Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.”

“This era, the Enshittocene, is the result of specific policy decisions, made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us.”

“This is the enshittifier’s credo: “We’re just doing the thing that makes life worse for you so we can make life better for us. The socializing”

“The subtext of “Competition is just a click away” is that Google will be disciplined by the fear of your defection to a rival service and will govern itself accordingly”

“In 2018, Procter & Gamble zeroed out its $200 million annual “programmatic advertising”8 budget and saw no decline in sales.”

“Intermediaries are part of the solution to the age-old problem of connecting people with one another—but they become part of the problem when they grow so powerful that they can act as gatekeepers who can usurp the relationship between the two sides of their markets.”

“Monopoly is a flywheel: Big companies subvert politics”

“The fact that enshittification can always be reversed with a disenshittifying counter-technology always acted as a brake on the worst impulses of tech companies.”

“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.”

“The revolving door. The overwhelming majority of industry execs who rotate into public service are henhouse-guarding foxes willing to help their former employers at public expense.”

“The complement to regulatory capture as impunity is regulatory capture as a fusion between the regulator and the regulated industry”

“All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that Amazon’s own shipping is fully subsidized. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods.”

“The walkouts were explicitly connected to a long run of Google conduct that chased growth by compromising on the ethical principles that the company had promised to its workers since its founding.”

“Printers themselves are getting progressively worse”

“Pharmaceutical companies merged to monopoly and used their seller power to gouge hospitals. Hospitals formed defensive regional monopolies and used their buyer power to force pharma prices down—then used their seller power to screw the insurance companies. The insurers underwent their own mergers”

“The reason for enshittification’s popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and what we should do about it.”

“US lawmakers are torn between their voters’ concern over tech monopolization and their sense that these are American companies that act as a source of American soft power abroad and of national pride at home.”

“Amazon makes 38 billion every year charging merchants for search placement. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you'll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, that best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.”

“This is why every company is so sweatily insistent that you use its app rather than its website. An app is a website wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to install an ad blocker or any other modification that makes the product work better for you at the expense of the company’s shareholders.”

“Meanwhile, ad fraud was going wild. Advertisers were paying billions for ads that no one ever saw. In 2018, Procter & Gamble zeroed out its $200 million annual “programmatic advertising”8 budget and saw no decline in sales.9 It seems all of those ads were either: Being shown to random people rather than the people P&G was paying to target; or Not being shown to anyone.”

“That’s chickenization: a system of total control over workers who have to borrow money to pay you for the privilege of working for you”

“This process isn’t just a way to prevent corporate executives from cheating the public by knowingly overpromising about their own products or denigrating their rivals’; it’s also a way to stop firms that have tricked themselves from fooling the rest of us”

“The point is that none of this could have happened were it not for Adobe’s decision to migrate all of its software to the cloud and deny its customers their long-standing right to simply buy its programs and enjoy their perpetual use.”

“Microsoft learned precisely the wrong lesson from all of this: that if it could form a large enough monopoly before the DOJ took notice”

“Your car is a rolling surveillance platform that gathers so much information on you that the carmakers themselves warn that anyone who gains access to your car could actually murder you.”

“But the flip side of that was lock-in. Unlike Android phones—which are typically designed to allow users to make use of alternative app stores and even install different operating systems—iPhones use software and hardware locks to prevent users from modifying Apple’s rules. This is a system that works well, but fails badly. So long as Apple remains a benevolent dictator, your iPhone is a walled garden that protects you from the bad guys who want to attack you. But if Apple turns on you, that walled garden becomes a prison, one that pens you in and makes you easy pickings.”