Enshittification Quotes

“First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“This era, the Enshittocene, is the result of specific policy decisions, made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“But the flip side of that was lock-in. Unlike Android phones—which are typically designed to allow users to make use of alternative app stores and even install different operating systems—iPhones use software and hardware locks to prevent users from modifying Apple’s rules. This is a system that works well, but fails badly. So long as Apple remains a benevolent dictator, your iPhone is a walled garden that protects you from the bad guys who want to attack you. But if Apple turns on you, that walled garden becomes a prison, one that pens you in and makes you easy pickings.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that Amazon’s own shipping is fully subsidized. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“In 2018, Procter & Gamble zeroed out its $200 million annual “programmatic advertising”8 budget and saw no decline in sales.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“The reason for enshittification’s popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and what we should do about it.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Meanwhile, ad fraud was going wild. Advertisers were paying billions for ads that no one ever saw. In 2018, Procter & Gamble zeroed out its $200 million annual “programmatic advertising”8 budget and saw no decline in sales.9 It seems all of those ads were either: Being shown to random people rather than the people P&G was paying to target; or Not being shown to anyone.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It