I have followed Cory Doctorow’s blog for some time now and I also recently discovered the podcast “Understood” where he is the host for season 5, “Who Broke the Internet?”.

He talks about enshittification quite a lot, you can’t blame him since he coined the term.

So what is enshittification?

Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers (such as advertisers), and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

Every piece of software seems to be going downhill and turning into some kind of freemium model where the free version doesn’t do anything reliable and you have to pay to actually use it.

You might pay with your own money or with attention as you’re fed ads.

And while some premium options guarantee you privacy and safety, that also gets violated by the fine print at the bottom of your terms and conditions. Even when you’re paying, you’re still the product.

But there is more:

• Google search is dumber than before because it wants to show more ads by making you do another query
• Amazon created a monopoly when it comes to books, ebooks, and every other product under the sun, making it impossible for someone to sell at a lower price
• HP is locking you from refilling your ink cartridges from 3rd parties
• Apple is trying to block your right to repair
• Kia is locking some of the features under a monthly payment (e.g. turning on the heating in the car remotely)

The book provides these examples and more to showcase all the tactics used by companies in order to lock you into their ecosystem and never be able to leave or transition smoothly.

Being locked into their ecosystem ensures you’re putting money in their pocket every time you need to do something.

This book is a good read for the present, and for what is to come. AI is only going to amplify these kinds of behaviors, drowning us in more and more software that is there just to lure us in and get us locked in. That’s the feeling I get.

There is no better time for people to get educated about FOSS and start using solutions that are guided by this principle.