Overview
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It is a long-form argument regarding particular deficiencies of Big Tech and how they should be remedied primarily through increased competition.
In the following article I will attempt a succinct summary of the book, as well as a light critique. This summary was developed in three forms -- a first derivative, a second derivative, and a third. Each of these is shorter than the one that came before. On this page you'll read the shortest (3rd derivative). A critique will appear at the end.
If you're looking for more detail, see the second derivative, and for a chapter-by-chapter summary, see the first derivative.
Enshittification Summary
"The internet is getting worse, fast". "We can make an new, good internet, one that's fit for human thriving."
"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."
"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."
The 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).
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.
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.
Since the 1970's the US has been weak on anti-trust enforcement, resulting in regulatory capture by industry. In recent decades, copyright law in the US and worldwide has been modified to criminalize hacking. This claw back of value (the right to repair and interoperate) from the consumer to the manufacturer is a form of enshittification.
Cause for hope
Europe is making great strides in anti-trust regulation -- "With its 2024 regulations, the EU is bringing structural separation to Big Tech."
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."
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..."
Critique
I agree with much of what Doctorow has to say. I too lament the apparent degradation of the "free and open internet". That said no argument is without flaws and it is worth paying some attention to the ways in which an argument might be falling short. Here are my quibbles with this book...
This book has a lot of tech history in it. As someone who has lived through most of that history, I found it not as compelling reading as the more structural elements of his arguments.
Doctorow seems to want to stop his analysis at the political-economic level, focusing on anti-trust, unionization, and right to repair as remedies. He is clear that enshittification is not just capitalism, but it isn't clear to me that there isn't some other more fundamental force at play here.
What are the drivers of enshittification? Greed, certainly. What about climate? Can we see this degradation of consumer value as part of the Polycrisis? As we experience a crisis of energy availability and distribution, is enshittification an example of what approaching and exceeding the limits of growth looks like? And if we can take this larger perspective on the problem, might we find other remedies -- fixes to the underlying confluence of collapsing systems we see all around us?
Another criticism I have is that Doctorow seems to be elevating a particular problem regarding the behavior of Tech firms and how that makes the internet less useful for some people to the status of a major cause. But before joining up, perhaps we should consider the opportunity cost? There are many severe problems in the world -- environmental degradation, wealth inequality, social injustice, war, climate change, etc., etc.
While the proposed solutions -- anti-trust regulation and unionization -- are very worthy, they may not be justified by enshittification nearly as much as they are justified by their application to these other severe global problems. In some sense, the focus on the worsening of Twittter and Facebook seems merely to be a first world problem. It's not to say that people shouldn't strive to make the internet better -- they certainly should. But maybe we should be focusing more on the needs of the non-virtual world at this point.
