Paul Krugman in his newsletter:
Everyone loves enshittification. Not the thing itself, of course. But Cory Doctorow’s neologism was an instant hit, neatly encapsulating the public’s growing disappointment, sometimes bordering on rage, with what was happening to internet platforms. His pithy summary of the process was also brilliant:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I argued earlier this week that enshittification has a lot to do with the way the tech industry has fallen out of public favor:
Source: Gallup
And the increasingly anti-democratic rage of tech bros is, I’d argue, in part driven by their awareness that people don’t love and admire them the way they used to, and their belief that they should still be the culture heroes they once were.
But without detracting from the brilliance of Doctorow’s discussion, I’ve become convinced that his analysis is too narrow, focusing only on certain kinds of social platforms. In fact, the basic logic of enshittification — in which businesses start out being very good to their customers, then switch to ruthless exploitation — applies to any business characterized by network effects.
More here.
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