If you use technology, read this book

Because I am not made of money, when I buy a book to give someone as a Christmas present (presuming it's one I haven't read yet), if there's enough time I'll read it myself before wrapping it up and sending it off. Thus was the case with one I picked up the other night, the latest nonfic from the great Cory Doctorow.

Doctorow is a longtime tech consumer advocate, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and just on his own, and his new volume explains how the evolution of the Internet has unfortunately coincided with some truly terrible governance to create what he calls the Enshittocene Era, which we are now living trough.

Digital services in particular and the Internet in general are in dire need of regulation, as evidenced by the continually worsening transitions from software being sold to you on a disc or as a download to what we see more and more of today, software that you "subscribe to"—which is to say, rent from a remote server. Further, some of the tech companies like to tweak their user agreements now and then to try and take ownership of not just the physical software, but your work that you create with it in order to "train AI." As more commodities become digital, you as a consumer own less of what you pay for. When once you owned music you bought on a disc, these days if you purchase an album on iTunes, you didn't really buy it—you're renting it for the duration your iTunes account and device is active and paid up. Even physical goods now use Internet connectivity, the so-called "Internet of Things," to try and prevent consumers from actually owning the products they buy.

You've undoubtedly encountered this sort of thing in your everyday lives, but Doctorow details how its done and why in all its greedy glory, and in quite accessible language, in this book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

All the tech outfits are abusing us; bad enough they all spy on us to an extreme degree to facilitate their algorithms and their advertising sales. But over time they've also graduated to just blatantly ripping us off whenever they can and abusing anyone that gets between them and a dollar. Amazon, unsurprisingly, is and always has been the worst offender, but Apple grates my cheese almost as much with the way they insist on control of everything related to any of their products. (Recall my note in the post on the Android app that there was no iOS app; this is because Apple wants total control and wants you to pay for the privilege of giving it to them.) Everyone is in on it. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Adobe, everyone. And a lot fewer companies make up "everyone" after so many mergers and acquisitions and blind-eye-turning on antitrust laws.

Dearth of competition. Dearth of regulation. Diminishing power of tech-industry labor. Binding arbitration of conflicts when the offending company employs the arbitrators. Choices made by companies and governments to gouge consumers without much pushback (but what little there has been is worth paying attention to and replicating). Thus does enshittification metastasize.

Suffice to say, this is a very important book for everyone to read. Especially Americans, since our regulatory system is the most influential (so far) on these businesses.

Some choice quotes:

"Apple didn't treat its customers well because it loved them. It treated them well to lure them into its walled garden, which was then revealed to be a prison."

"Google could spend billions of dollars every year making sure that even someone who's tried every other search engine would still prefer Google. Or it could spend a lot fewer billions of dollars making sure that no one ever tried a search engine other than Google. It chose the latter. ... Apple's single largest source of revenue is a check for more than $20 billion that Google writes it every year to buy the default search box in Safari and on the iPhone."

"The instant Adobe moved its software to the cloud and eliminated the non-subscription versions of its apps, it put a gun on the mantelpiece. It was only a matter of time until someone opened fire on Adobe's customers with that gun."

"If you operate a cloud-based app, you can monitor your customers' every click and keystroke to discover which features are most valuable to your deepest-pocketed users, and then you can remove that feature from the product's basic tier and reclassify it as an upcharged add-on. The CEOs who do this got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is, 'I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.'"

"Here's how perverse [the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, section 1201] is: ... If I, as the author, narrator, and investor in an audiobook, allow Amazon to sell you that book and later want to provide you with a tool so you can take your book to a rival platform, I will be committing a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.... If you were to visit a truckstop and shoplift my audiobook on CD from a spinner rack, you would face a significantly lighter penalty for stealing a physical item that I would for providing you with the means to take a copyrighted work that I created and financed our of the Amazon ecosystem. If you were to hijack the truck that delivers that CD and steal an entire fifty-three-foot trailer full of audiobooks, you would likely face a shorter prison sentence that I would for helping you break the DRM on a title I own."

Doctorow notes some positive changes in recent years and lays out a plan to fix things, but it depends on public and governmental actions that seem unlikely to happen in the near future in this country, at least so long as Republicans are in power. It may be up to the Europeans for now.

Tagged The Internet, Culture, Republicans, Technology, Cory Doctorow, Books, Posted on December 15, 2025 at 2:36PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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