Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author of The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse:
“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 call this enshittification.”
“Enshittification,” Cory Doctorow’s coinage describing the process by which internet media platforms become increasingly unusable and un-quittable, has been named 2023’s “Digital Word of the Year.” Here, we break down what the term means and Doctorow’s solution to the internet’s relentless enshittification.
If you haven’t, and you enjoy scifi/cyberpunk fiction, you should read Cory’s book “Radicalized”. Four short stories, all of them damn relevant to today.
The first story, “Unauthorized bread”, is my fav. Hackers versus the coldness of corpos and shitty landlords.
I haven’t read Unauthorized bread but you’ve just reminded me of Stallman’s “Right to Read” very short story, which is about a future where, God forbid, you might read someone else’s book without paying a licensing fee. Not the most amazing story, but it perfectly presaged things like scientific journals being paywalled today.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
I’ve seen people consider RMS an overly radical hippy, but man he is a true fucking visionary things he warned us about in the 1990s, 2000s are happening now