David Remnick: "Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment." I'm quoting The New Yorker's technology columnist Kyle Chayka. The term he's describing, well, it's so evocative that, unfortunately, we can't say it on the air.

Kyle Chayka: I immediately grabbed onto it. I knew what it meant. I could apply it in my own experience because everything just seems to be getting worse all around us on our phones and on websites.

David Remnick: The term is "enshittification," and it was coined by Cory Doctorow.

Kyle Chayka: I've been following Cory Doctorow's work for years and years on the internet. He's someone who I always look to to understand what's going on online and how the latest tech policy is changing and how things work. When I saw him starting to use this word, "enshittification," or everything getting worse, I just immediately understood what he was talking about, I think, as we all do.

David Remnick: "Enshittification" was a word of the year in 2023. Now, it's the title of Cory Doctorow's new book. Doctorow is a prolific and respected tech blogger, and he writes science fiction, too. He also played a big role in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for civil liberties online. Here's Cory Doctorow speaking with The New Yorker's Kyle Chayka.

Cory Doctorow: Well, I think that when you describe something that is all around but that is so diffuse that you can't really put your finger on it, when you describe it, you attach a handle to it. You give people a way to carry it around and maybe try and carry it to each other and say, "Are you noticing this? I'm noticing this. I thought I was crazy. I thought it was just me."

Kyle Chayka: Maybe we can start with an example that a lot of our listeners will have experienced already. Can you talk about what happened with Google Search?

Cory Doctorow: The Google-DOJ antitrust trial last year surfaced all these memos about a fight about making Google Search worse. In 2019, Google had reached maximum search growth. They had a 90% market share in search, so they weren't going to get any more users, except maybe by breeding a billion humans to maturity and then making them Google users, which--

Kyle Chayka: They haven't tried that yet. [laughs]

Cory Doctorow: Well, no. That's just--

Kyle Chayka: They shouldn't see that one.

Cory Doctorow: No, that's Google Classroom. It just takes a while, right? As the great Ed Zitron reported in his newsletter in Where's Your Ed At, you see in the memos, this strategy emerged. This guy, Prabhakar Raghavan, who's an ex-McKinsey guy, who'd been at Yahoo, overseeing Yahoo Search, who's in charge of Google Search revenue, he says, "Why don't we make search worse? Why don't we get rid of things like spell-check or something called 'query stemming,' where if you search for trousers, it also searches for pants, or context clues?"

Everybody is searching for pants because someone got pantsed on national TV. When searches for pants, you look at trending queries, and you put that at the top. All of that stuff, that made it so that you could one-shot your search, right? You search, and the top result would be the one you were looking for. What if we make it a three-shot? What if we make it so that you got to search two or three times, and then every time, we get to show you ads?

There's this guy at Google, Ben Gomes, who's a Googler from the OG days. He was building their first servers when it was one computer under a desk. He oversaw the build-out to all of the data centers all over the world. He's in charge of search technology. He's like, "What are you talking about? This is a terrible idea." Historically, I think that guy would have won the argument. Not because the Google founders had a sense of holy mission. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't, but because Google understood that, as they used to say, competition is just a click away.

At that point, Google had spent many years bribing Apple to the tune of $20 billion a year not to make a competing search engine. They had bribed all the browsers and all of the mobile carriers, and all the people who made operating systems to make Google the default search. Even Microsoft's browser was just a rebadged version of Chrome. Everywhere you looked, there was Google Search. They could make it worse, and it wouldn't matter.

Kyle Chayka: Because people had nowhere else to go, and they could turn the screws tighter and tighter, and extract more of our attention until we eventually flee elsewhere, which may be happening now with OpenAI and generative search. That, in some ways, is delivering a more convenient product, even though--

Cory Doctorow: Not necessarily a better one.

Kyle Chayka: Yes, not right, but faster.

