“The gradual degradation of an online platform or service’s functionality, as part of a cycle in which the platform or service first offers benefits to users to attract them, then pursues more and more profits at the expense of users.” – Dictionary.com definition of enshittification.

Originally coined by the author, Enshittification has entered the lexicon as it has struck a chord with everyone who feels, or is beginning to feel, that the maturing of the technological internet revolution is, well, shit.

Almost a companion work to Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism, which it references in several places, Enshittification is an easy to read take down of the business model of the internet giants that rule our lives. That those same internet giants deliberately make our lives worse due to their constant drive to extract profits and that this is at the expense of the user experience and the experience of the business customers who pay for it.

Doctorow’s basic premise is as follows:

1: Attract users by making a useful, responsive, and fun product usually at a loss.

2: Attract business customers by selling the user’s data, even if you’ve promised not to, creating a powerful tool for selling to users and driving other forms of sales channels out of business.

3: Squeeze every last dollar out of both users and business customers since you now have a monopoly in the space and the costs for switching are too high.

While Mr. Doctorow makes a great case for the macro-economic models for technology companies being fundamentally broken at best and downright predatory, immoral, and possibly illegal at worst, his hyperbole sometimes gets in the way of detail.

Veterinary medicine, my own former industry, gets a line in the book. Accusing corporate consolidators of paying veterinary staff minimum wages and then demanding that they pay thousands of dollars if they want to leave. While the consolidators and venture capitalists in veterinary medicine have a lot to answer for, I don’t recognize this particular piece of enshittification. Yes, some of them do pay staff minimum wage, but the repaying thousands of dollars sounds like repayment of school loan payments or signing bonuses which usually only applies to DVMs and perhaps LVTs/RVTs/CVTs. None of those are getting paid minimum wage. I guess it could be a reference to repaying money for vet services, but it is hard to imagine any company not wanting paid for services delivered.

I mention, and examine, this single veterinary medicine sentence because the conflating of two different facts to paint a picture which I should, but don’t, recognize gives me pause when considering the veracity of the book. Given I don’t know the business models of Amazon, Facebook, and Google nearly as well as veterinary medicine, should I take this as a poor bit of research or an example of flawed thinking?

And it’s a shame, because I buy Doctorow’s arguments otherwise. While the style and language is friendly and accessible, this book does deal with a number of complex anti-trust issues which the author masterfully navigates and explains. If not for the vet med line I would be bought in hook, line, and sinker. It is certainly possible that I’m bought in anyway.

One of the issues that books of this type can sometimes have is that they are either overwhelmingly positive or negative. While there is a lot to feel negative about in Enshittification, Doctorow does map out a pretty good manifesto as to how to reign in these tech giant monopolies. Unfortunately, advice on how to fight back at the user level is a little thin on the ground.

If you have the feeling that the internet is dying and the technology you used to love no longer seems to love you, then this is the book for you and it is a rallying cry for how we might fix it. Because if we don’t fix it nobody else will. The technology firms are just too powerful and there is too much money at stake for them to let anyone else clip their wings.

However, we made them, and we have the power to break them – but only if we try.

And try now.