Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

This book is enlightening and depressing, but also suffers from an excess of repetition, which contributes to it feeling over-long, and is less compelling in its conclusions that I think the author intended it to be. That said, I think it is an important text, and perhaps will become even more so in the coming years.

Doctorow knows what he's talking about, and paints a compelling picture of why everything feels a little to a lot shittier than it used to do - the Internet, of course, but not just that, all the tech we use and have to use in all aspects of our lives. 

He provides a forensically detailed and meticulous analysis of the stages of how all things with a tech component (which these days is many to most things) get worse as competition is degraded - first user interests are deprecated, then business customers are also victimised, and finally the only real winners in the game are the mega-middlemen that can, and do, monetise frantically at the expense of all of our privacy, safety, wellbeing, and wallets. His analysis of junk fees, and my personal bugbear, subscription model services for purchased goods, is enraging but also so on point it had me verbalising my agreement many times. IF YOU BUY A THING YOU SHOULD OWN THE THING. You should not have to both buy it AND rent it!

His problem description is, therefore, very thorough and persuasive, but I'm just not sure I believe in his four-pronged solution plan (competition, interoperability, regulation, and tech worker ethics). His optimistic ideas about how these factors might help us escape the "enshittocene" strike me as, not so much impossible, but certainly implausible to effect systemic change (although no doubt there will be small pockets of victories, and that's no bad thing). At the end of the day, though, I have a dreary feeling that the mega-corporations will keep coming out on top, at the expense of smaller businesses, innovators, and human beings. There's a reason why most stories about the future end up as dystopias.

If anything, my main feeling walking away from this book is an aching nostalgia for what he labels as "the old good Internet", which I remember so vividly, and a sad conviction that the "new good Internet" that he posits as a possible future state is nothing but a pipe dream. Big corporations will keep spying on us and continue to ever expand their rent-seeking ways, governments will mostly continue to let them, and other than minimising our use of all tech as far as we can (and this is an option I am increasingly pondering), I think there's not all that much that we can do about it on a grand scale. Cheerful thoughts, but there it is.