How to Save the Internet From “Enshittification”

The activist and writer Cory Doctorow spoke to Jacobin about the steady decline of the “enshittified” internet and what we can do to save it.

There are very few people that have written as consistently and incisively about the internet and its broken promises than the digital rights activist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow. His new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, explains what ruined, and is continuing to ruin, the web. Jacobin spoke to Doctorow about the origin of the neologism he coined, and how the process of enshittification is beginning to spread from screens to physical reality.

Bartolomeo Sala

You start your book by saying: “It is not just you, the internet is getting worse, fast.” You’re adamant enshittification is not the result of vaguely related phenomena but a precise logic that repeats with clockwork precision. In your book, you describe “enshittification” as a three-stage process and then use Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Apple as examples of once good services that have become obnoxious rent-seeking operations. Can you give us a brief definition of enshittification and how this process takes root in practice?

Cory Doctorow

My book Enshittification does three things: offers a description of how platforms go bad; a theory about why they’re all going bad now and why it’s so hard to leave them; and finally, a prescription for what to do about it.

You have platforms that are good to their end users to lure them in, while finding a way to lock them in. Once they’re lured in and locked in, the platform makes things worse for them, secure in the knowledge that they’re not going to go anywhere. Platforms do this in order to attract business customers. And then in the final stage, you have the extraction of value from business customers, and the platform’s turned into a pile of shit.

As to why that’s happening now, I think it’s not because of iron laws of economics or great forces of history or the foundational nature of capitalism. I think it’s because there used to be penalties for firms that made their products worse. They had to worry about their workers because workers were extraordinarily productive and hard to source. They had to worry about competitors. All other things being equal, customers would go somewhere else if a firm’s products or services got worse. But one foundational way of locking costumers in is to just buy all the competitors. This means that there’s nowhere to go.

Combine that with something that creates high switching costs to move to a more nascent competitor, and you have a high degree of lock-in. And then finally, firms had to worry about regulators, the discipline imposed by governments. But once there’s five or four or three or two companies in a sector, they find it easy to overpower their regulators.

What we did forty years ago was dismantle competition law. Tech was the first sector to grow up without competition law looking over its shoulder. So that’s my thesis. You have this characteristic pattern of platform decay, but it is caused by an “enshittogenic” environment that originates in the policy sphere, not in the moral failings of tech bosses or even in the structural problems of capitalism itself. Rather, it stems from this specific capitalism that has been distorted or degraded by monopolists to the point where even many capitalists suffer quite badly under it — and certainly workers and the public.

Bartolomeo Sala

You mention IP law, and in particular anti-circumvention rulings such as DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] section 1201, as a special culprit. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. In the past, there were four bulwarks which, together with a strong antitrust mentality, were able to keep corporate power in check: competition, regulation, interoperability or self-help, and worker power. Big tech has captured and undermined all of these elements. How did this happen?

Cory Doctorow

There was a time, roughly from the end of the Gilded Age until the 1970s when the primary purpose of US competition law was to prevent the concentration of power — not just the abuse of power but the concentration of private power. There was this sense that firms that were too big to fail would become too big to jail and then eventually too big to care.

In the 1970s, however, neoliberal economists, the Chicago economists, promulgated this idea called “the consumer welfare theory,” which said that actually monopolies are efficient and that it was perverse to punish companies for securing a monopoly because the most likely explanation for that monopoly is that they were really good at their jobs.

And so, as that happened, you saw a whole bunch of other things happening downstream from this shift. The success of mergers made regulatory captures simpler. And that meant that firms didn’t have to worry about being disciplined by governments for abusing their workers or for abusing their customers. It also made it possible for firms to collude to rig labor markets as well as to rig markets with their suppliers.

So, long before firms attained market power over their customers, they attained market power over their workers and over their suppliers. And so you have this other vicious cycle, where companies are able to take over the other sectors of the economy and abuse their workers. This regulatory capture can also lead to the creation of special regulatory privileges. That would be things like IP law, DMCA 1201, which initially was pushed by the entertainment sector in the [Bill] Clinton years but then was taken over by the tech industry. It realized that you could use the same digital locks in all kinds of devices, from ventilators and tractors to phones and consoles, to stop people from altering their functionality and to prevent competitors.

