{"id":306148,"date":"2025-10-15T19:35:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T19:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/306148\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T19:35:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T19:35:11","slug":"book-reviews-enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-and-it-girl-the-life-and-legacy-of-jane-birkin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/306148\/","title":{"rendered":"Book reviews: \u2018Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What We Can Do About It\u2019 and \u2018It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What We Can Do About It\u2019 by Cory Doctorow<\/p>\n

Cory Doctorow \u201ccertainly knows how to make an idea memorable,\u201d said Henry Mance<\/strong> in the Financial Times<\/strong>. While not everyone will appreciate his new book\u2019s scatological title, the prolific author, blogger, and internet activist deserves thanks for bloodying the world\u2019s biggest tech companies by succinctly diagnosing how they\u2019re ruining users\u2019 lives. \u201cYou could not ask for a clearer, more ambitious, or better-written business book than this one,\u201d all of it expanding on a theory Doctorow put forward three years ago describing a three-step process of \u201censhittification.\u201d In his view, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others have become giants by first earning users\u2019 trust. But in stage two, they abuse their users to benefit advertisers or other business customers, and in stage three, they abuse their business partners\u2014because their dominance allows them to.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis may sound merely like capitalism at work,\u201d said Dan Piepenbring<\/strong> in Harper\u2019s<\/strong>. \u201cDoctorow thinks it\u2019s closer to feudalism,\u201d and it\u2019s easy to see why. Where capitalists make things, today\u2019s tech companies act like medieval rentiers, using land they control to extract wealth from and immiserate those who need the land. Google made its search results worse so that users would search again and see more ads. Tesla <\/a>charges buyers monthly subscription fees for services they\u2019ve already paid for. Amazon<\/a> manufactures cheap imitations of the products shoppers truly want and makes the original products harder to find on its website. Doctorow builds these and other offenses into \u201ca masterly polemic, its scope so sweeping that it does, finally, seem to explain every pungent odor wafting from Silicon Valley,\u201d including the Foxconn sweatshops in China that are adorned with anti-suicide nets. Surprisingly, Doctorow believes such companies can one day be tamed by fed-up customers. \u201cI hope he\u2019s right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though the book \u201ccovers a lot,\u201d it \u201cleaves the reader craving a grander application of his concept to other aspects of culture and society,\u201d said Kyle Chayka<\/strong> in The New Yorker<\/strong>. Doctorow, for example, stops short of expanding his scope to national politics. And as brilliant as his analysis is, said Paul Krugman<\/strong> in his Substack<\/strong> newsletter, Doctorow neglects to mention how enshittification has \u201cmessed with the heads\u201d of the people running the big tech companies. \u201cThey were loved when the public imagined, falsely, that they were the good guys. Now they aren\u2019t. And it drives them crazy.\u201d That\u2019s bad for all of us. \u201cThe increasingly antidemocratic rage of tech bros is, I\u2019d argue, in part driven by their awareness that people don\u2019t love and admire them the way they used to.\u201d That leaves the rest of us at their mercy both as consumers and citizens.<\/p>\n

\u2018It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin\u2019 by Marisa Meltzer<\/p>\n

Jane Birkin had a certain je ne sais quoi\u2014\u201cto her misfortune as much as to her advantage,\u201d said Anahid Nersessian<\/strong> in The New Yorker<\/strong>. As the title of this new biography suggests, the British-born actress and pop singer had \u201cit\u201d: \u201can undefinable, unmistakable glamour that shifts our collective sense of what\u2019s cool.\u201d But \u201cbeing famous for your ineffable qualities is perilously close to being famous for no reason,\u201d and Birkin (1946\u20132023) struggled, unjustly, to achieve a sense of self-worth. As her diaries prove, she was \u201ca wonderful writer.\u201d She also achieved greatness in music and film. To fully understand her, though, you have to have appreciated who Birkin was from about age 40 on, and author Marisa Meltzer is \u201cnot quite sure how to handle this phase of Birkin\u2019s life.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cBut for a chance encounter,\u201d said Roxanne Roberts<\/strong> in The Washington Post<\/strong>, Birkin\u2019s name would probably be little remembered. Prior to 1984, when Herm\u00e8s released a handbag that Birkin had sketched for the brand\u2019s CEO when the two met on a Paris<\/a>-to-London<\/a> flight, Birkin\u2019s run as an icon was fading. Born into wealth, she first won stardom in the swinging \u201960s by way of a naked romp in Michelangelo Antonioni\u2019s Blow-Up, and by age 22 had moved to France, paired up with singer Serge Gainsbourg, and scored a major hit with a breathy duet that sounded like the couple making love. Gainsbourg turned out to be just the second of three famous lovers who disappointed her, and in Meltzer\u2019s portrait, Birkin comes across a person who \u201cbounced through adulthood and parenthood without much of a plan, protected by fame and enough money to wing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Still, the camera loved Birkin, and Meltzer does \u201ca stalwart job\u201d of detailing what it saw and how the star grew into her fame, said Joan Juliet Buck<\/strong> in Air Mail<\/strong>. The Herm\u00e8s bag<\/a> named for her now sells new for $12,000 and up, and that wouldn\u2019t have happened if Birkin\u2019s own taste hadn\u2019t already made her a street-style paragon. \u201cThe absurd arc of her public destiny reflects our unstoppable drift from culture to commerce\u201d: The bag is now more famous than she is. In reality, she was fun, curious, and kind, \u201cone of the generous people who give more than they get.\u201d<\/p>\n

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