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About three years ago, writer Cory Doctorow coined the term \u201censhittification\u201d<\/a> to describe a widely observed yet hazily defined phenomenon: the general worsening of online platforms in recent years. Google search declining in quality? Amazon overflowing with junky products? Instagram an endless scroll of doom<\/a>? These are symptomatic of enshittification, in Doctorow\u2019s telling. He describes enshittification-cursed products as possessing three distinct stages: good to users, good to business customers, and finally, good to shareholders \u2014 and thus increasingly unpleasant for everyone else. Doctorow, a longtime denizen of the internet who used to run the pioneering Boing Boing and is a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation \u2014 among many other ventures<\/a> \u2014 hit a nerve. The term took off, and its application spread far beyond the tech world<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now Doctorow is out with a book-length treatise on the subject, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It<\/a>. I spoke with him about whether the internet decay he describes was inevitable, how AI fits into his thesis, and Donald Trump\u2019s unlikely role in a healthier online future.<\/p>\n I\u2019m going to start with something you wrote in the conclusion of your book: \u201cThe indignities of harassment scams, disinformation surveillance, wage theft extraction, and rent seeking have always been with us. But they were a minor side show on the old, good internet, and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet.\u201d You also write that many of the same people who presided over that golden age of the internet are the people now in charge of the worse, modern internet \u2014 it\u2019s just that the regulations aren\u2019t there anymore to prevent their greed from overflowing.<\/strong><\/p>\n Do you think there\u2019s any other way this could have gone?\u00a0 If different people had built this tech, if different laws had been passed in 1998 or whenever \u2014 would we be living in a completely different kind of world, or at least a different kind of internet?<\/strong> We can all agree on that<\/strong>. It\u2019s quite amazing, really \u2014 in the years since the Video Privacy Protection Act <\/a>of 1988, one of the biggest changes to our world is the rise and rise of working encryption, despite the fact that governments then and now have tried to stop it. Working encryption is kind of a miracle. We have less privacy than we used to, even though we now have a technology that allows us to scramble our messages so thoroughly that if you turned every hydrogen atom in the universe into a computer and asked it to do nothing until the end of the universe but guess the password, you would run out of universe a long time before you ran out of possible passwords. So the fact that we don\u2019t have any privacy right now \u2014 it\u2019s not technological. The technology cuts in favor of privacy. This is just entirely down to Congress not doing its job.<\/p>\n I grew up in the nineties, when you might have one or two computers in the house that could connect to the internet. It was a very different world in terms of how we thought about being online. So I wonder how much you think this predicament we find ourselves in is just the product of the internet seeping into every aspect of our lives and a product of the bigness of the big tech companies, which are now so integral to all of it?<\/strong> These things were really quite petty. And yet at the time, if you read the briefs of people like Pam Samuelson<\/a>, arguably America\u2019s greatest copyright scholar, who\u2019s on the Electronic Frontier Foundation\u2019s board, and who organized mass resistance to this \u2014\u00a0she briefed exactly the consequences that we\u2019re talking about now. Like, there will be digital computers in pacemakers and in cars and in our thermostats. And the idea that we\u2019re going to say \u201cit\u2019s against the law to change how something works, if the manufacturer would rather that you didn\u2019t\u201d \u2014\u00a0 what we\u2019re saying is that everything is going to be off limits to our changing it, improving it, protecting ourselves from abuse over it. Those were the discussions we were having back then. They were very common. I\u2019m a science-fiction writer<\/a>, and the extremely plausible thing that science fiction writers were writing about back then was the idea that we\u2019d have computers everywhere and they\u2019d be in our pockets and in our bodies, and that we would put our bodies inside of computers and that an airplane would become a computer in a very fancy case.<\/p>\n So none of this was unforeseeable. <\/strong> When we do have technologies people are allowed to change, they do it. Take Apple\u2019s Facebook blocking. Apple gave everyone a little tick box, and if you click it, Facebook can\u2019t find you anymore. And 96 percent of iOS users click the box. I think there\u2019s a pretty good case that if there was a box like that for everything, we\u2019d all take it. I assume the four percent who didn\u2019t take it were Facebook employees, or drunk, or drunk Facebook employees \u2014 which makes a lot of sense to me, because I would be drunk all the time if I worked for Facebook.