Enshittification Quotes

“First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Amazon makes 38 billion every year charging merchants for search placement.
On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you'll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, that best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“This is why every company is so sweatily insistent that you use its app rather than its website. 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 at the expense of the company’s shareholders.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“The point is that none of this could have happened were it not for Adobe’s decision to migrate all of its software to the cloud and deny its customers their long-standing right to simply buy its programs and enjoy their perpetual use.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“By downgrading the security of Apple customers who have friends who use a rival product, Apple hopes to recruit its customers to serve as high-pressure sales agents for its products. In other words, Apple is making its service worse for its customers in order to benefit its shareholders. Or, put more plainly, Apple enshittified iMessage.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“The platform has turned into a pile of shit, and we’re at the bottom of it.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“The revolving door. The overwhelming majority of industry execs who rotate into public service are henhouse-guarding foxes willing to help their former employers at public expense.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“US lawmakers are torn between their voters’ concern over tech monopolization and their sense that these are American companies that act as a source of American soft power abroad and of national pride at home.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“This is the enshittifier’s credo: “We’re just doing the thing that makes life worse for you so we can make life better for us. The socializing”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“The walkouts were explicitly connected to a long run of Google conduct that chased growth by compromising on the ethical principles that the company had promised to its workers since its founding.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Enshittification is when you combine the banality of evil with an internet-connected device and a federal law that criminalizes doing anything with that device that the manufacturer dislikes.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“That’s chickenization: a system of total control over workers who have to borrow money to pay you for the privilege of working for you”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Intermediaries are part of the solution to the age-old problem of connecting people with one another—but they become part of the problem when they grow so powerful that they can act as gatekeepers who can usurp the relationship between the two sides of their markets.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Your car is a rolling surveillance platform that gathers so much information on you that the carmakers themselves warn that anyone who gains access to your car could actually murder you.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“But the flip side of that was lock-in. Unlike Android phones—which are typically designed to allow users to make use of alternative app stores and even install different operating systems—iPhones use software and hardware locks to prevent users from modifying Apple’s rules. This is a system that works well, but fails badly. So long as Apple remains a benevolent dictator, your iPhone is a walled garden that protects you from the bad guys who want to attack you. But if Apple turns on you, that walled garden becomes a prison, one that pens you in and makes you easy pickings.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that Amazon’s own shipping is fully subsidized. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“The reason for enshittification’s popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and what we should do about it.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Meanwhile, ad fraud was going wild. Advertisers were paying billions for ads that no one ever saw. In 2018, Procter & Gamble zeroed out its $200 million annual “programmatic advertising”8 budget and saw no decline in sales.9 It seems all of those ads were either: Being shown to random people rather than the people P&G was paying to target; or Not being shown to anyone.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“This era, the Enshittocene, is the result of specific policy decisions, made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Every time an Uber driver is offered a job, the wage for that job—dollars per mile and minute—is recalculated by an algorithm at Uber HQ. The goal of this algorithm is to lower the wage of Uber drivers. It works spookily well.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“The McDonald’s-backed company Plexure sells surveillance data on you to vendors, who use it to raise the price of items when they think you’ll pay more. In its promotional materials, Plexure uses the example of charging extra for your breakfast sandwich on payday. It says that such practices are not a rip-off because they’re done with an app.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Riley Quinn, showrunner for the excellent Trashfuture podcast, says that whenever you hear the word fintech (financial technology), you should mentally substitute unregulated bank. App-based lending platforms ignore usury law and say it doesn’t count because they do it with an app. Cryptocurrency hustlers illegally trade in unregistered securities and say it doesn’t count because they do it with an app.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Still, corporate IT workers love Microsoft (“No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft”), and so do their bosses, despite red flags so large they can be seen from space. For example, Microsoft offers bosses a “productivity” scoring tool that measures employees’ activity—internet usage, typing, clicking, and so on—and produces a stack-ranked score of the best employees. This is a very bad idea. As Goodhart’s law (named after the British economist Charles Goodhart) has it, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” If you tell employees that their workplace esteem is contingent on moving a mouse a certain way or typing at a certain rate (and that they will receive promotions and raises accordingly), the least motivated, least honorable employees on the shop floor will master the process of wiggling their mice or typing on their keyboards in ways that please the algorithm, irrespective of whether that translates into getting their job done.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“That just leaves Mercury in retrograde, something I just can’t bring myself to take seriously. After all, I’m a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don’t believe in astrology.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“A rival—and frankly terrible—theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its scale to raise prices or lower quality. This is the “consumer welfare standard theory,” and its premise is that when we find monopolies in the wild, they are almost certainly large and powerful thanks to the quality of their offerings. Anytime you find that people all buy the same goods from the same store, you should assume that this is the very best store, selling the very best goods. It would be perverse (goes the theory) for the government to harass companies for being so excellent that everyone loves them.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Google may be very good at operations, but it’s objectively terrible at innovation.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“But for tech bosses, there was a huge downside to manipulating workers into spending every waking hour at the office by instilling a sense of mission in them: those workers felt a sense of mission. When their bosses told them to enshittify the products they felt a sense of ownership over, having poured their heart and soul into them, they experienced a sense of betrayal and profound moral injury.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“Once a company can enshittify its products, it will face the perennial temptation to enshittify those products (along with the pressure from investors, board members, and executives to do so).”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“But for tech bosses, there was a huge downside to manipulating workers into spending every waking hour at the office by instilling a sense of mission in them: those workers felt a sense of mission. When their bosses told them to enshittify the products they felt a sense of ownership over, having poured their heart and soul into them, they experienced a sense of betrayal and profound moral injury. No, I won’t enshittify the product I missed my mother’s funeral and my kid’s Little League games to ship on time. I’ll quit before I do that—and the guy across the street will give me a job ten minutes later. Go fuck yourself, boss.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“This is a grubby little con game, and its technical execution is very clumsy. It turns out that when DoorDash sends a job to the app on a Dasher’s phone, the job listing includes the tip amount, but the Dasher’s app just hides that information from the Dasher.”
― Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It