You’re not crazy: everything has gotten worse lately. And it’s on purpose. Because making things worse creates profit for big companies. Especially Big Tech companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Writer/culture critic Cory Doctorow’s book (now out in paperback) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It goes into the whys and how of this phenomenon in the tech world. He offers possibilities of what people can do to fix it.
Doctorow’s the writer I turn to help understand all things tech. He’s a writer and lover of paper books, from science-fiction to non-fiction. He’s also an activist involved if digital rights for all creative people having to navigate creating and marketing and finance. He has worked in the old-fashioned book-selling business, and in the tech business, and travels the world as a featured speaker for corporations and governments to help them (and us) understand this technological bizarro world of the last 20 years or so.
Doctorow’s popularity and success are due to accessible style: he can explain tech-y concepts using conversational English, with understandable examples and a lot of humor. Liberals, leftists and some conservatives follow him. The only ones who might not like him would be the libertarians because—despite sounding like an anarchist at times—Doctorow has always—but especially here in Enshittification—argued the need for government regulation over the tech companies. He’s also pro-union: tech workers unions one of the side issues he covers in Enshittification. And he’s a fan of open source software—created and maintained by tech workers who own the means of production—like the Proton Mail email system, LibreOffice, a free alternative to Microsoft, and—new to me—openstreetmap.com, an alternative to Google Maps (and MapQuest, though they have made a recent comeback by having an option which identifies any surveillance cameras and how to avoid them).
Doctorow reviews how corporations, and especially monopolies, start with great ideas, but once they’ve locked in their customers, prices go up and service goes down. Two examples he discusses are Amazon and Uber. Both used the strategy of operating at a loss in the beginning, filling in the financial gaps using the original investor funds. In the case of Uber, that was why all the rides were so cheap to start. Once Uber had knocked out all the taxi companies their ride prices are back up to where taxi rides were.
Amazon’s worse: Same strategy: run at a loss, knock out the competition, then jack up prices. They charge any company to sell their product a whapping 30 percent take. Which forces those companies to raise their prices to still make any kind of profit. It’s enough to make one not use Amazon every again, and Doctorow doesn’t: he refuses to sell his books through them, and takes a huge hit on audio books, since, as he documents, Amazon basically controls most audio books. (There are still some independent audio book distributor companies, which Doctorow uses, though he has to put up his own money for recording them.)
The explanation of Amazon, Uber and Google would be worth the price of Enshittification, but the bad idea Doctorow really hates is “anti-circumvention law” which “bans... modifications to a digital device without the manufacturer’s permission. Nominally, anti-circumvention law is a copyright law, and the first anti-circumvention laws were passed in the name of preventing unauthorized copying.” But now they’re used for a lot of tech, like when Caterpillar tractors can only be turned on by an app and/or remotely by the Caterpillar company. Anti-circumvention law prevents anyone—even someone who has bought the tractor—from “circumventing” (working around) that control and modifying their own tractor so that they don’t need permission from the company.
This allows corporations to “enshittify” their products to save money. For example, we no longer have CD/DVD players on our computers to force us to buy music and films and games from usually those very same corporations, so that we can’t copy them for our friends. And it’s illegal to modify our computers to circumvent those imposed limitations. The same now for cars, refrigerators and phones.
An early example in Enshittification of this, and a good example of Doctorow’s style, is his discussion of VCRs, and the later “DMCA” law Big Tech got passed to control how we consume our own programs and entertainment: “the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, signed by Bill Clinton in 1998.”
Remember VCRs? They were one of the fastest-adopted—and most controversial—technologies in history. Movie studios and broadcasters argued that it should be illegal to record programs to watch later or to create a personal library. The Supreme Court disagreed. In 1984, the Supremes ruled on the Betamax case, legalizing the VCR and creating an important legal principle: a new technology doesn’t violate copyright law so long as it is ‘capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use.’
VCRs spawned a whole industry: video rental stores, videotape sales, camcorders (and, of course, a new age of porn). The Betamax principle protected successor technologies such as the ’personal video recorder’ (PVR), with blockbuster gadgets like the TiVo sweeping the nation.
Whatever happened to home video recording?
It was disinvented.
The same media companies that failed to get the VCR shut down in the courts later accomplished that goal by using the DMCA. The media cartel rigged the video market, refusing to license their programs for distribution except on DVDs (and successors like Blu-Ray), digital cable, and streaming services. All of these distribution channels share a single trait: they scramble everything the transmit, and their devices and apps… that have to be bypassed if you want to plug a recorder (or recording app) into them.
That means that while it’s perfectly legal to record a show off satellite, Blu-Ray, digital cable, or a streaming service, it’s a felony to make a device that lets you record those shows.
Because if someone could create/build a program to bypass the corporate controls, the corporations would lose control and money. Another example from the near past: when Napster and similar companies allowed people to “rip” songs from the internet. This was after the DMCA, and Napster did get shut down for copyright infringement within two years, but the damage had been done to the music industry. I still don’t know how I feel about that—musicians lost money as well as the music companies. Doctorow has argued in other books (like Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age) that that was inevitable and a good thing, that “information being free” allows creators to get their money directly from their fans. That “ripping” technology of Napster’s was soon harnessed into the early subscription/streaming services, which could (only) be controlled by the corporation, not the listeners.
Despite the bleakness of the new tech world Doctorow exposes in Enshittification, he has hope that change is possible. According to Doctorow, this situation is alarming to national defense personal in every country. Thus the hope—a combination of altruists, capitalists, and national security personal might come together to stand up to Big Tech, by forming their own tech:
This is the new trinity, the three armies we can bring to the fight to disenshittify the internet and keep it from enshittifying again: (1) digital rights activists; (2) entrepreneurs and technologists dreaming of turning American’s trillions into their own billions; and (3) national security hawks who knows it’s only a matter of time before Trump tries to brick their whole country.
This is a powerful alliance. While there’s some overlap in these groups, each has its own distinct constituency, and access to different forms of power. It’s a winning coalition.
What’s more, the forces of disenshittification have their choice of battlefield. Any country in the world could be the disenshittification nation, the one where circumvention is legalized and from which emanates the internet-delivered tools that every technology user in the world (including Americans, who, after all, are the first and most persistent victims of Big Tech’s ripoffs) can use to protect themselves from tech platforms’ ripoffs.
The first country to make this move can capture the market and secure an enduring global advantage.
Sounds possible? Maybe. Enshittification helps people like me understand the reasons, and stakes, behind these “tech platforms’ ripoffs.”