the enshittification of us

I’ll be talking with Cory Doctorow about both his new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late, and his previous book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 16th, which you can watch online if you can’t make it in person. Get your tickets here!

I don't know Merriam-Webster’s position on the word that defines the 2020s thus far, but it surely has to be enshittification. Not because of what it actually means, but because of what we all believe it to mean: that everything, in this particular era, seems to be getting much, much worse.

Like all broadly-used words, enshittification has a much more specific definition. It relates to the way that platform capitalism all but ensures that two-sided platforms (playing users on one side and business customers on the other) will eventually degrade in quality over time as they have to further squeeze both types of customer (users and businesses) in pursuit of (not just stable, but growing) profits—or, as its populariser Cory Doctorow puts it:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holds each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Some of the platforms that Doctorow uses as examples of enshittification are ones so ubiquitous that we can barely fathom not using them on a daily basis—the most obvious of these being Google, which has been enshittifying now for several years as a result of its choice to prioritise paid-for results and links over the information that its users are actually looking for. This is, of course, a sound business decision, if you are thinking only of profits; if the results of a search are so useless that the user has to search two or three or even four times to find what they want, they spend more time on the platform, which makes Google more money. However, this also has the effect of torpedoing exactly why people use Google in the first place, potentially undermining their market monopolisation (which is over 90%, and about which the legal systems can seem to do very little; Google has lost five major antitrust cases in the last three years, three in the US and two in the EU, and yet nothing changes). Doctorow wrote the following for Wired, back in 2023: