At The Financial Times, Cory Doctorow (previously!) elaborates on enshittification, the term he coined for the process whereby products and services decay in quality when the companies behind them have consumers and business customers locked in. As some are taking it to refer only to social media or Amazon or whatever, it's important to point out that 'Enshittification' is coming for absolutely everything. [archive.is]
Isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"? Well, no.
I'm not going to cape for capitalism. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy. But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavoured views could find each other, offer mutual aid and organise. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crap gadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names and cryptocurrency scams.
The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.
An interesting data point I learned reading this: more than half of web users are now using adblockers.
