Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It by Cory Doctorow

     In the immortal words of The Descendents: “Everything sucks.” In the immortal words of Reel Big Fish: “Everything sucks.” In the immortal words of The Suicide Machines: “I hate everything.” Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It is an exploration of why these punk bands’ words are so immortal.

If you have Facebook, I offer you this challenge: go to your feed and start scrolling. Take notes of how many posts you’re shown are ads, how many posts are from people you actually know, and how many posts from people you actually know are from the same people you actually know. At least in my experience, most of what I see on Facebook is either an ad or a post in a group that is being recommended to me (not even a group I’ve joined). This is a far cry from the early days of Facebook when you would see posts from your friends and things that were posted on your friends’ Facebook walls.

Cory Doctorow explores how a number of megacorporations have enacted a four-step plan to make their companies awful for everyone except themselves. In the first stage, companies offer a service that seems valuable. Once they have the user base, they then sell out their users for profit. Consider, for instance, how Google has harvested information from its users, sold their private data to advertisers, made the top search results pay-to-play for companies, and so on. Or, how Amazon shows you products that they think you want rather than what you actually search for. In Step 1, companies tailor their services to the user. In Step 2, companies sell out their users for the sake of advertising dollars and private business. In Step 3, companies then sell out their corporate partners for their own benefit and to consolidate their power. Take the Amazon example. They start generating revenue dollars by selling ad space and “top results” to companies. Then, they start consolidating the distribution network, making their own products, forcing companies to ship through Amazon by running at a loss on some products in order to monopolize the entire process. In the end, businesses don’t even profit by selling products on Amazon. The system is rigged against them: what would be top results are pushed down, more expensive alternatives are presented, and they have to pay such a premium to be sold through Amazon that it’s not even worth it—except that you either sell a product for nothing or you don’t get seen at all. We’ve reached Stage 4: Enshittification. Nobody but the megacorporation benefits and the product continues to get worse.

Doctorow’s characteristic snarkiness helps to communicate seething anger with a humorous lens as he outlines a wide range of outrages in an informative way. For instance, he breaks down the laws around copyright and how that impacts his own work as an author. When Amazon owns the distribution rights to audiobooks, for example, the publisher or author are paying to be listed and often losing money. Moreover, if anyone replicates, downloads, shares, etc. the audiobook—including the author—they can be sued for copyright infringement. Essentially, the author can be sued for use of their own work. These legal loopholes are absurd and obscene and offers a pretty persuasive reason not to buy into megacorporations’ monopolies, especially over creative work.

I think the most egregious example that will stick with me is that of Adobe and Pantone. I hate Adobe, I have to say. Back in my younger years, you could buy Adobe for a single payment—it was expensive for the time ($300 for Photoshop?), but at least then you owned it until the next version came out. Now, you have to buy a subscription, which is another enshittifying problem in its own right. The subscription gives you access to the entire suite, though I suspect most people use two or three products at best. The subscription costs me over $50 a month and it makes me sick when I think of how many hundreds or thousands of dollars I’ve paid them over the years. But then, it gets worse when it comes to Adobe’s relationship to Pantone. Pantone makes colours and they were historically a part of the package with Adobe; the cost was built into peoples’ subscriptions. Pantone then started leasing the colours to Adobe and Adobe did not want to pay on behalf of their users. As a result, Adobe forced their users to pay an additional subscription cost for access to Pantone colours. The worst part is that it was retroactive, too. If you were a creator who had made products that used Pantone colours and refused to pay the subscription fee, even works you had already created would no longer load properly: Pantone-exclusive colours would appear as black. If you wanted to continue to profit from creative work you’d already done, you’d have to buy the colours. What. A. Shakedown.

Enshittification covers a range of companies that have increasing influence with diminishing benefits to our lives. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Google. Twitter. These bastions of popular culture and consumption are progressively more useless to us—worse, they are outright exploitative. Doctorow’s framework is persuasive and productive. We can see the process everywhere with clear delineations. I can already see it at work in the supposedly revolutionary AI companies like ChatGPT and Grok. They’ve enticed you with free cheating. They’ve sold you out to private interests that can influence the information. I’m not sure yet how they’re betraying their investors and the companies they’re profiting from, but I’m sure it’s coming. The bubble is going to burst and it’s going to happen fast. What an enshittifying situation.

Happy reading! Hope it doesn't suck!

