Books
Cory Doctorow
Enshittification
As neologisms go, “enshittification” is not the most efficient specimen. Unlike, say, “nearlywed” or “broligarch”, it is neither wholly self-defining nor reminiscent of some other word to which it is related in meaning. Clearly the term has struck a chord: both the American Dialect Society and Macquarie Dictionary have bestowed word-of-the-year status on it in recent times. But what, specifically, is going to shit, and what are the processes by which it does so?
Happily for semanticists everywhere, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It contains the answers to these questions. Written by the Canadian–British author and journalist Cory Doctorow, who coined the word in 2022, it defines enshittification as a “disease” of digital platforms such as Amazon and Uber, and sets out, in lively and scatological prose, that disease’s “Natural History”, “Pathology” and “Epidemiology”. The last part of the book is entitled “Cure” and delineates the different ways we can fight back against “the Great Enshittening” (or, if preferred, “Enshittocene”).
A platform, writes Doctorow, is essentially a middleman in a space where no middlemen ought to exist. Having intruded themselves between providers and end-users, the tech bros now contrive to steal from both, in a way that works against the principle of “disintermediation” (sharing directly) and causes the quality of digital services, and digital life in general, to decline. One of Doctorow’s most memorable examples involves a plan to worsen Google’s search function in order to maximise advertising revenue. High “switching costs” – the price of leaving one platform and adopting another – ensure that unhappy users are retained. As Doctorow puts it: “Enshittification is a game of seeking an equilibrium between how much people like the thing that locks them to the service (often, that’s other people) and how much they hate the management of that service.”
It’s a sign of how quickly things move in this space that Enshittification can have a period feel, particularly when rehearsing arguments about intellectual property and anti-circumvention laws. This can be a source of hope: it is good to hear that the liberatory potential of the internet is still implicit to the tech, and that “right to repair” and antitrust legislation can win us back some of the freedom we’ve lost. But it is also, at times, a limitation. There’s a lot that’s shit about life online, and not all of it is reducible to the sharp practices of the broligarchy.
Still, this is an engaging book – intelligent, spirited and cautiously hopeful. I’d pass it on to a friend, if I could, but I bought it through an ebook reader, and so that (shittily enough) is where it will have to remain.
Verso, 352pp, $44.99 (hardback)
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