That was very widespread and had a huge magnifying effect on the power of monopolies. Because once you, for example, were the company that sold most of the printers in the world, if you added digital rights management to your ink, then you could raise the price of ink and users couldn’t put generic ink in their printers anymore. The three or four companies in the sector would follow your lead and eventually you would end up with where we are today. Ink is the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without getting a permit. It sells for more than $10,000 a gallon, making it literally cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion than with original HP ink.

Bartolomeo Sala

Is the solution to enshittification simply a matter of changing the rules of the game?

Cory Doctorow

There’s a unique opportunity globally at this moment. The US has got a lot of companies that rely on these digital locks to extract a lot of rent from customers around the world. The rest of the world does not. And the US Trade Representative threatened every US trading partner with tariffs unless they pass laws to protect these rent-extraction rackets.

Now, a deterrent only works if you use it. If the idea is, okay, we’ll make sure that nobody ever makes an alternative app store for iOS for the Apple phone in Ireland, Germany, India, or Canada, because that way we don’t get tariffs when we export to the US; well, now you have tariffs anyway. So you might as well do it, which would mean, among other things, that if you were a Canadian news outlet selling subscriptions to Canadian subscribers, you could do so through a Canadian app store and not through the iOS Apple app store, which would mean that the dollars your subscriber sent you wouldn’t take a round trip through Cupertino and come back thirty cents lighter.

Apple and Google have imposed a 30 percent global economic tax on apps and on every penny spent in apps. And so this would be not just a way to invigorate local business, to free performers on Patreon, or sellers on platforms like Etsy from this 30 percent tax, it would also be a way to boost a domestic tech sector.

Bartolomeo Sala

A thing that caught my attention while reading the book is the fact that, again contrary to one might think, “enshittification” relies on a very brittle equilibrium, which is always a mere step away from crumbling.

As you put it very well in the book, “enshittification” begins with big platforms, that is, two-way markets connecting end users and business customers whose value is a by-product of “network effects” — meaning, the fact that literally everyone is on these platforms and uses them for a wealth of reasons. This makes them especially onerous to leave, a high “switching cost” that the [Jeff] Bezoses, [Mark] Zuckerbergs, and [Elon] Musks of this world are all too ready to exploit.

However, your book is full of stories of businesses doing extremely bad, fraudulent stuff to their users or workers, only for this to turn out to be the last straw before everyone leaves.

Cory Doctorow

Well, I would say that we shouldn’t want that. We shouldn’t want things to get so bad on these platforms that people decide that the cost of leaving is lower than the cost of staying. Instead, what we should do is just make it easier for people to leave.

Interoperability exploits the same technical characteristics that makes “enshittification” possible, because the latter is grounded in the idea that you can change the rules of the platform — something I call “twiddling.” You can change how much it costs. You can change how much you pay for things. You can change how high something is ranked or how much it’s recommended.

The same flexibility of digital technology — the fact that computers can do pretty much anything that can be computed — means that every time there’s a ten-foot pile of shit in a program or service that you rely on, someone could offer you an eleven-foot-tall ladder to get over it. But the only impediment to that is anti-circumvention law.

If we were to restore the right of tinkerers, competitors, and cooperatives to reverse engineer and modify the technology around them, then they would be positioned to decompose these “prix fixe” offers that mean that to talk to your friends, you have to let Mark Zuckerberg listen in. These arrangements could be replaced with an “à la carte” offer, where you could say, no, I’m going to still going to use Facebook to talk to my friends, but I’m going to install a plug-in that encrypts the messages so Facebook can’t see them.

And on the labor side, there’s a lot of interest in counter apps that do the inverse of what bossware apps do. That is, apps that empower workers against their bosses, whether that’s something that allows you to monitor several labor markets at once and bid out your labor to the one that has the highest wage offer at any given moment, or something that allows all the workers in a region to reject all offers below a certain threshold so that the prevailing wage is forced up.

