Enshittification

Trump and American Enshittification

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IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK

By Rick Wilson

You feel it and see it, everywhere, like an ambient, grating sensation that everything is worse, and getting more so by the day.

Your airline seat is narrower than it was ten years ago, and you paid extra for it. Your insurance company denied the claim through a system designed so that appealing it takes more days than the cancer patient has left without treatment. Your groceries come in a smaller box at a higher price. The brand you love was bought out by private equity and cheapened, a logo stuck on something made in a Chinese slave factory.

The app that used to just work now wants a subscription. The doctor gets four minutes. The customer service line is a machine that says it understands, then hangs up. The hotel charges a resort fee for a resort that doesn’t exist. Every institution you interact with has quietly discovered that it can degrade the thing it sells you and lose almost nothing, because where exactly are you going to go?

Cory Doctorow named this process enshittification, and the word went viral because everyone in America recognized their own life in it.

They’re good to you at first, because they need you. Worse once you’re stuck. Worse still once being stuck is the entire business model. He was describing tech platforms, but the idea scales to the whole country.

This piece is bleak, even for me, because thus far there’s no immmediate cure for enshittification [ . . . ] Read full piece on Substack

The Cory Doctorow Doctrine 

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Corey Doctorow
Corey Doctorow

Cory Doctorow’s “Enshittification” explains why Tech platforms like Google and Amazon rot over time—squeezing users, businesses, and workers.

By Anita Jain

In the last two years, iPhone customers may have been pleasantly surprised to see a standardized USB-C charger port, allowing them to dispose of Apple’s custom Lightning wires. The world’s 1.5 billion iPhone users can thank Europe for forcing Apple’s change. The tech giant decided to switch all its new iPhones, determining it too costly to produce the USB-C port just for Europe.

It’s only in recent years that consumers have woken up to Big Tech’s power over our attention, moods, privacy, stock market, economy, and wallets—over us. It’s fortunate then that with our heads buried in our phones scrolling through social media, consumer advocates, regulatory agencies, and litigators have been sounding the alarm on surveillance and monopoly power and delving into the drier nuts-and-bolts details of right-to-repair and interoperability regulations, like the one that led to Apple standardizing its charging port.

Prolific tech critic Cory Doctorow, whose pronouncements make him akin to a town crier in the digital square, is among those leading the charge. After coining and popularizing the term “enshittification” to mean how tech platforms degrade over time, Doctorow has bestowed his latest book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, with the title.

His book, derived mainly from his blog Pluralistic, will be eye-opening to consumers and those like me who are already familiar with Big Tech’s bullying methods. (I’m the editorial director of the Open Markets Institute, a think tank that seeks to regulate Big Tech monopolies and curb corporate power.)

Enshittification is a ride through all the bait-and-switch tactics, financial trickery, and gatekeeping to which Big Tech platforms subject users. A prime example is how Google began degrading its always reliable workhorse of a product, search, in the mid-aughts, once there was no more room for its flagship segment, which had captured a 90 percent global market share, to grow. In a strategy laid bare in internal memos and emails in the Department of Justice exhibits in one of its two monopoly cases against the corporation, Google made users input more queries into the search bar to get the answers, leading to more ads and more revenue for Google. “After all, even if Google couldn’t find more people to search, or more ways to use search, they could certainly find new ways to charge for search,” Doctorow observes. “In other words, once Google stopped growing, it started squeezing.”

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