# Enshittification
Author:: Cory Doctorow
## AI-Generated Summary
None
## Highlights
> 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. Because enshittification isn’t just a way to say “Something got worse.”1 It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once. ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=332))
> Like a disease, it has symptoms, a mechanism, and an epidemiology. The first part of this book will explain these components of enshittification. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=339))
> We can create enshittification-resistant infrastructure for a new, good world. ([Location 348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=348))
> Enshittification infects a specific kind of digital business: platforms. The term platform gets thrown about a lot. Formally, a platform is a business that operates a two-sided market, that is, a system that connects business customers and end users. ([Location 351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=351))
> 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. ([Location 370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=370))
> 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. ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=400))
> When their company’s fortunes turn uncertain, tech leaders panic. Being techies, they have a technical name for this panic: they call it pivoting ([Location 513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=513))
> In other words, anytime you see good products produced ethically and offered at fair prices, it’s because the world from which those products emerged punishes cheating: low quality, poor labor practices, and high prices all cost the company more than it stands to make from indulging them. ([Location 992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=992))
> So let’s talk about what stops companies from enshittifying. There are two forces that act on every company in every industry: competition (markets) and regulation (governments). ([Location 994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=994))
> Technically speaking, every computer you use is a “Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine.” ([Location 1009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1009))
> Every computer we know how to make is capable of running every computer program we know how to write. That is, computers are universal. There is no known practical way to make a computer that only runs the programs its manufacturer approves of. ([Location 1011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1011))
> That digital flexibility is key to enshittification. The core mechanic of enshittification is a continuous series of adjustments to the “business logic” of a service—how much it charges, how much it pays, how it ranks search results, and so on. That’s how companies can start charging for things they once let you do for free, and how they can apply those charges selectively to different users and business customers, at different times. ([Location 1019](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1019))
> The flexibility of computers makes them interoperable in a way that no other technology can match. ([Location 1043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1043))
> For example, if you’ve ever used Apple’s iWork apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), you’ve benefited from this adversarial interoperability. Apple technologists made these apps by reverse engineering Microsoft Office ([Location 1052](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1052))
> Adversarial interoperability is the key to self-help. 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. The threat of adversarial interoperability meant that even when companies didn’t care about treating their customers fairly, they still had to act like they did, lest those customers avail themselves of a rival’s interoperable product and sever the relationship between the enshittifying company and its customers … forever. ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1057))
> Scarcity gave tech workers enormous bargaining power, so tech bosses got creative. Rather than motivating their workers by threatening them with replacement by more desperate workers willing to accept worse pay and conditions, tech bosses discovered a different, winning strategy: inculcating a sense of mission into tech workers. ([Location 1071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1071))
> There’s a name for this strategy, coined by the librarian-theorist Fobazi Ettarh: vocational awe. Ettarh uses this term to describe the weaponization of workers’ sense of duty, especially to the public those workers serve. For Ettarh, vocational awe is why teachers, nurses, hospice care workers, and, of course, librarians accept poor pay and conditions without rebelling. They feel a sense of duty to their students, patients, and patrons, and their bosses don’t, and everyone knows it. So long as workers believe that their boss would rather harm the people they love and care for rather than increase their pay, they are held hostage by their own sense of duty. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1082))
> But for tech bosses, there was a huge downside to manipulating workers into spending every waking hour at the office by instilling a sense of mission in them: those workers felt a sense of mission. When their bosses told them to enshittify the products they felt a sense of ownership over, having poured their heart and soul into them, they experienced a sense of betrayal and profound moral injury. ([Location 1126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1126))
> Let’s look at how competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power all slipped away. ([Location 1140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1140))
### The End of Competition
> (Like most other tech monopolists, Amazon is much better at buying things than it is at making things. ([Location 1158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1158))
> Almost without exception, every success Google has had since Google Search was an acquisition, not an invention. Android and YouTube, of course, but also the company’s whole advertising-technology (ad-tech) stack, its Google Docs and collaboration products, Google Maps, navigation and satellite images, server management, and customer service—all were other people’s companies that Google bought, scaled up, and integrated into its sprawling empire. ([Location 1168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1168))
> Google may be very good at operations, but it’s objectively terrible at innovation. Almost without exception, the products Google invents in-house crash and burn—so many that there’s a website called Killed by Google that lists hundreds of products that expired on Google’s watch. ([Location 1175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1175))
> When the majority of US states, led by Texas, formed a coalition and sued Google for antitrust violations in 2020, they, too, were able to demand access to the company’s internal memos. These contained many bombshells, but none so consequential as Jedi Blue, the code name for a secret collusive agreement between Google and Facebook that rigged the ad market to raise the price of ads while delivering a lower share of the revenue to the publishers who ran those ads. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had all personally signed off on Jedi Blue. ([Location 1270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1270))
> Interoperability is a powerful counter to network effects. ([Location 1451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1451))