There was an app that I was just reading about called Uber Cheats that was created by an Uber Eats driver who would check the mileage that he was being paid for against that of other drivers in order to identify systematic wage theft as a result.

I’m not saying that it’s the only thing we need, but I am saying that these kinds of apps are a new arrow in the quiver. The ability to take the technology that’s around you, and on a per-user per-session basis modify it so that it benefits you, and not the people who made it, is not really a thing we’ve had historically. And the fact that if one person does it, they can share that tool with everyone who’s similarly situated is also new.

Bartolomeo Sala

In your book, you speak at length about Google and how until recently its employees viewed themselves as part of an elite labor aristocracy.

Cory Doctorow

I think it’s easy when you’re a worker who’s well compensated and whose boss is quite solicitous of you to think that you’re not a worker at all, that you’re a founder in waiting or a temporarily embarrassed entrepreneur. And certainly, I think that’s the case with tech. Tech workers are extraordinarily productive. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that the median tech worker makes a million dollars a year for their employer. And so, of course, employers treated them well because they were in short supply.

At the same time, we know how tech bosses treat workers they’re not afraid of. You look at Jeff Bezos. He’s got these programmers who show up for work with pink Mohawks and facial piercings, and they get to wear black T-shirts with slogans on them their bosses don’t understand and feel uncomfortable about. But warehouse workers who work for Jeff Bezos, they do an hour of unpaid work at the beginning and end of each of their shifts standing in line for a metal detector. They’re not allowed to pee on shift, and so they pee in bottles, and they’re critically injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers. They’re not just used by the warehouses, they’re used up.

That’s what Jeff Bezos will do to you if he’s not afraid of you. And I think tech workers had an incredible opportunity when they were so powerful to unionize. But I think that tech bosses successfully tricked them into thinking that they didn’t need to, that they weren’t workers at all. And now they have this uphill battle. But on the plus side, right now, compared to ten years ago when tech workers were at the peak of their power, we have more support for unions in the United States and more workers who want to be in unions than at any time. This means there’s a lot of people those tech workers could be in solidarity with.

I think [Donald] Trump believes that by firing enough of the National Labor Relations Board that he’s ended the game. But actually, when you fire the referees, you just throw out the rule book. All bets are off right now.

Bartolomeo Sala

You point out that all sorts of dodgy practices that originated on big platforms are slowly seeping through to the real world by means of “smart devices.” Can you explain how this works in practice?

Cory Doctorow

If you ask someone who believes in markets as a good way to do resource allocation, they’ll tell you that markets aggregate choices, and therefore information about what people value and how much they value it. This is the modern theory of markets. But for me, to make a choice about which product or service I prefer, I must know what that product or service does. And if you can change the product or service later, what you can end up with is a circumstance in which firms conquer a market, impose high switching costs on consumers, and then make things worse for them by digitally updating the tools.

An example that combines a lot of these different things is a company called Chamberlain. Chamberlain bought virtually every garage door opener company in the West. And so if you have a garage door opener, it doesn’t really matter what it says on the manufacturer’s label because it’s almost certainly Chamberlain. Last year, Chamberlain took away support for something called HomeKit, which is a standard way for gadgets to interact with different apps. If your device supports HomeKit, then anyone can make an app that talks to it. You get a lot of different garage door apps to open your garage door.

Chamberlain removed that remotely and pushed an update to all the devices in the field that removed it, and did so behind a digital lock that made it illegal for anyone to restore it. And so now you have to use Chamberlain’s app in order to open your garage door, and you have to look at seven ads every time you open your garage door. And the app, meanwhile, is harvesting all kinds of your private information, not just when you use it but merely because it’s on your phone.

Bartolomeo Sala

In your book, you treat “enshittification” as a disease and, toward the end, offer a “cure” — what you call the “good, new internet.” Can you tell us a bit more what this new, good digital space would look like and why the breaking down of intractable monopolies would be a good thing for user experience, contrary to a lot of received wisdom on the topic?

