Overview
The following is a chapter-by-chapter summary of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It .
Enshittification Summary (First derivative)
Introduction
"The internet is getting worse, fast".
"We can make an new, good internet, one that's fit for human thriving."
Part One: The Natural History
Platform: "a system that connects both business customers and end users." Doctorow now muddies the waters by talking about intermediaries. Somehow platofrms replaced other intermediaries. And some intermediation is good, and some is bad.
The platform play, or the natural history of enshittification:
- Be good to your users.
- Abuse your users to make things better for your business customers.
- Abuse your business customers to profit from their value (as rent).
- The experience is shitty for both your users and your business customers, and remains that way, absent an external intervention (regulation).
Case Study: Facebook
Facebook attracted it's users with the promise never to spy on them. (Is that really true? I don't remember that promise.) It provided an easy way for it's users to communicate with each other.
Facebook then courted advertisers and publishers. It sold to them intelligence from spying on their users.
Over time Facebook raised prices on their advertisers whil devaluing their advertising product by allowing ad fraud at large scale. It used it's recommendation algorithm to require publishers to re-publish so much content on Facebook that facebook users stopped going to their websites.
Through spying and low quality content Facebook users had a much worse experience.
Case Study: Amazon
Amazon started by offering high-quality good at low cost, including low cost shipping.
Amazon's business customers at first received full price and Amazon handled the customer service.
As Amazon became ubiquitous it began to require discounts from its merchants. That trend only continued until Amazon was reaing most of the profit from every transaction.
In turn merchants raised prices and gamed the Amazon search listing, resulting in worse outcomes for Amazon's shoppers.
Case Study: iPhone
The iPhone "just worked". It was "slick and functional". Then came the app store, and Apple's "Walled garden". As long as you stayed within Apple's proscribed ecosystem you had a good experience.
Apple enticed app developers to their platform by taking a one-time fee for each app download, and 0% of any in-app spending.
In 2021, Apple even introduced a "don't spy on me" feature that applied to all third-party apps.
At the same time Apple added the same spying features to their own apps that Facebook used.
The Apple changed its policy to charge 30% of all sales on the App Store, including in-app purchases.
Case Study: Twitter
Twitter made it's data available for free by API at the outset. This allowed users and third-parties to greatly extend the functionality and benefits of Twitter. "It was playful. It was a party the whole world was invited to."
As Twitter grew it did not grow it's content moderation team to match the growth of the platform.
In 2022 Musk took over Twitter and saddled it with $10B+ in debt. He dismantled the content moderation team, and made verification something you could purchase. He made a number of other changes that were unexpected by the user base, affecting their experience negatively.
The resulting diminution of quality made Twitter less fun at best, and dangerous at worst, for it's users. And advertising revenue shrunk to the extent that there was some sense that there was an exodus of advertisers from the platform.
Part Two: The Pathology
Companies enshittify when they can. It is in their short-term interest.
Companies stop enshittifying when under competitive or regulatory pressure.
Adversarial interoperability is a technique for working around enshittification. In this practice, one reverse-engineers a product to identify weak points that can be leveraged to improve the user experience.
Tech labor is another, often untapped, mechanism for battling enshittification. When workers organize, and refuse to enshittify, their companies may sometimes comply with their demands, for a while, at least.
Part Three: The Epidemiology
How is enshittification spreading?
The End of Competition
Since the 1970's the US has been weak on anti-trust enforcement.
Anti-trust action, when it does happen, often has a significant effect. But the Big Tech firms just have to wait, delay, and stall implementation until the next administration takes office, and subsequently repeals or weakens the action.
Monopolies, monopsonies, or concentrated markets, have the means to enshittify due to the limited choices of their customers and business customers.
The Death of Competition Kills Regulation, Too
Regulation is necessary for a healthy market and a healthy citizenry.
Market concentration makes regulatory capture -- "when a company suborns its regulator and teams up with it to screw over customers, rivals, and suppliers" -- much easier to accomplish. "A hundred companies are a mob, a rabble. Five companies are a cartel."
"With an App"
Big Tech leverages the legal system's unfamiliarity with modern technology to avoid liability. In many cases the fact that a company uses software -- "an app" -- to accomplish a task allows it to successfully argue that it's activity should be regulated differently, or not at all.
For example, "Uber argues that it's not an employer because it directs its workers with an app."
It's Not Wage Theft If We Do It With an App: Uber's Algorithmic Wage Discrimination
Uber utilizes algorithmic wage discrimination. It's not a neat hack. It's gross exploitation and it directly contradicts the spirit if not the letter of US labor laws.
Reverse-Centaurs and Chickenization
"A reverse-centaur is a machine that uses a human to accomplish more than the machine could manage on it's own. Amazon uses reverse-centaurs to emiserate their delivery drivers.
Chickenization refers to a practice that is common in chicken farming: "a system of total control over workers who have to borrow money to pay you for the privilege of working for you , and to whom you owe nothing."
Arize, a call-center operator, uses chickenization to emiserate their workers, which they treat as independent contractors. They require them to pay for their own equipment, and and pay regular access fees to be permitted to work.
Twiddling
Twiddling is the "process of changing costs, prices, recommendation weights, and search rankings through automated or semi-automated means." Since the tech firm is in controll of this process, it can use it to incrementally evolve it's system towards further enshittification.
The End of Self-Help
Modern computers are universal. This universality means that they are hackable. In other words, computers can be made to do things that their manufacturers did not intend.
These unintended uses constitute real value to which the owner of a computer may feel entitled. In recent decades, copyright law in the US and worldwide has been modified to criminalize hacking. This claw back of value from the consumer to the manufacturer is a form of enshittification.
