Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
I have the first Kindle Paperwhite from 2012, and I still read with it. It is slow but I enjoy it, it worked. Amazon announced they were discontinuing support for these old devices in May 2026. No more support, no more Kindle store either. I can still use but it cannot be updated, and it's best left on Airplane mode, in case it tries to connect and gets bricked altogether in the process (the term to mean a digital device is no longer functional, which can happen on purpose). Suffice to say I did not purchase another Kindle, even though they offered me a time limited discount to buy a new one.
Ebooks on your Kindle are not yours, you pay to license them from Amazon, who still owns the digital product. You may have noticed your social media feeds are full of AI slop, irrelevant ads, and people you've never heard from rather than the friends, family, people, and media outlets you actually wanted to follow.
If you've ever had an inkling that perhaps these global tech empires and the richest people in the world heading them might not actually have everyone else's best interests in mind, and that maybe we should do something about it, you may well enjoy Cory Doctorow's Enshittification 💩 as much as I did.
The term, first coined by the author and digital rights activist in 2022, became so popular that it was selected word of the year 2023 by the American Dialect Society, and then was turned into a fully fledged book in 2025 and won the Locus award for non-fiction in 2026.
Enshittification describes the course taken by tech companies in the development of their products and services:
"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 values for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit"
Most of the book goes into detailed case studies showing how this devolution process applies to several of the largest tech businesses. You can read one of them about Amazon in a piece in The Guardian to give you a sense of the book. The content is serious with the occasional fun and sarcastic edge in the writing. The second half of the book is what is being done and what can be done about these issues; there is hope. He points to the swings the previous head of the FTC Lina Khan took against monopolies in the US during the Biden administration, and ways in which digital gig workers are organizing themselves around the world to push back against algorithms doing their best to pay them as little as possible.
Towards the end he contextualises other issues in the world, from poverty to climate change:
"But for all that the internet is far less important to these other fights, it is nevertheless extremely relevant to these struggles. The internet is the terrain upon which these fights will be waged"
In the age of AI, data centres are quickly being built everywhere, consuming enormous amounts of resources. It was a campaign topic for the US Midterms elections. Open AI recently launched their advertising platform for ChatGPT, typically the beginning of enshittification for users. It would be easy to see only doom and gloom, though I join Cory Doctorow in his belief that there are alternatives to make tech and the internet better and more open for everyone.
