What is “Enshittification” of Tech Companies? With Author Cory Doctorow
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Good morning for Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how the internet became enshitified.
Neil, that's actually not a curse word. It's the brainchild of today's guest, Cory Doctorow. It's Wednesday, December 24th. Let's ride. Let's ride.
Merry Christmas Eve, everyone. For our final podcast before you unwrap your presents, we're bringing you a chat with someone who will change the way you think about the internet. Cory Doctorow is a prolific author and internet scholar who coined the term enshitification to describe the decay you experience every day on platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. He has just come out with a book that explains how and why enshitification happens and what can possibly be done about it.
Now, forewarning, you're going to hear a lot of words that are reminiscent of bowel movements, but as Corey will explain, it's the perfect word for describing what everyone on the internet feels right now, which is things just feel a little bit worse these days. But first, a word from our sponsor, Public. Neil, I gotta tell you something. I know you're the one who ate the rest of my bagel out of the fridge. For the last time, that wasn't me. What I wanted to tell you was about public. You know how on public you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, and crypto, but now they have generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.
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What does 'enshittification' mean in the context of tech companies?
Corey, thank you so much for joining us.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
All right. So the first question I had after I read your wonderful book is, how the heck did you come up with this term? Were you sitting on the toilet one day and you thought, ah, brain blast, there is something here?
No, it's both less exciting and sort of more contingent than that. So I work for a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We're sort of the leading digital rights group in the world. And I've been there for 25 years. And getting people to care about digital rights, it's hard, right? Because you're asking them to care about things that are abstract and far in the future and technical. you know, you can just like wait until their lives have been destroyed by technology and then they'll care about it. But you'd ideally like to raise the salience while there's still time to do something about it. Right. So I have just spent a couple of decades coming up with words and concepts and framing devices and metaphors and similes and whatever.
And in this case, I was on vacation with my family in Puerto Rico and we had rented a little cabin in a cloud forest and it was serviced in probably by microwave, uh, internet. And one of the reasons that's improbable is that if you know one thing about microwave internet, the one thing everyone knows is that it doesn't go through clouds.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–2:40
2
What does 'enshittification' mean in the context of tech companies?
2:40–11:46
3
How did Cory Doctorow come up with the term 'enshittification'?
11:46–33:01
4
What are the stages of enshitification in tech platforms?
33:01–33:52
5
How do companies lock in their users during enshitification?
33:52–40:04
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Morning Brew Daily
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