Cory Doctorow Turned His Word of the Year Into a Whole Book ⇥ theguardian.com

In January 2023, Cory Doctorow described the way social media evolves, eventually broadening the theory and giving it the name “enshittification”:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

It did not matter that Doctorow’s original essay is based on something untrue. While there is possibly “a mass exodus [underway from] Facebook” — given the company’s 2024 transition to reporting users of its “family of apps” instead of individual products — in the quarters following Doctorow’s article, Meta posted growing numbers (PDF) of Facebook users. The vibe in Doctorow’s writing was compelling. People started throwing around “enshittification” to describe the worsening of all kinds of online services, and then the analog world, and then everything. Absolutely everything.

The American Dialect Society made “enshittification” its word of the year.

Before all that, however, Doctorow first used “enshittification” to describe Amazon. Now, Doctorow is about to release a new book that manages to stretch this theory to 352 pages. If I sound skeptical, it is because I read an excerpt published in the Guardian, expanding upon the blog post about Amazon that introduced the term. This is a company I entirely believe is deserving of this kind of scorn. Doctorow correctly observes Amazon’s founding premise was to sell products for remarkably low prices, famously sacrificing profitability in its nascent years, a promise that disintegrated as it became the online shopping destination.

Shopping on Amazon sucks now. It sounds, based on Doctorow’s article, like it also sucks to sell on Amazon now, too. But some of Doctorow’s criticisms ring hollow. For example:

Not that you can find lower prices through anything as simple as sorting your search results by price. The merchants that dominate the search listings will play games with quantity to have the result with the lowest price, even if the price per unit is much higher. For example, a four-pack of AAs priced at $3.99 is more expensive per battery than a 16-pack priced at $10 (ie $1 versus $0.63), but sort-by-lowest-price will bury the better deal on the third or fourth page of results.

Amazon’s search engine is pretty terrible, but this is just normal discounts-at-scale stuff. If it were ranked per-unit instead, this 800-count pack would probably rank near the top at just $0.19 each, but then Doctorow might complain about the company putting a $150 box of batteries as one of the lowest-priced items.

Doctorow:

Now Amazon is in the terminal stage. We’re all still stuck to the platform, but we get less and less value out of it. And because we’re all still there, buying Prime and starting (and ending) our purchase planning with Amazon’s enshittified search results, the merchants who rely on selling to us are stuck there, too, earning less and less from every sale.

I am not sure what I am meant to take from the “terminal” diagnosis of Amazon. I agree it all sucks. But there are plenty of thriving businesses that treat their customers with contempt — Adobe, Rogers, Canadian airlines — and I do not see how one of the most valuable and, now, profitable companies on the planet is inching toward death’s door.

I will probably read the book. I am hoping for something more nuanced, but perhaps I am expecting too much when there is a poop emoji on the cover.