On Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification"

It's healthy to appreciate small wonders—even corporate ones—and the truth is that I'm in receipt of a rare privilege where, strictly though my work, I'm allowed to read a book, write questions of its arguments, and then discuss those questions directly with the author in the podcast that I host.

The novelist and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow published a nonfiction diagnosis this year examining "Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It." And it's good!

I rarely, rarely read nonfiction (the last book I read was also for my work, and it produced one of my favorite interviews on our show), but Doctorow's overlap with my own interests is nearly uniform. The internet, as pretty much every single person can see, is worse. Way worse. And it feels like there's very little we can do about it. Amazon can hock bullshit products at the top of its search results. Google can seemingly ruin Search results to compel additional queries from users, which, allegedly, provides more opportunities to show us ads. Facebook can, um, exist in whatever capacity it's attained, which appears to be a mixture of AI slopfarming and groundbreaking product innovation in consumer surveillance.

Doctorow's explanation for why this is all happening is remarkably simple and easily explained: Companies are making things worse for their customers because they can, and the safeguards we had against this behavior in the past have eroded in recent years.

What I've found most interesting in Doctorow's analysis, though, is in how closely his case studies can be compared to everyday scams. There is a remarkable amount of lying, cheating, stealing, and rigging going on here, and when I look around, I worry that this behavior is becoming the next Organizing Principle for our time.

I've mentioned "organizing principles" before in this newsletter, but here's a brief refresher: There exists an invisible yoke steering industry, migration, statecraft, research, and allowable life itself to the same goal, and that goal is war.

But the globe's appetite for war has diminished. Yes, companies still reorganize themselves to obtain multibillion-dollar contracts from the Department of Defense. And yes, war's "budget" in this country is the largest it's ever been.

But as I've only learned this week, there hide pockets of instability that are being abused by organized crime to create a new organizing principle—online scamming. Here's an insane statistic: Reportedly up to 60% of Cambodia's GDP could be generated strictly from online investment scams. The military coup in Myanmar is also being leveraged by criminal syndicates that pay separate juntas to turn a blind eye to the construction and management of literal scam compounds—buildings where locals are forced into running investment scams across the world.

We are, I believe, witnessing a new interregnum, and what emerges from it may be a new framework of power, commerce, and behavior: That it is entirely "okay" to lie, steal, cheat, and connive your way to money and power, because no one is left to stop you.

Whether I ask Doctorow about this exact issue is undecided because I admit I might be insane.