The one-sentence summary

It’s not your imagination. Life online really does get worse by the day, and that is by intent.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • The book is subtitled Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it.
  • Misogyny, conspiratorialism, fraud and AI slop are drowning the internet. For the monopolists who dominate online – X, Tik Tok, Amazon, Meta and Apple – this is all part of the playbook. The process is what the author calls enshittification. First the platform attracts users with some bait, such as free access; then the activity is monetized, bringing in business customers and degrading the experience; then once everyone is trapped and competitors eradicated, the platform wrings all the value out and transfers it all to their executives and shareholders.
  • As a result, online platforms and retail spaces have become places of torment – the opposite of the virtual gathering places where we once imagined that world problems might be resolved.
  • Suggested remedies to these diseased platforms include shattering the monopolies and cutting down to size the companies that appear too big to fail, to jail, or to care. Only an attack on corporate power will permit effective regulation and real privacy. Tech unions must protect the workers who should, in turn, defend us against their bosses’ sadism and greed.
  • The digital is merging with the physical, so the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are wrecking our homes and our cars. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into and computers we put into our bodies.
  • There are two forces that act on every company in every industry – competition and regulation. Companies with competition make better products, at better prices, and under better conditions because failing to do so will cause its customers, workers and suppliers to go elsewhere. Likewise, regulation forces companies to realize that if they cheat then the fines may exceed their gains.
  • The discipline of self-help enables people to have agency over what they do online. Computers are universal in as much as there is no known practical way to make a computer that only runs programmes its manufacturer approves of.
  • The discipline of tech workers could become increasingly important. Initially they were treated as geniuses, many of whom had what is known as vocational awe – a sense of duty that prevents them from rebelling. But now that many have been laid off in huge quantities, they could be a final bulwark against their bosses’ enshittificatory impulses.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • Big tech rivals often collude with each other. For example, Apple’s single biggest source of revenue is a cheque for more than $20 billion that Google pays it every year to buy the default search box in Safari and on the iPhone.
  • Regulatory capture refers to companies that suborn their regulators and team up with them to screw over customers, rivals and suppliers. This starts with a regulator being weaker than the company it is supposed to be watchdogging and spirals from there.
  • In automation theory, workers are called centaurs if they have some kind of tool that lets them do more than they could on their own, but there’s more than one way to partner a human with a machine. A reverse-centaur is a machine that uses a human to accomplish more than the machine could manage on its own.
  • The ad-tech market is dominated by Meta and Google – to the tune of 51%. Historically that figure was 15% for all the intermediaries that served the advertising world.
  • No one has ever worked out how to make a computer that only runs the programmes that its manufacturer desires. Computers are universal, which means that every computer we know how to make is capable of running every computer programme we know how to write.
  • Twiddling is the process of changing the costs, prices, recommendation weights and search rankings through automated or semi-automated means in an endless process that constantly maximizes revenue. Counter-twiddling is when workers game their employers’ apps to fight back.
  • When Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set out a method for sorting good web pages from bad ones, they based it on citation analysis – an idea from academia where publishing in scholarly journals is an important source of validation and career advancement, as in ‘publish or perish.’
  • Goodhart’s Law is that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
  • Google staff have regularly fought back against what is called ethical drift – management’s tendency to move away from the company’s original founding principles.
  • In summary, the C-suite in tech boardrooms has always been pulling the giant enshittification lever but it used to be stuck by competition, regulation, interoperability and the power and conscience of tech workers. All of these have now been removed so the brakes are off.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • This is a highly detailed book based on many years of experience, so be prepared for in-depth commentary of many aspects of the internet that could well pass the average reader by.