Cory Doctorow

Tech bosses, and to a certain extent their critics, engage in a vulgar Thatcherism grounded in the idea that there is no alternative. However, I think that if you understand how the technology works, then it’s easy to imagine alternatives.

When I think about a “new, good internet,” I think about the technological self-determination of the old, good internet. I imagine a world where people make services that we like, and when those go bad, rather than having to choose between the bad new service and nothing, you get to choose to stick with the old, good service — one where your printer gets an update that says, okay, we can’t take third-party ink anymore, you make a few key strokes, find a co-op, or a tinker, or a company that will give you an alternative operating system for your printer, a few more mouse clicks, and now you just get to go on using generic ink, and you never have to do business with that one again.

It’s not an internet where things don’t go wrong anymore, right? It’s still an internet where people who run services and platforms might, either through rationalization, bad judgment, or greed, make things worse for their users. It’s just one where we have a countermove, where through interoperability, through workers threatening to quit or go on strike, through competitors poaching business, through regulators stomping on firms that are unfair, we have alternatives.

It’s a dynamic system where the way that that dynamism catches out is determined by your choices and the choices of your community. It doesn’t mean you’ll always choose wisely, people might make bad choices. But they’ll be your choices to make.

Bartolomeo Sala

In the book, you describe [Joe] Biden’s appointment of Lina Khan as the chair of the FTC, the lawsuit brought by [Department of Justice] against Google, and the EU’s Digital Markets Act [DMA] and Digital Services Act [DSA] as all part of a return of antitrust. You also say that the reelection of Donald Trump represents a massive setback, but not necessarily the end of antitrust enforcement.

In light of recent developments — I am thinking of Judge [Amit] Mehta ruling against the breakup of Google or Trump’s attempt to blackmail the EU into getting rid of its regulations in exchange for lowering tariffs — are you still optimistic? Or do you see the progress that’s been made being quickly undone? I guess you partially responded to this question when you said the EU should go “rogue” and found its own tech sector. . .

Cory Doctorow

I think that virtually everyone in the world underestimates how seismic the growth of antitrust has been. If you read political scientists, they will tell you that billionaire preferences are the single biggest determinant of policy outcomes. Things billionaires want, we get. Things billionaires don’t want, we don’t get. There is nothing more billionaire-friendly than monopoly. And yet, we have seen a surge of antitrust energy and action all around the world. We’re at this moment where the bedrock principle of political science has crumbled. Pigs are flying, water is flowing uphill, and things billionaires hate are happening all over the world — it’s a remarkable circumstance.

Now, it’s true that Trump is doing what I call “boss politics” antitrust: making a list of companies that are violating antitrust law — which is all the companies in America — and sorting it by which ones he likes the least, and then either wringing concessions from them or attempting to destroy them. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the world isn’t involved. You have things like the EuroStack, which is Europe’s response to the explicit merger of American tech with American state policy. Frankly, I think that’s much better than taxing or regulating American tech. Just sideline it. Make it irrelevant. Don’t try and fix it. I mean, American tech is irredeemable. Just make it part of the scrap heap of history.

And then in the US, federal antitrust law is open to enforcement, not just by the feds, but by state attorney generals. Some of the most important antitrust cases we’ve had have been started by various attorneys general. And that includes the Google case, which was not started by a progressive from a blue state but rather by the most corrupt right-wing AG in America, Ken Paxton, the scandal-haunted AG of Texas.

Bartolomeo Sala

Turning away from the US sounds great but don’t you think that such a scenario would be opposed by the EU elites themselves, many of whom would rather bend over backward than decouple themselves from the US in any way?

Cory Doctorow

Is that true? Because we’ve had the Digital Markets Act, we’ve had the Digital Services Act, we’ve had giant fines. I think that one of the advantages of this is that it actually plays to that same fantasy. If you dream of an alternate history in which Nokia and Olivetti are the Microsoft and Apple of the twenty-first century, the way you get there is by making it legal for European tech companies to make their own app stores and alternative hardware and so on.

Great Job Cory Doctorow & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.

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