Overview
The following is a medium-length summary of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It .
Enshittification Summary (Second derivative)
"The internet is getting worse, fast". "We can make an new, good internet, one that's fit for human thriving."
The platform problem
A platform is "a system that connects both business customers and end users."
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).
Facebook, Amazon, Apple's iPhone, and Twitter all provide excellent examples of the application of the enshittification playbook.
Companies enshittify when they can. They stop enshittifying when under competitive or regulatory pressure. Adversarial interoperability is a technique for working around enshittification. Tech labor is another such mechanism.
Means of enshittification
Regulation is necessary for a healthy market and a healthy citizenry. Since the 1970's the US has been weak on anti-trust enforcement. Market concentration makes regulatory capture much easier to accomplish. Monopolies, monopsonies, or concentrated markets, have the means to enshittify due to the limited choices of their customers and business customers.
Big Tech leverages the legal system's unfamiliarity with modern technology to avoid liability. The fact that a company uses software -- "an app" -- to accomplish a task allows it to dodge regulation.
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 enshittify its systems.
Computers can be made to do things that their manufacturers did not intend. These unintended uses constitute a real value to which the owner of a computer is 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.
Big Tech has a hostile attitude towards organized labor. Consolidation and collusion in tech have resulted in diminishing value to tech employees over time.
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.
Fighting back
Some gig workers have hacked their employers' apps to increase their earnings in situations where the employer is paying an unfair wage.
Google did not permit it's employees to organize with a traditional labor union, however Google employees have on many occasions self-organized to meaningfully shift Google's direction. Notably there have several high-profile employee 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.
Part Four: The Cure
A better internet is possible. "This is an unprecedented moment for the war on corporate power." 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 they don't think you deserve it."
Europe is making great strides in anti-trust regulation -- "With its 2024 regulations, the EU is bringing structural separation to Big Tech."
The Biden administration did some trust-busting but Trump has overseen a major backlash to this movement. It's important to remember that the anti-trust revolution came from the people.
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."
Regarding privacy, some states have adopted meaningful privacy law and we are closer than ever to having a new privacy law at the federal level.
"Interoperability can be a powerful force for disenshittenification....Whatever the reason, right-to-repair laws have been passing at the state level, amid smart tactics from repair advocates...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..."
"Eventually, the shitty technology comes for us all...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."
