Enshittification
Cory Doctorow coined the term "Enshittification."
On Adam Conover's podcast, I expected a quick overview, a plug for his book of the same name, a couple of jokes, and that's it.
What I found: one of the richest, most relevant talks on technology, intellectual property and the modern world I've heard in a long time.
Cory explains that enshittification happens in five stages:
- Make a great product to attract customers.
- "Lock them in" by making it hard or expensive to leave.
- Degrade the user experience to make it more attractive to businesses.
- Lock the businesses in, in turn, because there's no alternative.
- Degrade the experience for everyone to keep the surplus.
Like the banks ("too big to fail"), the big platforms draw their power from how hard it is for their users to leave ("too big to care").
Which leaves them completely free to change – and in the end degrade – the customer experience for their sole benefit. 3 examples:
- Google deliberately made its search engine less relevant to multiply ad impressions (more searches to find a result = more ads).
- In Finland, the prices on electronic shelf labels in supermarkets change about 2,000 times a day so the adjusted margin is never lost.
- In the US, most nurses are freelancers hired through a platform. The app has access to their credit score, which lets hospitals offer lower pay to nurses in financial trouble.
In this process, an app is, according to Cory, "a website wrapped in intellectual property": the law strictly forbids customizing, extending or adapting an app, under heavy penalties.
So users have no weapon to defend themselves and "de-enshittify" their experience. They're prisoners.
"Imagine if the person who built your house was the only one allowed to repair it."
Solutions?
The EU's efforts to regulate tech (especially on interoperability) are a good lead, he says. But the much-discussed "Euro Stack," meant to replace Big Tech, will only be useful with the right migration tools, so that government agencies don't have to start from scratch – tools that can't be built without reverse engineering.
In the end, he thinks big companies are obsessed with IP (intellectual property) under the illusion that it will free them from the human factor, which is harder to control. But:
"The recipe for making something matters far less than the knowledge you need to follow it."