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Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
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26/99
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48/99
Readers' Rating Index
98/99
Scholars' Citation Index
84/99
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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
"The result is a razor-sharp yet subtly optimistic look at the soul-sucking state of the internet."
"Doctorow's map of the steps to enshittification suffers somewhat from being too neat ..."
"These observations are all true to some degree, but they do not arrive without a whiff of an Econ 101 just-so story ..."
"The book stops short of fully extrapolating enshittification to national politics, but the term is certainly also relevant in that realm."
"A persuasive polemic aims to defang Big Tech—and improve life for everyone else."
"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."
"Overall, however, Doctorow deserves thanks for his service."
"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."
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