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.”