<\/p>\n You could also say that anyone would tick a box that eliminated ads for everything, period. Which might be a problem for a lot of business models.<\/strong> You argue that one of the reasons we\u2019re in this situation is that tech workers once felt more empowered to push back against the deterioration of their companies, but that they have less leverage now. What kind of reaction have you gotten from tech workers with your original essay and this book? Are you in touch with a lot of them? <\/strong> To what extent do you think AI is going to supercharge enshittification? When I swipe through my Instagram feed now, it\u2019s like 80 percent AI slop.<\/strong> And the thing is that when you are traded like that, your stock becomes highly liquid, so you can use it to buy companies and keep growing or hire people to keep growing. When Mark Zuckerberg pays someone a hundred million dollars to come work on AI for him, he doesn\u2019t give that guy a hundred million dollars in cash. It\u2019s all in stock. And Mark Zuckerberg can\u2019t get dollars on demand. He has to get them from a creditor or a customer. If he tries making his own dollars in the Facebook offices, the Treasury Department will break the door down. But he can make as much stock as he wants \u2014 he just types zeros into a spreadsheet. So if you\u2019re a mature company bidding against Facebook for growth, Facebook\u2019s going to win every auction, because they can make more of the things they\u2019re bidding with costlessly.<\/p>\n They\u2019re very afraid that when they become mature, they\u2019re going to be valued as a mature company. They\u2019re going to see a drop off in their share price; they\u2019re going to see key employees who are hired with stock depart; they\u2019re going to see an inability to start the process up again, because they can only buy companies for growth with cash and not with stock, since their stock is less liquid. It\u2019s really dangerous for them. They don\u2019t keep growing. They don\u2019t just level off. They plummet. And so they\u2019ve come up with all kinds of sweaty scams to convince you that there\u2019s still growth left. It was pivot to video, it was NFTs, the Metaverse, shitcoin, Blockchain, Bitcoin, and now it\u2019s AI. And AI is getting a little tired, so now it\u2019s superintelligence.<\/p>\n Which brings us to Instagram.<\/strong> It\u2019s because these streaming services want to convince Wall Street that they don\u2019t have to keep investing in new content to keep you as a subscriber. They want to prove that they can recommend things to you successfully. So the KPI is to recommend a show to someone that they watch for at least 10 seconds, which means booby-trapping the entire screen. The whole thing is like one giant fat finger economy. They take away any way to go back to the thing you were watching so that you are quote unquote \u201caccepting a recommendation\u201d several times a day and watching it for at least 10 seconds. And they can just make the number go up.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what\u2019s going on with AI. And to the extent that anyone is using AI and finding it useful, it\u2019s also very enshittification-prone because AI is a black box by its nature. It makes a ton of errors. And distinguishing the instance in which the AI did something that was bad for you because it made a mistake and the instance in which the AI did something bad for you because that company is cheating and they periodically just scam you \u2014 it\u2019s impossible to tell the difference.<\/p>\n You\u2019re saying these companies are pushing technology on people that don\u2019t want it, and I think there\u2019s certainly a lot of that going on. But many people also genuinely like to use AI. Millions and millions of people use ChatGPT, but even the example I gave of my Instagram feed \u2014 people are generating the AI slop, and it has hundreds of thousands of views. At what point do we blame the customers, at least to some extent, for what\u2019s going on here? <\/strong> Certainly the AI companies are not acting like we\u2019d all like AI. They are jamming AI into our face as hard as they can. I was just talking to someone who\u2019s in the CIO\u2019s office at a Fortune 25 company, and Microsoft has just given them a rate card for the coming year for their Office 365 license, and it costs extra if they don\u2019t want the AI. That\u2019s not a company that thinks you want AI.<\/p>\n I do feel a certain sweatiness, to use your word from before, with the way it\u2019s being integrated into various apps and programs.<\/strong> I do use AI \u2013 it will transcribe this interview. And I sometimes use AI Overview, which I really hated when it came out. It actually does serve a purpose \u2014 it synthesizes information from multiple sources fairly well.<\/strong> I\u2019m in a lot of airports, and I used it last week to figure out where a lounge was. And if I\u2019d gotten to the gate and the lounge wasn\u2019t there, it wouldn\u2019t have mattered. I also use AI sometimes for one-off file transformations, like when I needed to convert the subtitles for my Kickstarter video from one video service to another. It did a pretty good job, and it was pretty easy for me to tell if it had done a good job. That\u2019s the kind of thing where I think it\u2019s fine. The problem is no one is going to pay enough for any of those things to recoup a $700 billion CapEx on AI.