Matt Lucky reviews two new books exploring why digital platforms are failing users and how to rediscover the internet’s original promises of an abundance of high-quality and cheap services: Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It and Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.
In the early days of the internet, John Barlow’s “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” spoke to the utopian and liberatory hopes that early adopters glimpsed in emerging digital technologies. The paper envisions a future where individuals are free, at least in cyberspace, from both arbitrary state power and the old, sclerotic industry giants. Well into the early 21st century, the technology industry indeed appeared to be populated with miracle workers building something like the Star Trek future, one new product at a time. Inexpensive streaming and easy access to a giant catalogue of shows and movies on early Netflix, for instance, was an amazing deal compared to paying for cable. It felt like magic! Alas, in the last decade, that old luster has not merely waned, but in many instances has seemingly undergone a prolonged process of putrefaction.
Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, and Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity both seek to explain why the utopian promises of the early internet and digital platforms like Netflix, Google, and Amazon has decayed into the contemporary tech industry that expects Americans to pay more for worse products. Specifically, both aim to explain why the internet is getting worse precisely now, a process Doctorow calls “enshittification.” Like gravity, Doctorow says, digital platforms and other tech giants experience a perpetual pull to degrade their products and services, and it is only through countervailing forces that the descent into an abyss of shittiness is arrested. Something particular about the current internet is making it harder to resist that enshittifying gravity, which both authors aim to diagnose. Doctorow and Wu have known each other since elementary school, and their theses reflect a shared school of thought. That said, each offers distinct yet complementary insights into the troubles of Big Tech. Both books are also in internal conversation with the authors’ respective prior work: Wu’s book is the third in a trilogy (The Attention Merchants (2016) and The Curse of Bigness (2018)), and Doctorow’s, while not an official sequel, builds on some themes from his previous book, Chokepoint Capitalism (2022).
Amazon offers a core example for both authors of how businesses go bad when they grow into corpulent monopolies. If you have noticed that search results on Amazon frequently range from poor to baffling, there is a reason for that. Amazon effectively obligates sellers on its platform to pay for placement in search results, yet the ability to pay a fee is not indicative of the quality of the product. Hence, it is harder for you to find quality products on Amazon because their search system is centered on extracting money from sellers, rather than surfacing the goods consumers want. As Wu relates, in Amazon’s pay-for-placement system, “sellers (and users) are spending nearly $56 billion to make the buying experience worse. It is a pure example of valueless wealth extraction.” To wit, Amazon makes billions by degrading the quality of your shopping experience. They are far from alone. Doctorow similarly contends that Google has deliberately made search worse to coerce users into multiple searches, which in turn allows Google to display more ads.
More than a decade ago, Amazon used to be a great deal for third-party sellers by offering services such as handling the shipping and storage of products. This made it easier to start and run small businesses by offloading those tasks. Today, Amazon has changed that deal by hiking fees on sellers to the point where Doctorow pegs them at 45-51 cents on the dollar. This is great for Amazon, which, according to Wu, in 2023 received $480 billion in third-party sales from Amazon Marketplace, compared to $95 billion in sales it makes as the seller. For sellers and buyers, however, Wu contends Amazon is extracting an abusive toll from the public by sitting atop a monopoly over essential digital commerce infrastructure. What is more, Amazon requires sellers on its platform not to sell their products for cheaper elsewhere, which stifles competing platforms from developing and means that you are paying the Amazon tax regardless of where you shop.
Doctorow argues that not merely Amazon but the many other digital platforms are following a standard model of enshittification. They begin, in stage one, as wonderful deals to users and consumers, providing high-quality products and services at low costs. This allows them to quickly scale up by attracting a user base. Early Facebook, for instance, promised that it would never spy on users and filled users’ feeds primarily with content they wanted to see from their friends and family.
Next, in stage two, platforms betray their users by offering great deals to business customers on the other side of their market. In Facebook’s case, this entailed reneging on the former promise not to spy on users to instead perpetually surveil their every digital action in order to offer advertisers the ability to algorithmically target them with potent ads. Thus, instead of user feeds primarily filled with the promised content from friends and family, today, users’ eyes are filled with ads and promoted content. Neither ads nor promoted content are necessarily high quality. Recently, Meta projected that 10% of its sales revenue is from scam advertisements.
In stage three, platforms then betray their business customers as well. Thus, Facebook, in Doctorow’s telling, has engaged in rampant ad fraud by promising hyper-targeted ads that are often ineffective and seen by no one. For instance, at various points, Facebook has severely misrepresented user engagement to advertisers, ineffectively placed ads that go unobserved, and a significant portion of ad engagement on mobile devices is just accidental “fat-finger” clicks on obtrusive screen-filling ads. Doctorow relates how “in 2018, Procter & Gamble zeroed out its $200 million annual “programmatic advertising” budget and saw no decline in sales.”
At the end of these betrayals, users are left in a surveillance machine that feeds them artificial intelligence slop and conspiracy theories and business customers with an advertisement hole down which to disappear money. Or, as Doctorow puts it, users are served “a giant pile of shit.” For both Doctorow and Wu, this process of platform decay defines the modern digital platform economy.
