There’s an app for that: How the world got worse

Rick McGinnis: 

If you go by what you read or the cultural mood today, we’re doomed. In spite of improvements in life expectation, overall wages, quality of life, consumer goods and nutrition – among a dozen other benchmarks – the sense that we are on the downward slope of a decline persists, a subjective intimation of impending collapse waiting weeks, months or years ahead, preceded by a steady and irreversible immiseration.

Perhaps it’s true, but even if it isn’t, good luck trying to make a case for an optimistic view of modern life. Toronto-born writer and online rights activist Cory Doctorow makes a strong case that at least one significant part of modern life is getting measurably worse: the computerized, digital, and online one that barely existed over a century ago and is now a vast and integral part of how we do almost everything from work to shop to socialize to communicate.

He even came up with a rather pungent word to describe this decline – enshittification – which caught on almost immediately and is the title of his new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. (The rapid acceptance of Doctorow’s neologism is demonstrated by how Microsoft Word’ spellcheck blithely accepted it when I typed it into this column.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to note that I know Doctorow – or at least I knew and socialized with him, years ago, when the internet was still a relatively new thing and seemed small enough that you had the illusion that you knew everyone on it. Cory was an enthusiastic early adopter and full of optimism about the possibilities of this new medium and its technology; he’s part of a small group of people I’d consider reliable authorities, so if he’s sounding the alarm about its corruption and decay it’s worth heeding.

Doctorow lays his book out in four sections that, in order, lay out the major culprits of enshittification, explains the system that allowed them to emerge and thrive, details all the ways that they began turning into warped, malevolent versions of their ideal selves and – bravely, as most books like this are content to rage-bait us by just listing all the ways our lives have been made worse – proposes solutions to the enshittification.

The culprits are all in plain sight – Facebook (aka Meta), Amazon, Apple, Twitter (aka X), Microsoft, and Google, all of which started out as hungry startups in fields full of competitors and quickly metastasized into monopolistic giants who only grew by acquiring and consuming potential competitors to create the illusion of “growth”.

Along the way he uses novel terminology – “chickenization”, “reverse-centaurs,” twiddling, technofeudalism – to lay out just how these businesses have played with labour law, privacy, economics, regulatory bodies, intellectual property, and the stock market to reverse two centuries of business practice, legal convention, and government oversight to become vicious caricatures of the rapacious capitalists they once presented themselves opposed to ethically and spiritually.

Twitter, for instance, he describes as – like Facebook or Instagram or any of the other social media that have become unassailable institutions – “zombie platforms that shamble on long after they should have been double-taped and stuffed into a shallow grave.” That’s because they have come to dominate their niche in the market by becoming so big that users who leave in frustration have to leave behind their own established networks of friends and connections – a strong disincentive to joining whatever small, struggling competitor scuttles around in their shadow.

Like a major bank or an automaker, they have made themselves “too big to fail” not by providing an excellent service but by starving any other similar service of light, air, and resources.

One way these companies have thrived is by shifting their focus from building a better version of whatever made them successful in the first place to pouring their profits into changing the business landscape. Consequently, competition is difficult, expensive or even illegal, through government lobbying and novel interpretations of intellectual property and fair usage that rely on the ignorance of lawmakers about technology that didn’t exist or permeate the marketplace this way when the relevant laws were written.

Or as Doctorow puts it, “enshittification is when you combine the banality of evil with an internet-connected device and a federal law that criminalizes doing anything with that device that the manufacturer dislikes.”

Which gives us hardware that can’t be repaired or modified, software whose use is similarly proscribed, end-user agreements that penalize consumers who try to take their money outside of the manufacturer’s virtual factory store, and web pages that load slowly despite massive broadband connections. All this because your browser and the server farm are conducting an auction to find customers eager to target you and decide on any price it might charge you on the services being offered or the advertising it’s plastering all over the web page.

And as bad as all of this looks now, there’s the certainty that AI is going to make this so much worse.

Google was once an excellent search engine, so good that its name became a verb. There’s a palpable sense of betrayal when Doctorow writes about how this company (whose motto – don’t laugh – was once “don’t be evil”) deliberately made itself more sinister, inspiring several revolts among its well-paid tech worker employees, and made its core web search service immeasurably worse once it dominated its market.

“Once Google stopped growing,” Doctorow writes, “it started squeezing. Lacking competitors, having locked in its users and business customers. Google could make things worse for both groups in order to make things better for its shareholders and its executives.”

Innovation has given way to rent-seeking. Even so, Doctorow is still optimistic. But several things need to happen. One of them is that antitrust law has to be enforced again, by legal entities with a relevant idea of what monopoly looks like in the modern era. (This is easier said than done, especially in countries like Canada which historically favour monopolistic practice as a function of a curious and ancient belief in a “sound national economy.”)

Another thing is a return to regulation, but only after we stop hiring from the major telecommunications firms to fill spots at regulators like the Federal Communications Commission, who arrive ready to game the system in the telcos’ favour. Reviving and enforcing consumer privacy laws would help, as would reasonable definitions of hate speech or even harmful speech online, which is easier said than done. Doctorow proposes making it easier for users to leave platforms they consider hostile for new ones.

He’d like to encourage interoperability – the ability to jailbreak devices with restrictive or disabled functions when manufacturers arbitrarily decide to stop servicing them or make you pay for “premium functions.” He’d also like to restore protections for tech sector workers who’ve had wages and working standards lowered through creative use of employment contracts that have transformed them into “self-employed” entrepreneurs at the mercy of apps like Uber and DoorDash or Amazon’s feudal delivery model.

We have, he writes, reached a critical point where the internet is everywhere, in nearly everything, and it is almost inevitably terrible. And the people behind these companies insist that they need to be this terrible in order to fulfill the functions to which they have made themselves crucial. But Doctorow is sure that the same regulatory bodies, global markets, international treaties, and anti-trust laws that the tech companies suborned along the way can be turned against them.

“The capitalism of twenty years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavoured views could find one another, offer mutual aid, and organize,” he writes, clearly nostalgic for that long-gone era we both experienced.

“The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from computer companies with consonant-heavy brand names, and cryptocurrency scams.”

Which sounds as much like nostalgia as a solution to me. But I can’t do much better. The only solution I have is one where fatigue sets in, aversion overcomes convenience, and the threat of consumers unplugging in favour of a less-connected, more inconvenient – but hardly impossible or unpleasant – world (Surely there are enough people still alive with living memories of 1995?) frightens the owners of the ghost mall into making better crapgadgets. I doubt if either Cory or I will find satisfaction.

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