Cory Doctorow: One of the things about OpenAI that that story tells you, because that search is not good, is that people are willing to use Perplexity and OpenAI instead of Search because Search is so degraded, right? It's only good in comparison. Here's the kicker. I use a search engine. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I use a search engine called Kagi, kagi.com. I was just amazed by how good they were the first time I used them. I was staying with my fiction editor. I was in his living room on my computer, and so is he.

He was like, "Have you ever tried Kagi?" I'm like, "Kagi? No, tell me more." He's like, "It's like Google used to be when Google started." I was like, "That's amazing." It's $10 a month. I tried it for 10 seconds, and I'm like, "Okay, I'm buying it." Then I read this article by Jason Koebler in 404 Media about Kagi. He's using it, too. He's like, "By the way, they're using Google's index, and they're syndicating and reorganizing its results." Now, Kagi, they seem like very smart people, but I don't know how many people work there. 10, 20 maybe? I don't know. It's certainly not 100. You can't tell me that Google cannot do a better job with its own search index than, what, eight guys in a garage?

Kyle Chayka: It just goes to show that the product doesn't have to be so bad.

Cory Doctorow: No, it's a choice.

Kyle Chayka: The core good product is in there somewhere. We're just not allowed to access it because of all these layers of tweaking and mediation. You define this very specific process or the stages of things getting worse, as we can say euphemistically. I was hoping you could go through those for us.

Cory Doctorow: Sure, so enshittification describes a three-stage process by which platforms go bad. In stage one, the platform is good to its end users, but it finds a way to lock those end users in. It's different ways based on different platforms. Uber chased all the other cab companies out of the market, so that's one way to get locked in. It's very complicated. Facebook had a much easier one, which is once you're in a place with a bunch of friends, it's really hard to organize them all to go.

Economists just call that the collective-action problem. You love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass. You can't agree on what board game to play this weekend, much less like when it's time to leave Facebook, especially if some of you are there because that's where you hang out with the people at the same rare disease as you or your customers or the people you left behind when you moved, or the people organizing the Little League carpool. It's really hard to go.

You have people locked in. Once they're locked in, the platform is worse to those end users in order to be good to business customers. It brings in advertisers, publishers, taxi drivers, platform sellers, performers, sex workers, whoever it is that they are brokering the introduction between. This is where I think a lot of other critiques stop. They'll say, "Oh, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product," that there's a kind of conspiracy between, say, advertisers and Facebook to screw end users.

What actually happens after the business customers are locked in is they get screwed, too, right? The platforms start to squeeze their business customers, and they try to reach a kind of equilibrium where all the value, except for whatever kind of homeopathic residue is needed to keep people locked in and to keep business customers locked into those people, all that value has been extracted, given to shareholders, given to executives. That is the final stage of enshittification. That's where I think we find ourselves now with a lot of platforms. They're not the minimum viable product. They're like the maximally enshittified product.

Kyle Chayka: [laughs] I think you describe that third stage in the book as something like a giant pile of garbage. Everyone is getting--

Cory Doctorow: I used a word that wasn't garbage, but yes, indeed. Yes.

Kyle Chayka: No one is winning, except for the platform. In this model, the users have been attracted in. We like the features. We like the product. That's cool. Then the businesses come in, and they're making money, too. Everyone is happy for a little while, like maybe a year, in this utopian situation of the platform. Then the screws start to turn, and everyone is suffering, except for the platform and its executives. In those stages, the people who are benefiting at the end are Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk of X now. What does that end-stage look like that we're living in right now?

Cory Doctorow: Well, it's not new, right? They didn't invent greed in 2019, nor did they invent the ways that tech platforms can change the rules from moment to moment that allows this enshittification. People have been remotely downgrading platforms and technologies for as long as they've been around. What changed is that the platforms don't lose to competitors when that happens.

Mark Zuckerberg, when he launched Facebook, the thing he offered to the general public in 2006, where you didn't have to have a .edu address to join it, his pitch was, "Sure, you are all using MySpace, but did you know that it's owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who's spying on you with every hour that God sends? Come to Facebook. We'll never spy on you, and we'll only show you the things you asked to see. We're not going to boost stuff into your field of vision that you didn't ask for."

