In this excerpt from the Plutopia News Network, Cory Doctorow discusses his book Enshittification and the broader forces behind why digital platforms (and other industries) have “suddenly gotten worse.” He explains the term’s now-famous three-stage cycle: platforms lure users with quality, pivot to serving business customers at users’ expense, then squeeze both sides for maximum profit. Cory argues that this isn’t just greed, but the result of an “enshittogenic” policy environment shaped by weakened antitrust, captured regulators, and diminished worker power.
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All of these policies that are antithetical to the interests of billionaires keep cropping up all over the world. And I think that’s best understood as an effect and not a cause, right? That there is a giant tailwind for smashing corporate power. And it has many manifestations: environmental law, opposition to genocide in Gaza, the anti-poverty campaigns, anti-corruption campaigns. Many other aspects of the fight about corporate power are all kind of reflecting, I think, this popular sentiment that, like the wind, is invisible and can only be understood by what it propels. And I think we’re all really angry with corporate power, we’re all fucking done with it. And there is this maxim out of finance, Stein’s Law: that anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops. And I think that we’re reaching the stopping point for corporate corruption.
Links
- A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet: video of Cory’s December 28 talk.
- Pluralistic: Daily Links from Cory Doctorow
- Cory Doctorow’s Craphound
- Cory’s latest books
- “Enshittification” in Wikipedia
- Cory at EFF
Video version on YouTube:
Photo copyright Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud (JUCO), www.jucophoto.com/, licensed via Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0
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