> Once a company can enshittify its products, it will face the perennial temptation to enshittify those products (along with the pressure from investors, board members, and executives to do so). That enshittificatory impulse can come from an external actor, like the Orwell estate or Pantone, or it can come from within. ([Location 1535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1535))
> While not all regulation is wise or helpful, a world without regulation is a catastrophe. That’s because, in a highly technological world, your ability to do well (or even to live out the day) requires that you correctly navigate innumerable highly technical questions that you can’t possibly answer. ([Location 1634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1634))
> But when a sector dwindles to five companies—or four, or three, or two, or just one2—the collective action problem is annihilated by the inevitable coziness among the executives of the incestuous industries. After all, the executives in an industry dominated by a handful of firms are apt to have worked at most or all of the companies in the sector. They know one another, came up together, and are part of one another’s social milieu. ([Location 1676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1676))
> “Regulatory capture”—when a company suborns its regulator and teams up with it to screw over customers, rivals, and suppliers—starts with a regulator that is weaker than the company it is supposed to be watchdogging. ([Location 1686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1686))
> When Uber’s algorithm offers a job to all the drivers in your neighborhood, it calculates a different wage for each driver based on that driver’s recent behavior. If the driver has recently been picky, the system will offer a higher wage than it will to a driver who has been more ant-like. Pickers who take the bait will then be offered slightly lower wages in the future. The increments and frequency of these pay cuts are randomized so that it’s hard for drivers to recognize that they’re being squeezed, and of course, if a driver balks at a job and gets a little picky, then the wage starts to titrate up again. ([Location 1730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1730))
> As Veena Dubal has documented, the forums frequented by Uber drivers are full of posts from drivers who are certain that they are “good at Uber,” who boast of the giant salaries they bring home from driving. Dubal’s ethnographic work includes heartbreaking interviews with drivers who drive until they can’t keep their eyes open, sleep in their cars, get back on the road—and then blame themselves for the pittances they take home. They don’t understand that their indiscriminate desire to please the algorithm by taking every ride that comes their way is actually signaling that they are easy pickings and can be enticed into driving for sub-starvation wages. ([Location 1786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1786))
### Reverse-Centaurs and Chickenization
> When your drivers are pushed so hard by automation that they can’t even urinate, they aren’t centaurs, whose work is supercharged by high-tech tools. They are reverse-centaurs, humans who are used as inconvenient, fallible meat-puppets for a robot that demands superhuman feats of them, working them in ways the human body literally can’t withstand, until they are used up and discarded, and then replaced with other humans. ([Location 1838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1838))
> But Amazon isn’t merely in the business of turning its workers into reverse-centaurs. Before it does that, it chickenizes them. In labor economics, chickenization refers to a set of particularly ghastly labor practices originating in the poultry industry (hence the name). Poultry packing—like so many other sectors—is a cartel, with three companies dominating, each running in its own exclusive territory, meaning that farmers typically have no choice but to use the one packer available to them. ([Location 1843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1843))
### Twiddling
> Twiddling—the process of changing the costs, prices, recommendation weights, and search rankings through automated or semiautomated means—is a key driver of enshittification. A business with a digital back end can endlessly twiddle all of these virtual knobs. ([Location 1903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1903))
> Twiddling is the how of enshittification. While we can all see enshittification from the outside as platforms are good to users, then to business customers, then to themselves, twiddling is the invisible thing that’s going on inside the companies. ([Location 1920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=1920))
### The End of Self-Help
> What are we to make of industry claims to have made a selectively universal computer, which will only run the manufacturer’s preferred programs? It’s quite simple, really. When the Big Tech companies say, “It’s impossible to run code of your choosing on a computer we’ve sold you,” what they’re really saying is “It’s illegal to run code of your choosing on that computer.” ([Location 2029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=2029))
> 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. ([Location 2106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=2106))
> As Big Tech consolidated its grip on the tech sector, venture capitalists and founders understood that the most likely “exit” for any startup was acquisition by a Big Tech company. ([Location 2300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=2300))
> You may have heard of military exercises that pit red teams (attackers) against blue teams (defenders). ([Location 2348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=2348))
> However, despite the two equally matched sets of technological possibilities, the red team usually prevails. For the blue team to successfully defend the status quo (that is, a fortress with walls that are still upright and acting as barriers to entry for the city within), it has to build walls with no flaws. For the red team to undermine those walls, it only has to find a single mistake that the blue team made, and the walls will fall. This is the attacker’s advantage. ([Location 2351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=2351))
> rational bosses who know that workers can counter-twiddle are incentivized to treat their workers more fairly in the first place. ([Location 2445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=2445))
> Citation analysis—the academic impact-factor ranking technique that became PageRank—was very robust before it became important, but after it became the primary way to garner traffic to one’s website, a key weakness in PageRank emerged: it’s just not that hard to make links between websites. Soon, “search engine optimizers”2 were creating “link farms” of sites full of links designed to replicate the formal signifiers of authority that Google’s algorithm looked for. Google fought back by deploying ever more sophisticated and complex analyses that sought to disqualify pages whose authority seemed to come from inauthentic sources. ([Location 2508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=2508))
> That wasn’t all: Googlers were also given “20 percent time”—one day in five to chase passion projects within the company. Most of these projects went nowhere (most non–20 percent Google projects also went nowhere), but the 20 percent program is responsible for one of Google’s few post-Search, in-house successes: Gmail, invented by Paul Buchheit as a 20 percent project in 2004. ([Location 2576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DQJ5TWB1&location=2576))
### Rent Seeking and Technofeudalism Right