I’ve written about this topic before, but it’s nice when major publications back your viewpoint. One of my favorite authors has a new book forthcoming, and as a sign of the times the title – which may have been scandalous in a previous, perhaps more innocent age – gets straight to the point: “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It“. And because everything these days is meta and Mr. Doctorow’s book isn’t even out, I read an advanced review of the book that contained praise as well as some criticisms which I think are valid and troubling to consider when asking the most important question.
What can we do about it?
In case you didn’t read my previous blog about this or don’t remember it (because we all have enough to worry about already, so I get it), “enshittification” is the concept that all good online services and websites will eventually be ruined by our society’s relentless pursuit of profit. The advanced review as it appears on the Current Affairs website does a pretty good job of explaining this topic, and if you don’t intend to purchase the book, I think the article provides enough of an overview for you to spot this trend in the world around you, which may or may not improve how you may feel about it. I’m going to read the book for myself before I render my own praise or criticism, but I have similar concerns to the reviewer’s when it comes to answering the question that you have all asked, “What can we do about it?” It sounds like Mr. Doctorow is calling for grassroots efforts and government intervention to counteract future enshittifications (the author seems to think it’s already too late for the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc. and I agree), but from where I’m sitting it seems like getting help from the government isn’t on the menu at the moment, and our grassroots are divided as we fight to maintain healthcare, livelihoods and just basic human decency. So what is my recommendation to you if your technology feels “shitty?”
Take matters into your own hands. If you have the option to use something else, do so and make sure you tell the losing platform why you moved (even if they will probably never read your feedback). If changing the technology isn’t an option, perhaps take a moment to clearly identify the crappy part for the purposes of determining if it’s something you have control or agency over (maybe a new setting or change in interface), or if it’s out of your hands, such as the price going up. If it’s out of your control, focus your energy on working around or through it, or changing something else so that you can eliminate it altogether. Using technology is unavoidable for most of us, but there is no reason to feel like you are a hostage to it, and the best way to manage this is to change the things that you can control, and asking for help or sympathy (or both!) on the things you can’t.
We’ve discussed in previous blogs how technology things seem to be getting worse from just about every angle, whether it’s cost, quality or security. We can attribute a large chunk of this downward trend to the increasing profitability of cybercrime, which is itself a vicious, amplifying spiral of escalation. The more we try to keep ourselves safe, the more complicated it becomes to do so, and most regular folks don’t have the training or endurance to keep up, especially if you are a part of the growing elderly generations that are forced to use technology they barely understand just to stay alive and keep in contact with friends and family. With the recent (in my opinion ill-advised) downsizing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) much of the this country’s organizational strength and operational efficiency in cataloging and combatting cybersecurity threats will be abandoned.
What this means for all of us
Regardless of whether you are a big or small organization, CISA’s leadership and work provided foundational guidance on all existing cybersecurity threats while constantly researching, investigating and publishing information on new threats as they discovered. One of the main reasons that governments exist is to provide funding, resources and scaled force for tasks that cannot (and should not) be handled by smaller groups or for-profit institutions, such as military defense, mail delivery, and national security. As has been demonstrated time and time again, for-profit companies cannot be trusted to put people before profits, and security oversight is definitely not something you want to enshittify. And yet, that is exactly where we are. In the absence of CISA leadership, organizations, whether they be ad-hoc coalitions of state-level agencies or, most likely, for-profit companies in the security industry, are now scrambling to fill the gigantic, CISA-shaped hole in our nation’s cybersecurity. Let’s be clear, security for small businesses was already well on its way to becoming difficult, expensive and onerous. Eliminating national leadership will most definitely lead to a fracturing of an already complicated security framework that will most assuredly weigh very heavily on those who can least afford to shoulder a burden that was formerly carried by those trained, equipped and funded to do so.
I first encountered Cory Doctorow through his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom which is a vision of our world in the 22nd century where social media rules everything. When it first came out in 2003, it was fascinating and seemingly far-fetched, but here we are, twenty-two years later, living in a world where everyone seems helplessly enthralled with short-form content powered by profit-driven algorithms and relentless thirst for pseudo-anonymous internet validation. Since then, Doctorow has been focusing his energy and writing on the internet and information, spending years as an editor at proto-blog Boing Boing (started in 1995!) before going independent in 2020, and three years later, he wrote about a now semi-famous concept called “enshittification” which describes the process of technology services that start out amazing and then slowly (or quickly) degrade as the platform tries to profit from their viral popularity at the expense of their users.
We can all name at least one
As usual, the internet isn’t quite certain if Doctorow coined the scatalogical neologism, but he definitely nailed the smell wafting off the various services we all know, use daily and once loved unconditionally. Whether its Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook or TikTok (let’s be fair, that one started out pretty crappy to begin with), every single one of us is subject to services that started out great and have since struggled to prove their continuing worth in the face of seemingly unstoppable profit-making practices and egregious privacy violations. The real problem is many of us can see the crapification happening, but we stick around because there is literally no where else to go. Back in the days before the internet, this was called a monopoly, but now it’s because we can’t convince our softball team to organize games and practices anywhere other than Facebook, our favorite TV series is only available on HBO Max, and a certain online shopping behemoth has literally captured the majority of the industry, forcing everyone to compete in an advertising bloodsport in which the sellers to pay to compete, and we all buy ringside seats because there is no other game in town. Doctorow has been advocating a solution for this but it requires participation (either willing or enforced) by the owners who are profiting from driving their platforms into the ground and for us consumers to recognize when we are being exploited. Back when he wrote that article for EFF in 2023, it seemed like we were making good progress towards protecting users’ rights, but now in 2025, I’m not so sure he’d be as optimistic and let’s be honest, he wasn’t exactly Pollyanna then either.
As you might have guessed, I don’t have the answer either. I do think it’s important to that you know that I know how you feel when you ask me, “Why does (necessary technology service) suck so much?” and that it’s a widely recognized phenomena. It is an important first step to recognize that if something is free, you are the product, and even if you graduate to paying for that service and you are STILL the product (Amazon Prime, I’m looking at you), you can’t just set that recognition aside because it’s easier. In the glorious, early days, we thought the internet would make our lives easier, and it has, but it has also cost us dearly and now the Piper is before us, and this time he doesn’t even have a hand out because he knows we will keep paying. Hopefully, because we all know how the fable ends we are forewarned and can work our way to living our lives outside the pockets of a powerful few. We are all in this together. Keep fighting for your privacy.
Image by Alexa from Pixabay