Screen and Shout

Shortly after I received my new work laptop, I became extremely frustrated with Microsoft OneDrive, which wanted me to save everything to the cloud. It seemed impossible to save any documents to the hard drive. After a few hours of searching for solutions, I uninstalled OneDrive, which many an internet commentator strongly warned against. I felt I had to do something, and it did somewhat solve the problem: now I can save and open files on my computer (even though I still must click through four pointless windows to do so). Without the storage software, though, things are very, very wonky. Microsoft Word crashes constantly, and it opens a slew of random documents when it restarts. Of course, it’s not just Microsoft. Every time I open a PDF, Adobe tells me it looks like a long document, so do I want its AI to summarize it for me? As someone who makes his living reading and writing, I couldn’t imagine a more insulting question for my computer to ask me.

Thankfully, there is a new expression to sum up the way our technology no longer works as well as it once did, one that has entered the lexicon with shocking speed: “enshittification.” Coined by the Canadian British novelist, blogger, and internet rights activist Cory Doctorow, the term perfectly encapsulates so much of our current digital hellscape: nothing as good as before and all but the kitchen sink pouring straight into the data centres. In Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Doctorow reveals how our tech has gotten so bad so fast and provides some possible mitigation strategies.

Part of the draw — and the fun — of this book is the title’s scatological naughtiness. Having coined a zeitgeist-defining phrase, Doctorow knows how to mix both dirty humour and startling clarity when describing the phenomenon of things getting shittier, including its causes and its fallout. He uses the word hundreds of times, as well as gleefully coining variations of it: enshittify and its opposite, disenshittify; enshittificatory and disenshittificatory; the enshitternet; the Great Enshittening; and (my absolute favourite) the Enshittocene: the geological era we are now living in. Doctorow also knows how to make a sentence grab the reader: “Once a company can enshittify its products, it will face the perennial temptation to enshittify those products.”

Underneath the fun of the title — also embodied in the cover, which features a giant poo emoji with “&$!#%” covering its supposed mouth — Doctorow is deadly serious. From the opening paragraph of the introduction, he pulls no punches: “It’s not just you.” He goes on: “The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck.”

I nodded along with each sentence. This is, of course, part of the power of the word “enshittification”: we all recognize its verity.

In the following four sections —“The Natural History,” “The Pathology,” “The Epidemiology,” and “The Cure”— Doctorow intelligently lays out how we got here. To put it in the simplest terms, this “sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us” has come about because big tech companies want only to maximize profits and shareholder glee. They have us handcuffed as customers; they have businesses locked in; they’ve cowed any governmental regulatory power. For those who don’t believe him, Doctorow has receipts. He narrates how Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Twitter were able to suck in users and advertisers with revolutionary products that, at first, worked; but once we were all hooked, they started to become shittier and shittier. “All our tech businesses are turning awful,” he writes, “all at once, and they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their rotting carcasses, unable to escape.”

The main driver behind enshittification is capitalism run amok. Through monopolies, dangerously weak regulation, and anti-interoperability, corporate giants can basically do what they want. Doctorow makes it clear how dire the current landscape is, across industries: “Today, there are five major publishers, four major studios, three major labels, two companies that dominate apps, and a single company that dominates ebooks and audiobooks.” As he points out, “A hundred companies are a mob, a rabble. Five companies are a cartel.” Without oversight, the Googles of the world can sabotage search results to show more ads and rack up more profit. This is an important part of enshittification: it’s done on purpose. “Once the fear of competition had been eliminated,” he writes, “making Google Search worse was a small price to pay for rising stock prices and massive buybacks.”

