Enshittification: Exploiting workers and consumers in the digital world
Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification is a critical analysis of how the bosses of the internet, who have become the world’s richest people and whose economic power now shapes the political world, have made policy choices that are harmful both to their consumers and their workers. Toronto-born Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, activist, and best-selling author who has worked over two decades with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to press for human rights online.
In a spirited anti-capitalist book, Doctorow traces the life cycle of online services and spaces through the lens of what he calls “enshittification.” In this process, users are drawn in by the early promises of the internet, which offers helpful and relatively inexpensive services as compared to their non-digital counterparts. The shift in interest destroys earlier, more expensive alternatives. Then, these services become controlled by monopolists who use their monopoly power to make those services outrageously expensive and increasingly unusable as the services fill with ads and scrape users’ data. The promised services are left holding less value and convenience than in their earlier forms, with no alternatives left standing.
The book focuses on the negative impact of enshittification on consumers and workers alike. Consumers, who became addicted to the services when they were cheap and convenient, are now largely unable to resist extra costs and depreciated services as the providers become fewer and their operations more rapacious. Doctorow gives a host of examples readers will be familiar with, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Uber, AirBnB, cryptocurrency, and other titans of the internet age.
Workers have become prisoners of surveillance systems as arbitrary algorithms measure their performance, deprive them of their privacy, and rip them off in every transaction. One example of this rewriting of the terms of labour exchange is the “algorithmic wage discrimination” practiced by rideshare app Uber. Computerized programs track and pay Uber drivers who work long hours less per ride than workers who are more part-time and therefore apparently less dependent on their Uber employment. Apps became the bosses of gig workers who are surveilled mercilessly under inhumane working conditions and then often suspended without explanation or the right of appeal. Doctorow notes, “Amazon drivers are put on quotas so punishing that they piss in bottles and defecate in bags. Their eyes and mouths are constantly monitored by ‘AI’ cameras, and they are disciplined for not looking where the camera thinks they should be, or for singing along to the radio” (308-09). This targeting of workers is not limited to the gig economy. The social media platform Twitter (renamed X by its new head Elon Musk) carried out devastating layoffs as part of a strategy to force the survivors to work inhuman hours and cut off any criticism of Musk’s corporate strategy.
Tech workers, argues Doctorow, have mostly responded so far to such enslavement via social movements rather than unions. For example, Google workers walked out in a grassroots movement in 2018 when an executive guilty of sexual abuse of a subordinate received a $90 million severance while his victim was tied to a contract that prevented her from either suing the company or speaking publicly about the abuse. As the effects of an enshittified internet continue to shape our social and political actions in the non-digital world, we must take action. There remains a strong need for formal unionization and for the union movement to fight for legislative changes to end practices that turn human workers into slaves of machines serving the interests of a small group of corporate bosses.
By Alvin Finkel