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Enshittification:Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It
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Life online is getting worse and worse? Leading tech critic, Cory Doctrow, author of The Internet Con, has the answer, and also wants to show how we can win it back.
*** Longlist for the FT and Schroder Business Book of the Year 2025 ***
** Named word of the year in US, UK and Australia **
*'Enshittification' will be the most talked about tech book of the year.*
"Enshittification" is Doctorow's word to describe the decay of online platforms. It captures the feeling of a world that is ever worsening.
Enshittification is not a technical glitch. It is a technique that every platform - from X to TikTok, Amazon to Apple, has adopted. First they lure users onto their platforms, then attract businesses who might profit from this newly formed public, and then finally squeeze both for their own profit. Tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, draining profit at the cost of user experience. In the meantime our public squares have turned somewhere between the mall and a dumpster fire, that is unfit to deal with the problems of our times.
What is to be done? Like a surgeon, Doctorow sets out the symptoms, the diagnosis and the cure to these metastasizing platforms. We need to question the monopolies that dominate so much of our online lives, we must demand regulation and our privacy back, allow for interoperability, and win tech workers' rights.
Reviews
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Punchy, pungent and utterly compelling - a book that will change the way you see the world, and just might change the world itself. You simply must read it.
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Big Tech does not just plunder your data. It does not merely rob you of your privacy. It does something far, far worse than that. You know it. You feel it. But you won't be able to put your finger on it until you have read Cory Doctorow's Enshittification. Once you do, you will know and, more importantly, you will stand a better chance of resisting
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Remember when the internet was young and alive, vibrant and accessible and free? Cory Doctorow does, and he knows what’s gone wrong - and he sees a way forward. This is a magnificent book
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With his hallmark clarity and energy, Cory Doctorow lays out how tech monopolies innovated ways to disregard, abuse, and suck dry their users. We must heed Doctorow’s no-bullshit account of how to fight back
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Enshittification explains the exploitation that changed the internet and our lives. Doctorow gave us the word to describe how these companies immiserate humanity on a planetary scale
Edward Snowden -
The steady decline of the technology you use every day isn’t just in your imagination—and in Enshittification, Cory Doctorow explains how we got here. Witty, incisive, and urgently relevant, this book reveals how we can reclaim our digital lives from the forces that have degraded them.
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The book of the autumn.
, The Financial Times -
You could not ask for a clearer, more ambitious or better-written business book than this one.
The Financial Times -
Consistently acute
, Times Literary Supplement