Why Does Everything Online Suck Now?

"Remember when your social media feeds actually showed posts from your friends? When online platforms felt helpful instead of exploitative? If it seems like everything digital has gotten worse lately, you're not imagining it-and there's actually a term for what's happened-"enshittification." Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, who's written a new book called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Below, Cory explains how we got here and what we can do about it."

"Users stick around during Stage Two because they are locked in. There are lots of different ways that tech platforms can lock users in. In the case of Facebook, it's something economists call the collective action problem. You're there because your friends are there, and your friends are there because you are there. In come publishers, and they get stuck there too because they are reliant on you, who has been taken hostage by your friends."

"Digital businesses can change the rules on a per user, per session basis. They can change prices, recommendations, and every aspect of navigating their service based on inferences made from their surveillance data about you. I call this twiddling. There is a company called Plexure, which McDonald's holds an investment stake in, that advertises its ability to use surveillance data to figure out how to raise the price of your go-to breakfast sandwich. For instance, it"

Enshittification names a predictable decline in platform quality driven by shifting incentives toward monetization and surveillance. Platforms initially provide value to users and publishers, then alter rules (twiddling) using per-user, per-session data to extract more revenue. Lock-in mechanisms—network effects and collective action problems—keep users and publishers captive. Publishers become commodity suppliers while advertisers pay more for lower-fidelity, fraud-prone ads. User feeds and service quality degrade to a minimal residue of wanted content. Companies can dynamically change prices and recommendations, using surveillance to personalize extraction, exemplified by services that vary prices for individual customers.

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