Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Online

Cory Doctorow has written a courageous, devastating book which succeeds in every regard except its main goal. Doctorow wants to popularize the term “enshittification” and its cognate terms “enshittocene,” “enshitternet,” “The Great Enshittening.” These words refer to the process by which an internet platform deteriorates from a cave of wonders into—well, you get the idea. And although he meticulously describes the stages of this process, Doctorow gives the reader “explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense”: If you want to deploy it to mean “something that is bad,” then “This is good.” It’s jarring, in a book which so unsparingly anatomizes the degradation of everyday life by corporate cynicism, to find yourself being urged to degrade the English language as well.