Lest you take comfort in the notion that enshittification and extractive economics are confined to the digital realm, Doctorow and Wu articulate parallel arguments capturing how these patterns reach beyond cyberspace to conquer the physical world as well. In the healthcare industry, for instance, Wu contends that private equity (PE) firms “bring platform practices to medicine by buying up and combining existing practices into one large practice, then raising the prices charged to hospitals and insurers.” Put differently, PE firms are creating regional monopolies of networked healthcare providers, serving as middlemen between patients, payers (insurers), and healthcare providers, and extracting their toll from that industry. They are, like Amazon, the platform monopolist in the middle of the market.
In contrast, Doctorow identifies enshittification invading the physical world, not through adapting platform business models to physical industries, but through the use of needless software to colonize consumer goods by software. The main vehicle for this conquest is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) section 1201, which makes it a felony to circumvent digital locks on software and reverse engineer them to fix enshittified (or merely broken) products. What the DMCA means for businesses is that if firms can engineer a thin, unnecessary layer of software into their product, then suddenly, aftermarket modifications by consumers and third-party businesses that touch that software are criminalized. For example, by placing a chip with a bit of DMCA-protected software into its printer cartridges, HP is able to make it illegal for competing third parties to sell inexpensive ink cartridges that bypass the digital locks on HP printers.
This strategy is enshittifying the physical world through pointlessly smart devices. Doctorow writes, “the cost of tiny, high-powered chips is in free fall, which means that more and more devices are becoming “smart.” Once they are “smart,” they can be designed so that using them in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of is illegal.” Doctorow’s preferred example of this is the app for his garage door opener that shows him seven ads whenever he uses it, because the firm that makes the opener knows designing around the app is illegal. Similarly, every corporation wants you to conduct business through their app, no matter how unnecessary, since “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.” The internet for everything becomes less a movement for convenience and technological possibility and instead an iron cage to enclose the physical world in enshittification as unintelligent products fall into disuse and off store shelves.
Doctorow emphasizes at length that enshittified products and services are the result of policy choices rather than technical necessities. There is theoretically always a way to design good software to counter bad software. As Doctorow notes, “there is no known practical way to make a computer that only runs the programs its manufacturer approves of. If there were, we’d make computers that were incapable of running ransomware and spyware and other malware.” Put differently, in the same manner that every computer is vulnerable to malicious hacking, they are also open to software that benefits consumers and workers. For instance, DoorDash’s app hides the tip amounts from its delivery workers (sometimes trapping them into deliveries that lose them money after accounting for fuel), and in response, a startup, Para, designed an app that surfaces that hidden tip information to delivery workers. Put simply, Para’s app counters a harmful design feature of DoorDash’s software. It is likewise possible on a technical level for consumers of firms to design workarounds for garage door openers that demand you install ad-filled apps or to craft printer ink cartridges that circumvent HP’s digital locks. This is all to say that the enshittification of the physical world is the consequence of anti-circumvention laws such as the DMCA. Further, modifying or repealing those laws will generate opportunities for startup firms to market good software to counter pernicious designs when current incumbents descend into enshittifcation.
Both authors cite the need for policy reforms to restore competition to discipline firms away from these abusive patterns. Doctorow identifies two sets of practices. The first, applicable to every industry, is competition and regulation. More competition between digital platforms, many of which control monopolies over their respective markets or have a market share just beneath that qualification, would force companies to improve the quality of their services to win over users. Second, the government could allow the public to help themselves by modifying or eliminating anticircumvention laws, such as the DMCA, so that when one firm enshittifies, other firms can legally design fixes to get around those giant piles of shit.
Wu, by comparison, recently articulated his project as a “political philosophy or an economic vision that favors decentralized power and decentralized capitalism.” The project applies to the economy a logic that echoes Madison’s thinking in Federalist 10: calling for a republic composed of many plural and diverse interests that generate mutual countervailing power to arrest the formation of a single malignant and dominating faction. Solutions ought to be oriented toward establishing a more effective balance of power that causes players in the economy to act as checks and balances on each other’s pernicious impulses to extract and enshittify. Like Doctorow, Wu believes more competition will produce higher-quality products.
In further recommendations, Wu suggests enforcing neutrality rules against platforms to prohibit arbitrary discrimination between paying customers. This might prohibit, for example, Apple’s ability to select winners and losers on the App Store by charging a 30% processing fee for transactions on most apps, while exempting select friends, such as Uber, from that extraction. Additionally, Wu also recommends “line of business” restrictions that protect other sectors from encroachments by current tech monopolies. For instance, Wu recommends barring major firms such as Google and Microsoft from controlling emerging AI platforms so that the current large language model trend (bubble?!) can pose a genuine competitive challenge to the incumbent tech platforms.
Together, Doctorow’s and Wu’s books provide a detailed critique of the travails of the digital economy and reimagine the original utopic promises of the digital era when printer ink would be cheap, Google search results would be relevant, and garage door openers would not require an app to work.
Author Disclosure: The author reports no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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