<\/p>\n You have a section in the book about solutions for enshittification, which involves open markets and regulation \u2014 the things you say used to be more prevalent. Does that imply that if we adopted just the right regulatory framework now, we could actually go back to the way things were in some sense? Is it really possible to put that toothpaste back in the tube?<\/strong> What I do think is that we can have the best of both worlds. There\u2019s this idea that maybe the reason usable things are in walled gardens is that you need to have a walled garden to make them usable. But I think there\u2019s another way of thinking about it, which is that they have more investment. And they have more investment because structurally, we made it possible for people to make walled gardens and then made it illegal to break down the walls.<\/p>\n \u201cWe won\u2019t make any technology unless it\u2019s a walled garden\u201d is a thing you say only if it\u2019s illegal for people to break down the walls of your garden. And if it\u2019s not, then you\u2019re like \u201cObviously open development makes more sense.\u201d The walled garden is more profitable only if I can ask the government to put people in jail for mucking around with my walls. It\u2019s not like people are going to stop investing in electronic communications and e-commerce and all the rest of it. They\u2019ll invest based on the contours of the market that are set by policy.<\/p>\n One big counter example to big internet companies that have declined in quality is Wikipedia. Why has it worked so well compared to many other places?<\/strong> Meanwhile, Wikipedia was started by the wonderful Jimmy Wales<\/a>, a friend of mine, who is, among other things, a fire-breathing libertarian whose favorite author is Ayn Rand, and who one day woke up and said, \u201cYou know what? This is too important to be run by one captain\/CEO. It needs to be a commune. It needs to be owned by its workers, and I\u2019m going to hand over the reins of power.\u201d In the same way that Tim Berners-Lee<\/a> rolled out of bed one morning and said, \u201cThe web is too important for me to take out a patent on it. Everyone\u2019s gonna be able to use it.\u201d And the way Jonas Salk said, \u201cThe polio vaccine is too important.\u201d He said that owning this vaccine would be like owning the sun,so he didn\u2019t patent it.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not a \u201cGreat Man of History\u201d guy by any stretch, but I think those people show us the downstream effect of being a real mensch when you start something, just a really solid person, and how it can create a durable culture where there\u2019s an ethos of kindness and care. And when you combine that with a bunch of irrevocable legal and technology choices \u2014 they\u2019re using open-source software, they\u2019re using open-license content, anyone can clone Wikipedia if it gets enshittified \u2014 it means that anyone who\u2019s contemplating enshittifying it has to think hard about what happens if it just gets cloned and they lose all that investment. All of that stuff \u2014 not one aspect of it, but collectively \u2014comes together to make a set of extremely enshittification-resistant\u2026I guess you\u2019d call them equities.<\/p>\n You came up with this concept three years ago. Have you seen changes since you first described it? Now that it\u2019s a word on people\u2019s lips, have you seen tangible results from your work?<\/strong> And so it\u2019s quite remarkable for me \u2014 as someone who\u2019s been adverse to the U.S. trade representative all these years, and watched as they really destroyed any hope of a good internet anywhere in the world in order to service American capitalist interests \u2014that that office has been completely neutered by Donald Trump. It\u2019s very weird that the source of enormous American advantage around the world is being killed by Trump. It\u2019s wild to see the deliberate repudiation of this massive advantage that the U.S. has had in relation to the rest of the world. But you know what? I\u2019ll take it. The rest of the world is really starting to feel urgency about the fact that they\u2019re so reliant on American big tech, because Trump has made it clear that he views every other nation as a rival to the United States. And he\u2019s made it clear that his tech platforms are aligned with him, and that they are an arm of American foreign policy but also an arm of Trump personally. And you have things like \u2014 the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court swore out a complaint against Benjamin Netanyahu over genocide, Trump denounced him, and then the next day Microsoft cut off his Outlook account<\/a> and deleted everything: his contacts, his calendar, all of his working documents, his email archive, all gone at the drop of a hat. And they claimed it was because of an unspecified terms of service violation, but nobody believes that.<\/p>\n But you\u2019re saying this American aggression has some real upsides.