Enshittification
Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
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4.4 • 10 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Enshittification: it’s not just you—the internet sucks now. Here’s why, and here’s how we can disenshittify it.
We’re living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.
Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution.
When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say “things are getting worse.” He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better).
The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users—and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die.
Doctorow’s argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror.
Here, now, in Enshittification the book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and—most important—how they can be undone.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
