Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



“the Future is here…it’s just not evenly distributed.” -- William Gibson…
Do you ever think about how many services in your life have NO obligation to be very good?
Do you remember when Facebook was actually not a flaming pile of crap? When Twitter was a fun place to kill time and connect with friends?

Do you remember when Amazon didn’t conjure up images of sweatshops and evil, or cost to damn much to be the only option?

I am a writer…

Perhaps unpublished. Perhaps self-styled…but whatever, I do this every day, have been doing it for over 35 years, It has to count for something.

In 2019 I bought this computer, an HP laptop and it was a rough year. That was when my car went up and there was one other thing and it was also the last time I worked Thanksgiving to make up all the cash I had to spend on things and then COVID hit and that was that…

But in 2019 I bought a version of Word and installed it on my then-new laptop and now I’m glad that I did because if I had to buy it now, I just couldn’t…

Because I couldn’t own it.

You can’t buy WORD or Word perfect outright anymore because now it only comes as a subscription, something you have to pay for year to year…

A fee…to use a product that you bought…that won’t work unless you pay for it again and again and again and again….and again.
And again. (I know I am being obnoxious right now; I’ll stop)

If I ever give up this computer (it’s 7 years old at this point…I don’t know how many more years it has) I will be forced to find a workaround…Google Docs? Sure…but they suck for other reasons…he talks about Google as a prime example of enshittificaton.) or simply give in and pay a subscription fee that I put in the pockets of Microsoft….not once, not twice, but every year…. (I’m looking at it now…about 99 bucks a year, every year.)
There is a word for this:
it has become
Enshittified….
*
Cory Doctorow has written a brilliant and scathing assessment of this phenomenon… it happens again and again: a company starts with a product or service that everyone loves (like Amazon….who DOESN’T love getting packages same day?) and then it begins the arc toward dominating the market, squeezing pre-existing customers, and then moving on to the business customers…
Doctorow begins with case studies of Amazon, Facebook, Twitter (now X), the iPhone and thoroughly dissects how the process of enshittification began there and how it continues unabated today…

And he takes us thru the process and why we need net neutrality and regulations and unions and all kinds of things that people actually like but don’t realize that they like….
We are not so far away from having a better world…
We can start with the internet.

And then we must reclaim the world…

This is a brilliant assessment, a very easy read, and definitely worth a look.





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