Anita Jain at Washington Monthly has put together an article that explains much about the way things work. It’s a review of a new book from Cory Doctorow: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
From Jain’s review:
The Cory Doctorow Doctrine
Jain summarizes how it works:
Doctorow takes us through the how and why of enshittification. How tech companies enshittify proceeds in four steps: 1) first, platforms are good to their individual customers, 2) they abuse their individuals to improve things for their business customers, 3) next, they undercut their business customers to keep more profit, and 4) finally, they have turned into a giant pile of shit.
Jain cites a number of examples. Here’s one:
Enshittification is a ride through all the bait-and-switch tactics, financial trickery, and gatekeeping to which Big Tech platforms subject users. A prime example is how Google began degradingits always reliable workhorse of a product, search, in the mid-aughts, once there was no more room for its flagship segment, which had captured a 90 percent global market share, to grow. In a strategy laid bare in internal memos and emails in the Department of Justice exhibits in one of its two monopoly cases against the corporation, Google made users input more queries into the search bar to get the answers, leading to more ads and more revenue for Google. “After all, even if Google couldn’t find more people to search, or more ways to use search, they could certainly find new ways to charge for search,” Doctorow observes. “In other words, once Google stopped growing, it started squeezing.”
My own pet peeve is the way Apple removed headphone jacks from their devices. That move forced people to turn to Bluetooth devices like Apple ear buds if they want to listen in private, or Bluetooth speakers if they want better sound. Great for Apple, not so great for end users.
Paul Krugman tackled this back in July with The General Theory of Enshittification. Krugman talks about network effects where companies with a lot of users tend to attract even more. It’s not limited to tech companies.
Suppose you run a business whose product, whatever it may be, is subject to network effects: the more people using it, the more attractive it is to other current or potential users. Social media platforms like Facebook or TikTok are the currently obvious examples, but the logic works for services like Uber or physical goods like electric vehicles too.
What’s the profit-maximizing strategy for your business? The answer seems obvious: offer really good value to your customers at first, to build up the size of your network, then enshittify — soak the customer base you’ve built. The enshittification could take the form of charging higher prices, but it could also involve reducing quality, forcing people to watch ads, etc. Or it could involve all of the above.
Sound familiar? (Cough, cough, Tesla, cough.) There’s more to it as well, and it’s not good in a different way:
For users, it’s all too natural to see the degradation of their experience as a morality play. Once upon a time, the fantasy goes, there were nice guys who ran their businesses in the public interest. Then, however, they became corrupt, or were forced to behave badly by venture capital, or something.
But they were never nice guys. Doctorow is good on this:
Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There’s very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital very early on, long before he started fucking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?
As Tessio says in The Godfather, it was always “only business.”
The thing is, the enshittification cycle also messes with the heads of the people running these companies. They were loved when the public imagined, falsely, that they were the good guys. Now they aren’t. And it drives them crazy.
Which is why the tech bros have become backers of Trumpism and worse. Their fee fees have them butt hurt because they’re not getting the adulation they think they’re entitled to get.
Thing is, one of the defenses against enshittification is goverment that safeguards consumer interests and imposes regulations that hold companies to account. If you have a recent iPhone, you can charge it with a USB-C cable because the European Union forced Apple to give up its proprietary cable. Elon Musk’s chain saw assault on government is the fever dream of end stage capitalism.
UPDATE: Krugman has more on how the Tech Bros have become so toxic. Here’s how it concludes:
But here’s the crucial point: Their rage wouldn’t matter if their wealth weren’t so vast and we didn’t have a political system so corrupted by money. In a more equal society with a less corrupted democracy, people expressing the views we’re hearing from the likes of Peter Thiel or Marc Andreesen would be treated as cranks. In fact, they’d probably be hiding their opinions.
If we now have a political discourse that prominently features crazy ideas, it’s because we have a political system that has made some crazy people incredibly wealthy and lets them translate that wealth into power.
Read The Whole Thing.
Let us all thank Doctorow for giving the word we need at this time: enshittification.
But wait — there’s more!
Jain concludes her review with a teaser. Doctorow will be releasing a book in 2026 dealing with A.I. It will not be pretty.
I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can't be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people's money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don't get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
emphasis added
This came from a question after a talk he gave on A.I.
…"So, you're saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that's going to burst and take the whole economy with it?"
I said, "Yes, that's right."
Doctorow’s best guess is there is no way to avoid it. The only answer he sees is to pop the bubble ASAP, to stop it from getting even bigger before the inevitable happens. It’s been noted that if the portion of the economy devoted to A.I. is disregarded, the rest of the economy would look like an economy in recession.
Batten down the hatches. There’s a storm coming, and it’s not a great time to be trashing the SNAP program.
