How wonderful to invent a term, and then find out that it has been declared Word of the Year, as the Macquarie Dictionary did in 2024. ‘Enshittification’ captures perfectly our frustration and impotence when huge multinational create and change their own rules, deliberately degrading their products and holding us hostage to price-hikes, leaving us to rue that we had ever been drawn in by what seemed to hold such promise.
Enshittification has four stages:
- First, platforms are good to their users
- Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers
- Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves
- Finally, they have become a great pile of shit (p. 10)
His main targets are Facebook, Amazon, IPhone (Apple), Twitter and Google. He addresses the first four as these as separate case studies, but for all of them the process of enshittification is the same. But it’s not just these four companies: in effect, anything that is ‘smart’ holds you hostage to the manufacturer, even though you have purchased it. So we see a SNOO Smark Sleeper ‘smart’ basinette that rocks a baby to sleep suddenly demanding $20 per month for them NOT to disable the features, if you should dare to use it for a second child, or sell it to someone else. We see ‘smart’ cars requiring mechanics who have the capabilities to repair them to apply (and you to pay) for a code to override the engine being disabled. Even artificial eyes, grafted onto patients’ eyes, can be ‘bricked’ by the company should it fall into difficulties. If “there’s an app for that” then use of the app propels you into a different legal realm where the design of the app pre-empts all other claims to intellectual property of the content.
The constant screwing of competitors, users and customers; the cynical takeover of competitors and quashing of their products; the ongoing adjustment of ‘terms and conditions’ where ongoing participation signifies consent – these companies are appalling. But the cost of leaving, and the withdrawal of face-to-face alternatives by government departments and banks draws us more and more under their control.
The book is not necessarily about AI but he introduces the idea of ‘reverse centaur’ here, which he takes up in more detail in his most recent book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. The mythological centaur, you’ll remember, was a man on top with the legs of a horse, or in automation terms, a worker who has some kind of tool that lets them do more than they could do on their own (p. 121). A farmer with a tractor is a centaur, and so too is a cashier using a register that adds up the groceries and tells how much change to give (oh! how I would have loved such a machine when I worked the register at a neighbourhood hardware store!) [On the other hand, I could and still can work out change, which is something that I doubt many cashiers could do today]. But a reverse-centaur is a machine that uses a human to accomplish more than the machine could manage on its own (p.120). In particular he looks at the working conditions of Amazon delivery drivers, as exposed on the documentary The Great Amazon Heist, which you can watch on SBS On Demand.
He picks up on Yanis Varoufakis’ thesis expressed in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, where technology was transformed after the 2008 GFC from a primarily profit-seeking enterprise to a primarily rent-seeking enterprise (p. 197) Because the tech giants control the ‘factors of production’, they are imposing a form of rent onto the rest of us. Microsoft Office can now only be bought as a subscription, not an outright product that you own; a purchased e-book can be removed from the platform whenever the app decides; a digital subscription to a magazine only gives you access to the archive as long as you keep paying the subscription fee.
The power of these tech companies over politics is daunting. When Doctorow was half-way through the writing of this book Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term where, with Elon Musk, he set about dismantling the legislative restraints that had been placed on some of their power during the Biden era. The legal power they wield is disproportionate too, and often wielded against third parties: a blind person is allowed to break proprietary software to upload it to a text reader, but a sighted person risks huge fines in assisting them to do so. The financial penalty for an author allowing a purchaser to move their purchased audiobook to another platform break DRM software would cover the purchase of thousands of CDs.
After cataloguing this world of woe, Doctorow finishes by outlining the ‘cure’: a noble enterprise, but one which he does not carry off convincingly. He argues that competition, regulation, interoperability and tech worker power are four forces which discipline technology firms. The only competition I can see amongst the tech firms is their race to enshittify everything they touch. Thank heavens for government-owned enterprises like ABC, BBC and to a lesser extent SBS, but they are under huge pressure from tech firms and the media companies that are in a love/hate relationship with them to enshittify their own offerings. Competition regulators all over the world seem to be toothless. Privacy policies are presented as an all-or-nothing ‘agreement’ and I don’t think that it’s in the conspiracy-realm theory to suspect that your phone is listening to you when an email advertising something you discussed suddenly appears in your inbox. When tech-bros parade around with their heavy-framed smart glasses, all privacy is gone. Attempts to force tech companies to pay for news led to Facebook pulling community pages before grudgingly allowing access again- and this fight hasn’t finished. Attempts to limit social media for children (which I always saw as more a way of empowering parents and schools to say ‘no’ than actually outsmarting a tech-savvy adolescent) are being adopted, but always under scrutiny for their ineffectiveness- which lies in the lands of the tech companies anyway. He looks at the successful Silicon Valley tech workers who walked out a Google as a form of power, but he’s looking at dead men (because they are overwhelmingly men) walking. AI will sap any power they might have.
This is an eye-opening book, but I came away feeling enshittified, rather than empowered. I know that his next book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI takes up the issue of AI, but I fear that his faith in ‘cures’, which are being dismantled and rendered impotent before our very eyes, is not reassuring. But if you want specific examples of enshittification (an index would have been much appreciated) and to feel oppressed and angry, then this is your book.
My rating: 8.5/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library (at least he’ll get the Lending Rights payment directly, I guess)
Read because: I had heard the hype about the term.
