Everything Sucks—Here’s Why
Digital price tags mean that your local supermarket can now engage in surge pricing. Yay!
Back in the fall I backed a Kickstarter for Cory Doctorow’s latest book, Enshittification. I finally finished it and did a quick review on it for SleuthSayers, the mystery blog. The piece, which is up today, is called:
The Case of the Crumbling Platform
What struck me most about Doctorow’s work is how neatly it captures a feeling that’s been bubbling beneath the surface for me, my wife, and countless others: the sense that the services and products we once trusted are slowly degrading into something far less useful. Doctorow gave that sensation a name—enshittification—and then broke it down into a three‑stage model that explains why platforms move from generous pioneers to profit‑driven monopolies. Here’s part of what I’m saying today:
“In its first stages, a company dreams up a great idea and bestows it on the world. The thing works so easily and often satisfies a need people didn’t know they had… As soon as they demolish the competition and achieve a monopoly… the firms flip the switch. The end user is no longer king—advertisers are.”
His analysis feels especially timely. He shows how companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook—to pick the three biggest he profiles in the book—each start by solving a real need, only to change course once they dominate their markets, turning users into the product and advertisers into the new kings. In the end stage, even the advertisers are screwed, and the only humans who matter are the shareholders. The service as a whole degrades so badly that end users can’t use it, and advertisers get little value out of it anymore.
If you think about that paradigm, it sounds exactly what the experience of using Google’s search engine is like. It’s the reason you can’t logically find decent products on Amazon anymore, and why your friends and family never see your posts on FB and Instagram anymore. In my world, it’s the reason indie authors must constantly relearn how to run ads every time Amazon and FB “tweak” their algorithms.
Doctorow’s coined the term enshittification in 2022, and it quickly earned the honor of “word of the year” from lexicographers in both the United States and Australia, underscoring just how much this issue is resonating with people.
If you’re curious about how these dynamics affect writers, readers, and everyday consumers, I hope you’ll check out the review. I mention a few other companies that he takes aim at, including Apple, Adobe, auto manufacturers, software developers, and so on.
I think Enshittification is an important read, and I’m already planning to explore more of Doctorow’s books. If you want to check out the book itself, here’s an affiliate link. And since the irony of sending you to Amazon to buy this book is not lost on me, here’s a link to Bookshop, where your purchase can actually benefit an indie bookstore.
I close the piece with a short conversation I had with a saleswoman who was smoking outside our local Best Buy. I swear, this woman was prescient. She knew what was happening before I ever got wind of it because she witnessed enshittification happening in the world of home appliances. I wish she still worked at the place so I could go hand her a copy of this book.
