Everything is getting worse. 

Cory Doctorow gave it a name three years ago: enshittification. Now he has written the best business book of the year, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. It will help you understand many things, oh so many things, about how and why the massive platforms are breaking down. And it’s not all bad news – the “What To Do About It” half of the book is filled with ideas about how to stop our slide into awfulness. 

But there’s no soft-pedaling it, it is also the most infuriating book you can imagine because we are being manipulated and lied to by unimaginably powerful forces that are making our lives worse on purpose for their benefit, damn their eyes. This is a must-read book if you feel digitally frustrated and want to understand the machine we’re trapped in.

1: This is the link to purchase the book from Cory Doctorow’s website as a hardcover, DRM-free ebook, or audiobook read by Doctorow. You can get it from Amazon (here’s my affiliate link) but after reading the book you’ll wish you hadn’t because screw that company.

2: Technically this is the second best business book of the year. The best is Apple In China: The Capture Of The World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee. It tells the almost unbelievable story about how Apple gained unprecedented scale and profit by transferring technology to China, but also inadvertently helped turn the country into a global high-tech competitor that now challenges Apple – and the rest of the world. Highly recommended.

Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022. It caught on because it’s perfect. The giant online platforms lock us in as customers and eliminate competition, then systematically destroy the things that made them popular by extracting more value for themselves.

You instinctively know exactly what it means. You’ve noticed that Google searches aren’t as good as they used to be and Amazon is a mess and there are too many subscriptions and web browsing involves wading through a cesspool of ads and AI slop and in general it seems like things change all the time and most of the changes make the world a tiny bit worse. 

The word enshittification describes a natural progression that Doctorow examines at length:

“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 giant pile of shit. . . . Enshittification—deliberately worsening a service—is only possible when people value that service to begin with. Enshittification is a game of seeking an equilibrium between how much people like the thing that locks them to the service and how much they hate the management of that service.”

Parenthetical note: although Doctorow does not write about it explicitly, my fear is that AI companies are going to speedrun the enshittification cycle, abusing businesses and end users almost immediately in a desperate quest to recoup their huge capital expenditures. Ready for ChatGPT to include advertisements and product suggestions? OpenAI is building its ad platform and will roll it out next year in ChatGPT to monetize its free users.

Doctorow has written a thorough and well-organized analysis of the sickness of our platforms – the economics that lead them to betray both buyers and sellers; the mergers and acquisitions that have led to a collapse of competition; the use of “apps” to evade antitrust law; and on the plus side, steps we could start taking right now to slow down or reverse the collapse.

The book begins with case studies of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Twitter, Google, Netflix, HP and many more, all of which started out as genuinely good and useful additions to the world before becoming enshittified – raising prices, requiring subscriptions for features that had been free, degrading service, and mistreating employees and customers. 

I’m not going to summarize the entire book. Instead I’m going to pull out just a couple of specific anecdotes about enshittified services that were new to me. Maybe they’ll make you want to read the book. At the least maybe you’ll share the feeling I had over and over: “Oh, those sneaky bastards.”

Uber introduced a revolutionary concept – reliable, on-demand transportation anywhere.

Many things about Uber have gone wrong. 

Here’s one: When you request an Uber ride, nearby drivers are alerted and given the chance to pick you up. Uber drivers are not all offered the same amount of pay for your ride. Uber’s algorithms constantly adjust the amount offered to each driver. 

It doesn’t work the way you expect.

The rate is lowered for the drivers who always accept jobs. It’s constantly adjusted, going down to the lowest price that will make the driver accept the job rather than logging off. Drivers that accept jobs readily in an effort to please the algorithm signal that they are easy pickings and can be enticed into driving for sub-starvation wages.

If a driver hesitates or is selective, the system bumps the rate up just enough to keep the driver engaged.

Doctorow describes it this way: “Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually — inevitably — lose to the tireless pricing robot.”

Uber charges more when the battery on your phone is low. If you only have 5% battery left, you are likely feeling a sense of urgency. You’ll take whatever price is offered without checking competitors. So Uber shows a surge price that’s 6-10% higher than it should be.

Lots of anecdotes and small scale journalist investigations say it’s true. Uber denies it and wishes we would stop bringing it up. In 2016 a former Uber executive admitted Uber monitors battery level and it’s definitely aware that a low battery would motivate riders to pay surge prices but he weakly added that Uber would never do that, oh my goodness the very idea, how could you believe, I’m feeling faint, someone please bring smelling salts.

Exploiting desperation for profits is totally something big companies will do if they can get away with it.

Amazon’s innovations at the beginning were so good! Huge selection, competitive prices, ultra-fast shipping, awesome! Most of us became Prime members, pre-paying for a year of shipping in advance, which happened also to lock us into doing all our shopping on Amazon but that was okay because, cool, Amazon.

Today it feels different. Jeff Bezos is a jerk, shipping is less reliable, and Amazon mistreats its drivers. (It also mistreats warehouse workers but it’s going to fix that problem by replacing 600,000 of them with robots.)

But for now let’s just look at searches. You’ve probably noticed that searching for things to buy on Amazon has become a terrible experience.

That’s on purpose.

Amazon makes $38 billion every year charging merchants for search placement. Doctorow has all the details:

“The companies that spend the most on ‘ads’ go to the top, even if they’re offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you’ll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon. Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, “it doesn’t count, we did it with an app.””

But there’s another way Amazon makes the world worse for all of us, everywhere we shop.

When merchants add all the fees together that get paid to Amazon – not just Amazon’s cut of the sales price but the various charges for warehousing, fulfillment, and probably a resort fee, who knows – Amazon sellers pay Amazon 45 to 51 cents on every dollar earned on the platform.

That’s far more than the margin that would be earned by the sellers anywhere else – but sellers have to be on Amazon to be seen. They have no alternative but to raise prices.

Ready? Here’s the worst part.

When merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required by Amazon to raise their prices everywhere else to match – even on their own direct-sales stores.

You are paying the Amazon tax even if you shop elsewhere – directly with the merchant or at Target or your neighborhood shop.

The word “enshittification” is starting to seem pretty on the nose, isn’t it? 

I got an email last week from the company that makes my garage door opener about a feature that will stop working unless I start paying for a monthly subscription. There are anecdotes in the book about baby bassinets that stop working unless more ransom is paid to the manufacturer. Otherwise you’d be able to put your second child to sleep in the same bed and the manufacturer would get nothing and that can’t be allowed in the era of enshitment. There are sous vide cooking wands that won’t work without a subscription, seriously.

And on and on.

Two of the forces that would normally prevent enshittification have broken down.

One is regulation. I just wrote about the long-term breakdown of federal regulation in the US. Doctorow also describes regulatory capture, when a regulatory agency created to act in the public interest is instead co-opted to serve the interest of the industry it is supposed to regulate. Once the regulatory agency is captured, companies are able to flout regulations meant to prevent them from harming the public. It’s so commonplace now that it’s taken for granted.

The other is competition. Doctorow summarizes the business landscape this way:

“From eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer, most industries are now dominated by five or fewer global companies. . . . Sector by sector, the global economy has collapsed into inbred cartels. These cartels are insulated from competition, they capture their regulators, and they lord their power over their workers. In other words, they are ripe for the enshittification practices of price gouging, deception, and out-and-out fraud.”

Enshittification is a wake-up call that gives you the knowledge to demand better, and it has specific suggestions about how to move beyond helplessness and find ways to regain control. Doctorow summarized his conclusions last year:

“We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

“We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

“Martin Luther King said ‘It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.’

“And it may be true that the law can’t force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

“But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn’t think you deserve it.

“And I think that’s pretty important.”