Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Summary
Describes how platforms decay: first they serve users, then they exploit users to serve business customers, then they exploit everyone to extract value for shareholders. Identifies the policy failures that allow it.
Why it’s useful here
A widely recognized vocabulary for why communities should own their infrastructure, and a test for whether a self-hosted alternative is resistant to the same decay.
Key ideas
- Three-stage platform decay
- Constraints that once disciplined platforms: competition, regulation, interoperability, worker power
Related
- doctorow-2023-internet-con.md