<\/strong> So I see just a massive opportunity on the horizon, and not just in Europe, but all over the world to start building a new, good internet outside of the U.S. One that\u2019s multilateral, one that\u2019s pluralistic, one that is enshittification-resistant from the start. It\u2019s going to be accelerated by Trump, which is very weird. But as my friend says, when life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla.<\/p>\n This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>I absolutely think so. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a matter of different people building it. I mean, it\u2019d be nice if we had people better than Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Really, my purpose with this book, in part, is to recover that lost history of the policy decisions made in living memory by named individuals, which had the extremely predictable outcome of producing this very enshittified internet. They were warned at the time that this was a likely consequence. They did it anyway. I think it\u2019s worth remembering that this is not an accident; this is stuff that was completely foreseeable. If you reward people for doing bad things, you shouldn\u2019t be surprised that they then do bad things. And if Congress doesn\u2019t pass a consumer privacy law since 1988, we shouldn\u2019t be surprised that people are invading our privacy.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>I still think that\u2019s kind of backward. If you look back to the debates over the Digital Millenium Copyright Act <\/a>of 1998 \u2014 that\u2019s the law that bans reverse engineering. And at the time, it applied to things like making sure you didn\u2019t de-regionalize your DVD player, or that no one could sell you a Sega game unless it was pressed in their official factory where you have to pay a royalty to press the CD.<\/p>\n
I really do think it\u2019s a mistake to say \u201cWell, we couldn\u2019t have anticipated this, or it couldn\u2019t have been better.\u201d We don\u2019t have a counterfactual \u2014 we don\u2019t have a world where we didn\u2019t allow for monopolization and didn\u2019t disarm people who wanted to change how computers work, and gave absolute discretion to people who wanted to alter how the computers that they\u2019d sold us worked even after we bought them, and so on. But even though we don\u2019t have that counterfactual, I think there\u2019s a very plausible case to be made that if we had allowed people to decide how the technology they used worked, that \u2014 given there\u2019s a bunch of people are not very happy with how the technology they\u2019re using today work \u2014 maybe some of them would\u2019ve changed it.<\/p>\n
We should think about these things as an equilibrium derived from a series of moves and counter moves. The way the market works isn\u2019t that someone shows up and just takes all your money and gives you what they think you deserve. There has to be some source of dynamic pushback, right? If you believe in markets and price discovery and so on, there has to be a way to make a counter offer. What ad blockers do is they take everyone who is considering making their ads more invasive and more obnoxious and make them grapple with the possibility that users that see those ads, rather than tolerating them, will install an ad blocker and never generate ad revenue for them again. And that makes them think hard about what kind of ads they\u2019re willing to put in there.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Oh yeah, I hear from them all the time. Mostly what I get is emails saying, \u201cTell me how to start a union.\u201d The best time for them to have started a union is back when they were very powerful, but the second best time is now. There\u2019s an old joke from Down East in Canada, that if you wanted to get there, I wouldn\u2019t start from here. But you gotta play the ball where it lies. This is where we are.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Certainly there\u2019s a lot of AI slop, and I think that does make these platforms worse. I think to understand the economic foundations of AI, there\u2019s a kind of paradox to having a monopoly. When you\u2019re on your way up \u2014 when your company is growing \u2014 the market really loves it. It can see that growth and it can predict a future where you\u2019ll have pricing power, and that gets priced in. The price to earnings ratio, P\/E ratio of growth firms, is very, very high. If you have two comparable firms, one of which is mature and isn\u2019t growing anymore, and one of which is growing, and they have the same turnover, and the same income per year, the one that\u2019s still growing will trade at a massive multiple of what the one that has just reached its maturity does.<\/p>\n
