new one.’ (p. 323-4)
Too big to fail, too big to jail
Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then it becomes too big to care. Doctorow points out that antitrust law was designed to fight that apathy and force companies to care. He writes that unions and ‘trustbusting’ are examples of working people using democratic means to rein in the undemocratic, autocratic power of corporations and the ultra-rich.
Trump’s expansion of cryptocurrency is making things worse. Cryptocurrencies, the author tells us, are near-perfect vehicles for wild speculation, money laundering and scams. – Isn’t that the point of inventing such a thing? Doctorow warns that expanding their centrality to the US economy will precipitate the kinds of crises that previous speculative bubbles caused, such as when exotic mortgage derivatives gave rise to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.
But there’s hope! (For the rest of us, at least.) Before Brexit happened, the British Parliament passed a bill – the Digital Markets Unit, a 70-engineer-strong, tech-focused department of the Competition and Markets Authority. It was the best staffed technical comp unit in the world. The fact that it got stuffed up by Brexit didn’t matter because it still had all the damning information and irrefutable evidence of how Big Tech was deceiving and egregiously exploiting the public, small businesses and government. And the EU – being likewise scammed by Big Tech – have the enforcement powers.
The good news
‘In a heartwarming show of post-Brexit cooperation, the European Commission used the UK DMU’s market studies as blueprints for enforcement actions in Europe that saw US tech giants like Apple and Google hit with fines running to billions of euros. The EC also relied heavily on the DMU’s studies in crafting new laws in the form of the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.’ (p. 327) And Japan and South Korea copied Europe and UK, building counterparts that otherwise would have been prohibitively expensive.
‘Amid the instability of an isolationist, authoritarian US lashing out at its enemies and the economic chaos that will arise from turning the US economy into a cryptocurrency casino, there will be motive, means, and opportunity for other counties to develop their own tech tools, networks, clouds, social media, and messaging.’ (p. 330)
Reversing and halting the creeping enshittification of our world
Doctorow presents uplifting evidence that now is an unprecedented moment for a war on corporate power. A global movement is surging. ‘All over the world, there is muscular action underway to restore competition, regulation, interoperability, and labor power, which is good, because at the same time, all over the world, we are experiencing an unprecedented wave of enshittification, too.’ (p. 319)
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