It wasn't enough to bring people over from MySpace. MySpace users had a collective-action problem, too. The difference was that back then, IP laws hadn't been monotonically expanded in the way that they have in the last 20 years. Mark Zuckerberg was able to give MySpace users a scraper. You gave that scraper your username and password, this bot. It would pretend to be you at MySpace several times a day, grab everything in your feed that was waiting to be shown to you, and it would put that in your Facebook feed.

You could reply to it there, and then it would push it back out to MySpace. You didn't have a collective-action problem. You could just move from one to the other. Now, 20 years later, if you try to do that to Facebook, they'll say you violated Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and patents and trademarks and copyrights and trade secrets. We've rigged the game so that history ended with the current round of winners, that no one can do unto them as they did unto their predecessors.

Kyle Chayka: In the book, you are not a total pessimist. You're far from pessimistic about this, actually. It's not just that everything is getting more and more enshittified and worse and worse, and there's nothing to do about it. There are strategies, and there are ways to make that lever of enshittification harder to use. Maybe you can talk about how there are these political ideas to fix this. Perhaps, under Trump right now, we're not seeing so much action.

Cory Doctorow: Well, yes, there is something quite miraculous about antitrust in the last six or seven years, even under Trump. The case that Google just lost started under Trump. What's miraculous about it is that it's happened all over the world. It's easy to think of this as being just a thing Joe Biden did. I don't think Joe Biden actually did it. I think that Joe Biden was cornered into it by elements of his party who were sick to the back teeth of concentrated power and wealth.

In order to keep that coalition together, he had to do something. It wasn't just Joe Biden who was cornered into that. Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian. In Canada, we have this very, very weak competition regime. Our Competition Bureau had challenged three mergers in its whole history, but it succeeded zero times, right? Yet, Justin Trudeau, again, hardly an enemy of concentrated corporate power, whipped his party to pass big, muscular antitrust law that created new powers for our Competition Bureau.

We've seen very big antitrust action in the EU and in EU member states like Germany and France and Spain, but also in Australia, South Korea, Japan, and even China. This is happening everywhere. Trump, he's trying to stop it. The reason Trump did it in 2019, when he brought the case against Google, was not merely that he was petulant about big tech. It was that there was this giant political tailwind for doing something about concentrated power, about monopoly. That came from you and me. That came from people who are living out what the finance sector calls Stein's Law, that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. That power is still abroad in the world.

Kyle Chayka: We're seeing so much more activity and action in the EU, in the UK as far as passing these packages of regulations, but they are impacting how American users experience technology, too. There's this trickle-down effect or trickle across. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Cory Doctorow: Yes. Well, some of that is already happening, as you say. The European Union, for example, said, "Apple, we don't care how much money you make selling lightning chargers. From now on, everything sold in the European Union, unless there's a damn good reason, is going to have a USB-C charger. We're not going to keep filling our e-waste dumps with immortal garbage that has proprietary dongles on it." Apple fetched, and they complained, but they did it.

They, I guess, decided that it was logistically, transcendently hard to do this in a way where they would split the manufacturing run. They would send the USB-C ones to Europe, and they'd send the Lightning port ones to America and everyone else. Everybody else got it. Now, the Digital Markets Act, which came into effect in 2024, goes a lot further. It imposes these interoperability requirements on companies, so they can't lock rivals out of the platform, right?

They can't say, "Oh, well, we think you might invade our users' privacy or consumer rights, so we're not going to let you in." In Europe, what they say is, "Well, we have a privacy law here." Unlike in America, America hasn't had a new privacy law since Ronald Reagan banned video store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals in 1988. Other countries have mature, muscular privacy laws, and they say, "We'll decide that. If a company plugs into an Apple device and invades someone's privacy, we'll take care of that. You can stand down, Tim Cook."

Apple is so upset about this that they threatened to leave the EU overhead, which is not going to happen. In fact, after that was reported, they were like, "Oh, no, no, no, that's not what we were threatening at all. We're just sad. This is more in sorrow than in anger. We hope you'll see the error of your ways." Apple's not going to walk away from 500 million affluent consumers.

