Cory Doctorow

So that's making it so that it can use other people's ink.

And so making it use other people's ink, that's interoperability doing so against the wishes, the manufacturer it's adversarial.

And like the,

It's a kind of a bedrock that if you own a thing, you should decide how it works, even if that upsets the shareholders of the company that made it.

They're so emotionally fragile that they can't bear to think that the people who buy their products will use them in ways that benefit them at the expense of the shareholders.

Then maybe they're in the wrong line of business because it is yours and you should have the final say over it.

It's dis-enshitification, enshitification, enshitificatory, you know, enshitigenic, dis-enshitificatory, and so on and so on.

So enshitification has kind of got...

three parts, right?

One is like a description of how platforms go bad.

One is a theory about why they're going bad.

And one is a proposal for how to make them better.

So the first part, this description of how platforms go bad, it's a three-stage process.

And in stage one, platforms are good to their end users, but they're also trying to find a way to lock those end users in.

And then once the users are locked in, they make things worse for those end users in stage two.

And because the users are locked in, they know that they can turn the screw without risking those users' immediate departure.

And so they make things worse for those end users in order to take something from them and give it to business customers.

who get lured in, that's stage two.

And stage three, those business customers who've been locked in as well, because they're now dependent on those end users, they have all the value withdrawn from them as well.

The platform harvests all the value from users, all the value from its business customers.