Enshittification
Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
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- 13,99 €
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Enshittification: It’s not just you—the internet sucks now. It’s been enshittified. That was no accident, and it’s not gonna fix itself. Here’s how we’ll disenshittify it so we can have a new, good internet.
We are all living through the Enshittocene—the Great Enshittening—a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are being turned into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.
The once-glorious internet has degenerated into “platforms” that rose to dominance because they delivered convenient and delightful services efficiently and reliably. But once we were locked in to those services, the tech bosses turned on us, relying on our dependency to keep us using the services even as they got worse and worse. The platform bosses did the same to the companies that had flocked to their services to sell stuff to us. Once we were all locked in—businesses and users—the tech companies stripped out all utility, save the bare minimum needed to stave off total collapse.
In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow shows us where it comes from: not the iron laws of economics, or the great forces of history, but specific policy choices made by powerful people who ignored every warning about the consequences of those choices. These are choices that can be undone. Enshittification is a Big Tech disassembly manual, a road map for the seizure of the means of computation. It is a diagnosis, and it is a cure.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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This trenchant treatise from journalist and novelist Doctorow (The Internet Con) explores how and why the internet has devolved into a wasteland of scams, ads, and surveillance. Platforms from Google to Apple to Facebook have deliberately worsened themselves, he argues—as their users "remain trapped in their rotting carcasses unable to escape"—by pursuing monopolistic goals including limited competition, regulatory capture, and diminished worker power, all of which has rendered these platforms not only too big to fail but "too big to care." Some infuriating examples of callousness include Amazon's "mountain of junk fees" for merchants, which make up "nearly 50%" of the company's revenue, and Uber's "algorithmic wage discrimination," which lowers the rates of drivers who work longer hours. The book's wonky discussions of techno-feudalism and IP are balanced by the author's wry sense of humor—"For a man with a dick-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos sure has an abiding hatred of our kidneys"—especially his deeply held and repeatedly emphasized contempt for the "extractive" inkjet printer market (the "most depressing category of goods imaginable"). The book staves off doom and gloom with a latter section that analyzes potential remedies, among them antitrust efforts like those pursued by former FTC chair Lina Kahn, recent legislation in Europe, and the unionization of tech workers. The result is a razor-sharp yet subtly optimistic look at the soul-sucking state of the internet.
