Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (2025)

This is a delightful (Doctorow is a whimsical novelist/technologist who rarely pulls his punches) and informative book about the enshittification of the internet and, thanks to digital's colonization of the rest of the world - think the "internet of things" - of almost everything, as well. In its bare bones, Doctorow traces how and why the internet went from being initially "good" - i.e. we gained connections to nearly everyone in the world and to vast stores of previously difficult to tap knowledge and, crucially, we were able to choose how we wanted to use it - to the current enshittocene (one of Doctorow's many variants on the basic pun). This enshittification follows from the tech giants' essentially rigging the internet, first against individuals, i.e. "consumers," then against companies/publishers, i.e. "producers." In more technical economic terms, the tech giants have captured "rents" - profits above and beyond what they could achieve in a truly competitive market. Doctorow helpfully explains how this came about. Four guardians of the good internet were undermined: 1) competition 2) regulation 3) "self-help" 4) tech workers. Let me briefly explain 2 through 4. 2) Doctorow devotes considerable attention to what he considers the highly deleterious doctrine of the "consumer welfare standard" regarding monopolies. Promoted by jurists and scholars such as Robert Bork and Richard Posner from the 1970s, this doctrine claimed that monopolies per se were not bad. One had to assess whether they, in fact, artificially jacked up prices. Doctorow shows how giant tech lobbying in the naive '90s led to federal regulations such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (1998), which perversely gave tech "digital locks" on their intellectual property. Even after a comsumer had purchased software or an app, for example, it was now a felony crime to tamper with the app. This statute alone opened the gates to massive rent capture. Previously, I had only been aware of Section 230 (I believe) of the 1996 revised Communications Act, which declared tech giants to be merely "platforms," and hence not responsible for the content published on said platforms. The mistakes of the '90s were more numerous and far-reaching than I had realized. 3) By "self-help" Doctorow means the ability of consumers or users to modify digital software and products they have purchased. When this was possible - i.e. before the DCMA - it helped to keep the tech companies honest. Doctorow adds that this self-help didn't rely only, or even mainly, on individual users, who were, of course, at a technological disadvantage vis-a-vis the giants. Rather, what he calls "adversarial interoperability" - the ability of, and incentive for, other companies to offer software that was interoperable - prevented the giants from gaming the system. 4) Finally, until the last couple of years, tech workers were relatively few in number, and hence had real leverage over their employers. Many of them were also genuinely committed to the lofty ideals promulgated by the giants - "connect everyone in the world" (Facebook), "make the world's knowledge universally and freely available" (Google). This allowed them to say "no" to at least some of their bosses' schemes. That leverage has been lost in recent years, for complex reasons. Interestingly, in this book, at least, Doctorow doesn't address AI's impact on tech workers' leverage or on the other aspects of enshittification. To learn more about that, one will have to read his latest, The Reverse Centaur, which I plan to do in the coming weeks.