[crosstalk]

Kyle Chayka: -singular experience. It's easier to make one product for everyone. That product has to toe some line if the laws are strict enough in order to reach enough consumers. I was thinking also about AI. I'm curious what stage of enshittification you think generative AI is in right now.

Cory Doctorow: Whatever AI can or can't do. The reason it has attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in investment capital is because the market is betting that you can fire workers and replace them with chatbots. I don't think you can. Not only do I not think you can now, I don't think you will be in the future. I think that there are lots of ways in which, when workers are in charge of how they use AI, they might make their job better.

They might be better at their job. They might be happier. I don't think that bosses firing workers and replacing with AI is going to work. I don't think that shoveling more words into the word-guessing program will make that happen. I think that's like saying, "We keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster. It's only a matter of time till one of the mares gives birth to a locomotive. A person is not like a word-guessing program with more words, right?

I think because enshittification is about a service that works getting worse, and AI is a service that was just a bunch of flashy demos that it's in really a different space. Although it is interesting to note that all of the promising avenues for improvement, according to AI bosses, involve doing a lot more AI queries, and having that happen automatically through these things called routers that take what would have been a query that cost you one sum and turn it into 20 queries that each cost you a sum, but that you have no insight into.

You don't get to choose how that query is broken up and subbed out to these different kinds of models at different prices, which even if they're not ripping you off now, which I'm 100% sure they are, they will rip you off in the future with, right? They just have a black box, where it's just like you give them a credit card. Then, after you ask a question, they tell you how much they've charged your credit card. Why wouldn't they abuse that power?

Kyle Chayka: Yes, they're already extracting more value from the user as much as they can. Right now, we're seeing OpenAI roll out advertising-friendly products. Advertising in your book seems to be like the harbinger of the worst kinds of enshittification and is the model that underlies much of the internet right now.

Cory Doctorow: Actually, I want to quibble with that a little. I was the co-editor for many years, and I'm still the co-owner of a website called Boing Boing, which is one of the first big advertising-supported blogs. Our advertisers only made us invade our users' privacy to the extent that our users' privacy was invadable. When pop-up blockers became normal, advertisers stopped asking for pop-ups. When ad blockers became normal, advertisers became less interested in invading people's privacy.

I think that if we banned surveillance advertising and just went back to contextual advertising that advertisers would say, "Oh, well, we're not going to advertise anymore." When the time comes, of course, they're going to advertise. There's no way companies are not going to pay advertising firms to tell other people about their products. It's a completely ridiculous thing to claim.

Back to the thesis of the book. The policy environment creates enshittification, right? The enshittificatory environment creates the regime in which bad impulses, bad people, bad ideas thrive. We have to make a hostile environment for enshittification. We are long past the day where we should be updating our privacy law. At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we had this campaign called Privacy First, where it's like, if you're angry because Grampy's a QAnon, you think Facebook brainwashed them. You think the reason your teenager is anorexic is because Insta brainwashed her. You think the reason the millennials in your life are quoting Osama bin Laden is because TikTok brainwashed them.

If you're angry about cops using reverse warrants to round up protesters at anti-ICE demonstrations or the January 6th riots, or if you're angry about kids being followed into abortion clinics by their phones, or if you're angry about someone making deepfake porn of you, if you're angry about people being racially discriminated against when they get a loan or get a job or get a mortgage, what you're really angry about is privacy, right? This is all surveillance. The coalition for this is so big. It crosses so many political lines that if we could just make it illegal to spy on people, we could solve so many problems.

Kyle Chayka: That would break the whole model that's going on right now.

Cory Doctorow: Yes.

Kyle Chayka: Well, Cory, thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Cory Doctorow: The pleasure is very mutual. Thank you for having me on.

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David Remnick: Cory Doctorow is a writer and former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He spoke with staff writer Kyle Chayka. Kyle's column, Infinite Scroll, publishes weekly at newyorker.com. You can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com.

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