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Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
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About This Book
Enshittification: It's not just you―the internet sucks now. It's been enshittified. That was no accident, and it's not gonna fix itself. Here's how we'll disenshittify it so we can have a new, good internet. We are all living through the Enshittocene―the Great Enshittening―a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are being turned into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying. The once-glorious internet has degenerated into "platforms" that rose to dominance because they delivered convenient and delightful services efficiently and reliably. But once we were locked in to those services, the tech bosses turned on us, relying on our dependency to keep us using the services even as they got worse and worse. The platform bosses did the same to the companies that had flocked to their services to sell stuff to us. Once we were all locked in―businesses and users―the tech companies stripped out all utility, save the bare minimum needed to stave off total collapse. In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow shows us where it comes from: not the iron laws of economics, or the great forces of history, but specific policy choices made by powerful people who ignored every warning about the consequences of those choices. These are choices that can be undone. Enshittification is a Big Tech disassembly manual, a road map for the seizure of the means of computation. It is a diagnosis, and it is a cure.
Reviews
"Somehow he believes that tech can be brought to heel, that a coalition of the fed up and fearful will usher in a new wave of trust-busting regulation, or at least nudge things in the right direction."
"He certainly knows how to make an idea memorable."
"The book covers a lot, but it leaves the reader craving a grander application of his concept to other aspects of culture and society ..."
"A persuasive polemic aims to defang Big Tech—and improve life for everyone else."
"The result is a razor-sharp yet subtly optimistic look at the soul-sucking state of the internet."
"It might be stretching things a bit to say that the book is a rallying cry for consumer rebellion, but readers will be upset, informed, and inflamed after reading this one."
"I am not sure this state of affairs is as novel to capitalism as Enshittification makes it out to be, and this is a frustrating aspect of the book ..."
"Still, what is perhaps most striking—and where the book truly succeeds—is in Doctorow's detailed anatomy of enshittification, his comprehensive account of the sheer inventiveness of Facebook and the others, which makes 19th- or 20th-century robber barons seem tame by comparison ..."
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