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

by Cory Doctorow

In 2017, a Yale Law Journal paper titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” leaped out of obscure legal circles and into the public eye. This is not normal. Law review articles are barely interesting to lawyers, let alone the broader public. What’s more, this wasn’t just any law review article; it was a law review article about antitrust, one of the dustiest, least-regarded, most abstract, and frankly most irrelevant areas of law, dominated by dull, mathematical models created by and for extremely specialized economists. The article’s author was a third-year Yale law student named Lina Khan. Four years later, Khan was the youngest-ever chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, the most powerful consumer regulator in the world. Khan is an extraordinary figure. Charismatic and quick-witted, she has a knack for cutting through the professional obfuscation that kept antitrust out of the public eye and connecting antitrust policy to bread-and-butter issues, like who you work for, what kind of health care you get, and how much you pay for eggs.