How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché

I’m growing concerned with the impossible promise books with “how to” in their title seem to offer. As a reader, there’s a big part of me that is primed to expect a numbered list of steps tailored specifically to me and my context. I know I’m being unreasonable.

In any case, How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment by Justin Piché and Rachel Herzing is a book that embodies care and compassion towards incarcerated people. It is a commitment to a politics that focuses on finding more humane alternatives to imprisonment.

Like so many lessons from my youth, I learned a lot about the justice system from The Simpsons. In one episode, Sideshow Bob asks, in his own defence, whether the justice system is based on the idea that a man can change, upon which the chief of police comments, “Have our boys look into that.” In another episode, Marge becomes a police officer and Lisa says, “Mom, I know your intentions are good but aren’t the police a protective force that maintains the status quo for the wealthy elites? Don’t you think we ought to attack the roots of social problems instead of jamming people into overcrowded prisons?” After a pause, Marge presents a police dog puppet with a slogan that dismisses the nuanced conversation.

One of the highlights to me of Herzing and Piché’s is the way that they extend that conversation. Despite the title of the book being about abolishing prisons, abolition is not for them an all-or-nothing shift and they take to task the people who object to improving prisons since it is not abolition. I really appreciated that perspective. Demanding outright abolition is a noble goal, but while we wait, so many incarcerated people are suffering from inhumane conditions that could be ameliorated. Herzing and Piché focus on the immediate, real-world experiences of prisoners in favour of the idealism that sometimes inhibits change.

In order to keep that focus on material change, abolitionist organizations emphasize direct communication with imprisoned people. It was compelling to hear about the impact of letter writing campaigns and how much they’ve meant to incarcerated folk. Additionally, abolition can look like small-scale actions like driving incarcerated people to and from hearings and getting to know them directly. These small actions promote an understanding of others and give us a direct insight into the conditions of prisons. I really appreciate the way that abolition can take the form of direct connection. It reminds me of the chapter of Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” about getting to know your neighbours as a way of resisting tyranny.

If How to Abolish Prisons doesn’t persuade you to rethink our system on humanitarian grounds, the authors make a compelling case against prisons for a number of reasons: they’re resource-heavy on the climate, they’re exploitative for profit, and they’re not effective in addressing the root causes of issues. The book celebrates a number of successes with communities resisting new prison construction and engaging in other large-scale action against prisons. While it maybe didn’t go as in-depth as I had hoped, the book’s optimism really helped to offset that feeling.

Happy reading and happy reforming!

The Fire People: A Collection of British Black and Asian Poetry by Lemn Sissay

Years ago, my partner encouraged me to buy the anthology The Best American Poetry 2021. I loved that collection and found in it so many resonant works. In that vein, when my partner took a trip to the U.K., she brought me back this gift: The Fire People: A Collection of British Black and Asian Poetry edited by Lemn Sissay.

The editing of this collection has, in some ways, a much broader scope in that it includes multiple poems by the same authors. For instance, Jackie Kay, Shamshad Khan, and Lemn Sissay are granted the space for four poems each, while Kadija Sesay and Koye Oyedeji have only one poem each. In other ways, the collection has a tighter focus.

A number of the poems reflect similar topics. There are a number of poems about familial and ancestral connection, food and traditions, racism and injustice, and modern culture for racialized people. For example, from a content perspective, the poem “Ajax” by Patience Agbabi, is a lengthier poem about a drug-fueled clubbing experience. From a stylistic standpoint, there’s a distinct focus on expressiveness and informality. The poems often read like slam poems or avant-garde bombasticism. For example, “CigArs & WHitE StAr LiLLys” by Mallissa Read makes use of text speak, random capitalization, and unusual spacing to push the limits of language and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Reggae fi May Ayim” offers phonetic spellings of a Jamaican accent. The collection also includes the poet Tricky, a rapper and producer whose poems have a distinct rhyming quality—the blend of music and poetry comes across pretty clearly here and elsewhere, as the collection as a whole has a generally playful voice, making use of puns and associative leaps. 

I was hoping that someone in the collection would incite in me a new poetic obsession. While there were some poets that I liked (Jackie Kay stands out in that respect), and a few stand-out pieces by a smattering of poets, I think I built the collection up in my head too much based on my experience with the American poetry collection. I liked it, but I wouldn’t say I loved it.

Regardless, it is never a bad thing to explore different parts of the world through literature and to open yourself to the possibility of connecting with other voices.

Happy reading!