Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It | Los Angeles Public Library

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It | Los Angeles Public Library
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While Canadian journalist/novelist Corey Doctorow's recently released
Enshittification
has more to offer than a book called
On Bullshit
, there are chapters in this 338-page nonfiction book that travel a similar road.
‘Bullshit’ is a tongue-in-cheek short tome (fashioned from a 1986
essay
by Harry G. Frankfurt).
Enshittification
aims to give us tech tools to live by to better navigate the monstrosity that is the internet in the 2020s. So let's start where Doctorow (also known for his blog
Pluralistic
and his podcast
Crapbound
) starts in the book. For the first 52 pages, we get a rundown of the wonderfulness of social media in its infancy, then a detailed explanation of the woes of social media in decline. He covers Facebook, Amazon, the iPhone, and Twitter; platforms that once helped consumers live better lives. Facebook connected us with loved ones. Amazon made shopping easier and convenient. The iPhone had everything we needed in a phone and so much more. Twitter was a free market for connection and promotion. As we know, Facebook bought the lovely Instagram and turned it into another form of Twitter with more videos. Then Facebook made the transition to the lawless Meta, eschewing quality control, killing businesses that were created there and indulging in a s…load of fake news.
In its beginning, Amazon was an affordable and unheard-of easy way to get everything from diapers to furniture without leaving your house. Mom-and-Pop stores, mid-level merchants, and conglomerates were all able to easily display and sell their wares. Consumers bought from Amazon, and in turn, Amazon could charge businesses for being on the site as well as get a percentage of their sales. But inflation, the Pandemic and more inflation brought on years of capital losses and… more inflation. The result is higher prices, cheaper, and limited products to choose from.
Apple's iPhone had excellent cameras, wasn't littered with AI and fights between Google and other search engines. Twitter, once free for all to post with clout earned through relevant posting, was sold to tech billionaire Elon Musk, who monetized it by charging, but also included his political purview along with next-to-no censorship (Go on Twitter, and if you don't say the right thing, you will not only be marginalized but insulted). Algorithms are used to limit the reach of those who do not pay. In writing this book, Doctorow assumes his audience knows the capitalistic pursuits of these media conglomerates have created what he calls "enshittification."
Then the book becomes a treasure hunt, as if each chapter were a corner and the answer right around each one. But it isn't. Doctorow examines many causes for the state of the internet, how founding companies went largely "unchecked" by government regulators, how companies crushed their competition by "self-help" or simply "fixing problems" and making better products over time. How the public loses by having to pay more for products to ease the complications of the past. How algorithms trick companies using apps from other companies and the public along the way. How, for example, Amazon, with free shipping, has forced a majority of households to shop until they drop because the companies they used to physically go to or order from directly are also on the site.
While explaining this, Doctorow discusses a plethora of tech and non-tech companies' stories, ideologies, and problems (Think IBM, AT& T's Bell System, Microsoft during the infancy of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, then Apple's iWork). And, each time he writes the story, he goes even further back. He covers the tech workers' POV, makes analogies, and explores strategies used by companies that are not tech (Sherwin-Williams, anyone?) and generally keeps going back until it's easy to forget what the main subject actually is.
Along the way, though, he is able to give the reader an education on capitalism and the long, strange trip that life has become since everything has been digitized. Doctorow spotlights the killing of companies we thought would never go out of business, the scarcity of business diversity within industries, giving the public much less to choose from.
The problem may be that while the explanations are excellent, the title promises that the reader will complete
Enshittification
with an answer of "what to do about it." Doctorow endeavors to give it, but the answer seems almost as complicated as the years of tech and the chapters he writes.
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by Presley, Lisa Marie
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