Washington Monthly - The Cory Doctorow Doctrine
Editorial director Anita Jain discusses Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” reveals how Big Tech deliberately worsens its products to maximize profit and control.
In the last two years, iPhone customers may have been pleasantly surprised to see a standardized USB-C charger port, allowing them to dispose of Apple’s custom Lightning wires. The world’s 1.5 billion iPhone users can thank Europe for forcing Apple’s change. The tech giant decided to switch all its new iPhones, determining it too costly to produce the USB-C port just for Europe.
It’s only in recent years that consumers have woken up to Big Tech’s power over our attention, moods, privacy, stock market, economy, and wallets—over us. It’s fortunate then that with our heads buried in our phones scrolling through social media, consumer advocates, regulatory agencies, and litigators have been sounding the alarm on surveillance and monopoly power and delving into the drier nuts-and-bolts details of right-to-repair and interoperability regulations, like the one that led to Apple standardizing its charging port.
Prolific tech critic Cory Doctorow, whose pronouncements make him akin to a town crier in the digital square, is among those leading the charge. After coining and popularizing the term “enshittification” to mean how tech platforms degrade over time, Doctorow has bestowed his latest book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, with the title.
His book, derived mainly from his blog Pluralistic, will be eye-opening to consumers and those like me who are already familiar with Big Tech’s bullying methods. (I’m the editorial director of the Open Markets Institute, a think tank that seeks to regulate Big Tech monopolies and curb corporate power.)
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