Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory DoctorowMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I can't recommend this enough. In fact, I think it should be required reading for anyone sick and tired of the general enshittification we've all been experiencing.
And while it's a word we all use now, or at least I have been, I should point out that Cory Doctorow, wonderful novelist and even better non-fiction writer, was the one to COIN the word.
That's no small feat. And this is no cash-grab of a book, either. It's an extremely coherent and exhaustive analysis of where we are through the lens of how the technological feudalism began and how it transformed from a value-laden service into the nasty bullshit factory it has become.
Google, Meta/Facebook, Twitter, HP, Microsoft, and we can't forget Elon. It's all part and parcel of a great enshittification that begins with undercutting and driving everyone else out of business by subsidies, graduating to squeezing the end users in favor of the suppliers, then squeezing the suppliers as well because you're officially too big to lose or give a shit about anyone but your shareholders.
Sound familiar?
And because it's becoming such a standard business model, we now have subscription services for our car seats, printer ink that will brick your printer unless you pay a monthly rent, and much darker features across the board, including but not limited to medical devices, fresh drinking water, any DRM enshittified software or books you buy which can go poof at any time, or the fact that the prices you pay for anything can change on the fly to reflect how your software's spy algorithms have determined that it can SQUEEZE you just that little bit more.
Sound familiar?
Well, Cory Doctorow doesn't just give us rage bait in this book. He goes into detail about history, anti-trust laws, regulation, unions, and how each and every one of us can fight back realistically. And I'm not saying we have to get our pitchforks from the pitchfork emporium, either. I'm saying that we've SEEN the changes in a lot of our own lifetimes. And while those changes DID enshittify, there were always brief periods where it DID get better. The point is to codify safeguards DURING those transformative periods to prevent monopolies from taking over.
As they very much have.
So take the early days of the internet with hope, people. Ma Bell seemed monolithic. And then we had a brief spell of freedom. The point is not to go the unregulated path again. Insist on healthy business practices. The current businesses are imploding. We have the know-how, the will to create good things. It is entirely possible--assuming we don't let the predators and the IP litigators (all on the side of the businesses) set such a pace that they will start making us rent the very air we breathe.
Feudalism, indeed. Land owners. Allowing us to produce our own lives on the land THEY own. Sound familiar? All the tech we keep buying. All the smart features. They're preventing us from OWNING anything we buy. It's ALL rented. One way or another.
Public outcry against enshittification WILL happen, whether or not we call it that officially. Too many people are already at the ends of their ropes.
Will change come peacefully? It can. People just need to build something that far outperforms the middlemen who have us all by the balls and then prevent it from being sold out to the enshittifiers.
Doctorow's enthusiasm and optimism is truly a marvel to read.
Again, don't sleep on this.
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