The End of Labor Power
Big Tech has a hostile attitude towards organized labor and labor rights more generally. Consolidation and collusion in tech have resulted in diminishing value to tech employees over time.
Tech Rights Are Worker Rights: Para and Tuyul Apps
There are examples of gig workers who have hacked their employers' apps to increase their earnings in situations where the employer is paying an unfair wage. In some cases third parties have emerged to facilitate this hacking. These apps are sometimes called "tuyul" in reference go a stealing spirit in Indonesian folklore.
Although not a substitute for proper labor law enforcement, these hacks are an improvement to the labor conditions of gig workers.
The Google Walkouts, Tech Solidarity, and Tech Unions
Google's original search product was exceptional --- it was so advanced at it's inception is seemed like magic. On this foundation Google built an empire and in the process it hired many bright and motivated employees. Google did not permit them to organize with a traditional labor union, however Google employees have on many occasions self-organized to meaningfully shift Google's direction, at least for a while. Notably there have several high-profile walkouts.
Since 2021 Google seems to be pushing back on these efforts by firing employees that speak out about issues with Google's products or practices. In 2023 and 2024 Google fired more than 13 thousand employees. Presumably Google employees have little ability to agitate at this point.
Rent Seeking and Technofeudlism
Is enshittification just a synonym for capitalism? No. The radical economist Yanis Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system that prefers profit over rent. Enshittification is aligned with rent-seeking. As companies become larger, through the "benefit" of regulatory capture and anti-competitive behavior they have created the opportunity to enrich their shareholders through the collection of rents rather than through innovation.
Part Four: The Cure
A better internet is possible.
Antitrust is Back, Baby
Europe is making great strides in anti-trust regulation and has ruled against Big Tech firms many times. Canada is also making progress in this area.
During the Biden administration, trust-busters were put in positions of power in the administration. Of course much of their progress has been rolled back by the Trump administration.
Antitrust under Trump
The Biden administration's anti-trust turn was real and significant. Lina Kahn in particular went after the biggest tech firms. Trump has overseen a major backlash to this movement. It's important to remember that the anti-trust revolution came from the people. (A "grassroots" movement which can outlast presidential administrations.)
Bringing Back Regulation
Wat are the roots of regulatory capture? Take the FCC as an example. The FCC has a revolving door, it has been assaulted by the American business lobby, and it's public comments process has been misused.
Anti-monopoly is a flywheel: "competition-enhancing regulation reduces profits and clears space for new companies that pose an innovative threat to the big incumbents, which must spend their competition-eroded profits to compete. This leaves big companies with less money, and thus less power, making it easier to pass even more muscular regulation. As a sector grows more competitive and less cozy, the companies in it start to police one another's lies and cheating in public and before regulators."
Privacy First
We are seeing a procession of ever-improving privacy bills being introduced in Congress.
Some states have adopted meaningful privacy laws.
We are closer than ever to having a new privacy law at the federal level.
The EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act
"With its 2024 regulations, the EU is bringing structural separation to Big Tech."
"we have to choose: Either we make the platforms more powerful in hopes that they'll use that power to fix the problems they've created, or we make the platforms less powerful so that the people they'cve failed can escape from them."
Administrability
"So what makes a policy administrable? Two key considerations here are (1) how hard it is to spot rule-breaking, and (2) how hard it is to agree on whether the rule was broken."
Intermediaries can grow so powerful that they usurp the relationships between the individuals that rely on them. Applying the end-to-end principle we get end-to-end intermediaries that can be quite helpful in avoiding/reducing enshittification.
Bringing Back Self-Help
"Interoperability can be a powerful force for disenshittenification." The DMCA in particular is a major hindrance to efforts to implement interoperability.
The Strange Tale of Beeper Mini
For years, non-Apple devices were excluded from Apple's end-to-end encrypted messaging service, iMessage. In 2024, a teenager names James Gill hacked iMessage. The CEO of Beeper, "a company that specialized in interoperable 'bridges' between different messaging tools", used Gill's hack to give Andriod users true interoperability with iPhone users for messaging. Apple battled Beeper over this and eventually Beeper relented. Eventually Apple implemeneted RCS to provide interoperability of messaging between Android and iPhone. Possibly this was due in part to pressure from European regulators.
Repealing the Law of "Felony Contempt of Business Model"
"Whatever the reason, right-to-repair laws have been passing at the state level, amid smart tactics from repair advocates, who have split the anti-repair coalition by introducing domain-specific repair laws, rather than going after across-the-board repair rights."
"And with the European Union passing its own far-reaching right-to-repair legislation, manufacturers are increasingly required to either sell repairable goods all over the world or endure the cost, complexity, and risk of producing different models for the EU market and for everywhere else."
Restoring Labor
"Eventually, the shitty technology comes for us all..."
"The scarcity that was at the root of tech workers' power has ended, and their power has evaporated."
"Throughout labor history, there's only ever been one mechanism that working people could use to protect their pay and working conditions, through times of labor scarcity and labor supply: unions."
We should lend support to unions and those trying to establish them.
There's Bad News and There's Good News
"This is an unprecedented moment for the war on corporate power."
Two trends are contributing to enshittification: Market consolidation and the effect of software having increasing control over physical reality.
Globalization is helping to make the anti-trust movement more effective, as the effects of monopolization are felt similarly around the world.
The Trump administration might actually be inclined to take some anti-trust action in his second term. This would be done selectively, as a way for him to punish his enemies.
Conclusion: Is Enshittification Just Capitalism?
We can and should apply current laws and create new laws to make the execs of large firms "fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it."