Perhaps the most terrifying part of Doctorow’s warning is that it no longer pertains only to websites and social media platforms. Because of the low cost of microchips, almost every conceivable product is ripe for the taking. A telling example is Anova Culinary’s sous vide wand, which, for almost ten years, came with a free app that could control the cooking tool. In August 2024, the company’s CEO, Stephen Svajian, announced that new users would have to pay a monthly subscription fee of $2 for the app. Svajian had realized, Doctorow writes, “that the data he swiped from his customers wasn’t worth enough to cover the costs of spying on them.” It’s the same for many other seemingly benign household gadgets. Even our vehicles are spying on us: “Your car is a rolling surveillance platform that gathers so much information on you that the carmakers themselves warn that anyone who gains access to your car could actually murder you.”

Doctorow’s cataloguing of all the tricks, loopholes, and detours that big and small companies employ to maximize profits is devastating. He explains how they use copyright laws to forbid anyone from tampering with their products, especially apps. An app “is a website wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to install an ad blocker or any other modification that makes the product work better for you at the expense of the company’s shareholders.” By bringing in other examples, Doctorow illustrates that tech is just one influential part of a much larger picture. “Virtually every sector looks like this,” he tells us, “from trucking to groceries, hotels to aerospace. When Boeing airplanes start falling out of the sky, this is the force at work: consolidation, regulatory capture, enshittification.”

With damning evidence, Doctorow unpacks how our tech overlords have forsaken us. In Needy Media: How Tech Gets Personal, the communications studies professor Stephen Monteiro takes a slightly different tack, writing a thorough genealogy of how our smallest devices came to be what they are. Unlike Doctorow’s book, which is an economics textbook in disguise, Needy Media is exactly as academic as it seems. Monteiro sets out to argue that the “relationships that exist between users and their portable smart devices often have as much to do with the affective value of the multi-sensory, rudimentary exchanges that take place between user and device as they do with the exchanges with other people and systems typically carried out by texting, calling, posting to social media, scrolling, and related actions.” In other words, our smart gadgets aren’t just inanimate objects but near-sentient mechanisms that seize our attention.

Monteiro explores this idea through several histories, some fascinating, others a bit of a slog. He presents the implications of the build-your-own-computer craze in the ’70s, of Tamagotchi pets in the late ’90s, and of MP3 players blinged out with personalized “skins.” He unearths these precursors to our current digital world to reveal the role of user interfacing, asking readers to see the mouse, in particular, as a “cultural artifact of ideological significance.” By making our physical interactions with these objects visible, he shows that our bonds to them are both “intimate and complicit.” Not only do we “tap, rub, and caress their glass faces to do and make things,” but we angle them and their lenses to look back at us, so we can livestream and take photographs and unlock them (as well as helping to train their facial recognition programs). That’s not all: “We ask them questions or make requests through their voice-activated virtual assistants. And when they beep, chime, vibrate, or illuminate, we reflexively pick them up and hold them close.” 

Throughout, Monteiro reminds us of the uncanny ubiquity of these objects in our daily lives. “Smartphones, smartwatches, and the like have accompanied us almost everywhere only for the last twenty years,” he writes, “yet it has become difficult to imagine how life was before.”

While very different in tone and intended audience, these books make a great pairing, as exemplified in their covers: Enshittification’s swearing poop emoji and Needy Media’s kiss-blowing emoji bursting through blue wallpaper. Together they explain how we have developed such loving relationships with our devices, despite the way their manufacturers take advantage of us.

Doctorow, at least, does more than scare us silly. He offers what he sees as the solution to our enshittificatory dilemma. After all, if it’s true that the Enshittocene is the age not just of “the abusive outsized platform” but of its collapse, there could be a cure. To disenshittify would mean stronger regulations, right-to-repair laws, unionization, and more. In the face of glaring capitalist greed and malfeasance, he remains hopeful. “We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system,” he proclaims, “one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.” I hope he’s right, though I have my doubts. The issue to me seems much larger than the need to control these corporations. That these enterprises exist at all is the problem, and as long as they do, wealth and power will continue to stream upward. For now, I’ll switch to LibreOffice, abandon Twitter and Instagram, and continue to be inspired by the Luddite maxim that technology should work for us and not for our bosses.