So why are they putting slop in your feed? Because they want to convince the stock market that there is a giant AI market and that they\u2019re going to take it over, so they\u2019ll continue to be a growth stock. It\u2019s the same reason that every button on your phone that you habitually press has been silently swapped for a button that summons an AI that you don\u2019t want to talk to, and why it takes five swipes to get rid of it. Because someone\u2019s KPI, their key performance indicator, which is how they get their bonus, is based on \u201cCan you get someone to use AI for at least 10 seconds?\u201d It\u2019s the same reason that when you load a streaming video service like Netflix or YouTube, you have to handle the phone like it\u2019s a photo negative. Because if any part of your body grazes any part of the phone, you\u2019re immediately taken to a different video, and there\u2019s no way to get back to the video you are watching.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>It would be amazing if people weren\u2019t clicking and making AI by the hundreds of thousands, given that there has not been a single newspaper, website, radio program, or TV broadcast that has not led with the story of AI for at least five years. When you actually look at the amount of interaction that the median person does with AI, the number\u2019s really low given all of that.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>I\u2019m using a company to help me fulfill my last Kickstarter, and the person giving me tech support uses a chatbot to generate the tech support responses. And they\u2019re gibberish. It\u2019s so frustrating being on the other side of the email correspondence. Maybe the phrase we can put on AI\u2019s gravestone is, \u201cIf you can\u2019t be bothered to write it, why would I be bothered to read it?\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/strong>I think if you use AI summaries for things that are low stakes, and where you can find out if it\u2019s wrong really quickly, that\u2019s fine. When it becomes something you trust automatically \u2014 the phrase is automation blindness. If it\u2019s usually right, but sometimes wrong, it can be real easy to slip one past you.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>No, I don\u2019t think it is. And I don\u2019t want to go back, I want to go forward. I don\u2019t want the old, good internet, because as much as I liked it, it was too hard to use, and my normie friends couldn\u2019t use it. I like the thing that we did where we made it much easier for everyday people to use it, and lots of people got to join the party. I\u2019m really glad about that. I\u2019m not one of these Eternal September<\/a> people, angry that normal people use the internet now.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>If I were a grad student right now, one of the research questions I think would be really interesting is these \u2014 they\u2019re called benevolent Dictator for Life projects, these public-interest projects that were started by one person who thereafter said \u201cI\u2019m the final arbiter of how these things work. I\u2019m a benevolent dictator for life. And however we structure it, I\u2019m always gonna have a veto.\u201d There are lots of those projects, and almost all of them are run by people who, like me, self-identify as left. And almost all of those self-identified leftists are like, \u201cThis is too important to let other people be in charge of. This can\u2019t be a committee. There has to be a dictator.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Well, I\u2019d say the big change is not directly from this work, but it\u2019s this work in combination with the stuff Trump is doing. When I was EFF\u2019s European director, I worked in 31 countries. I was on the road 27, 28 days a month. I actually stopped plugging in my fridge because it cost me 10 bucks a month to keep my ice cubes frozen. And everywhere I went, I would talk to people about what kind of policy would make sense for helping them have the best possible internet for the people who lived in their country. And there were always ideas like, \u201cWe should be able to reverse engineer American tech and localize it and modify it and make it make local sense. We should be able to make our own add-ons for it to help us use it in a way that is best for our context,\u201d and so on. But they said, \u201cWe can\u2019t do that, of course, because the U.S. trade representative would hit us with tariffs if we did.\u201d<\/p>\n
At this point, the Europeans are starting to really get interested in what they\u2019re calling EuroStack, which is clones of American tech platforms, open source and based in Europe. EuroStack is pretty cool and I\u2019m watching them build it, and thinking, folks, you are gonna have to figure out how you get people out of U.S. stacks and into the EuroStack. No one\u2019s going to copy and paste a million documents out of Office 365 and into a European equivalent for their government ministry. To do that, you\u2019re gonna have to reverse engineer. You\u2019re gonna have to scrape, you\u2019re gonna have to jailbreak apps, you\u2019re gonna have to do a bunch of stuff that right now you can\u2019t do because the U.S. trade representative told you you need to have a law that banned it \u2014 otherwise they\u2019d put tariffs on you. But if someone says, \u201cDo what I say or I\u2019m going to burn your house down,\u201d and then they burn your house down anyway, and you keep doing what they told you to do, you\u2019re kind of a sucker. You have the European Union building all this stuff, but it\u2019s like they\u2019re building housing for people in East Germany, except in West Germany. Sure, it\u2019s beautiful housing, but you have to tear it down the Wall if you want people to move in.<\/p>\n