Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
By Cory Doctorow
MCD, 352 pages, $30
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.
“Doctorow keeps selling his keen mind short.”
Strong words communicate strong emotion. But part of the point of writing is to bring emotion and intellect together, and Doctorow keeps selling his keen mind short. He promises us, for instance, that “We can create enshittification-resistant infrastructure for”—get ready for the bathos—“a new, good world.” When Iris Murdoch titled a novel The Nice and the Good, she was inviting the reader to listen closely to the deep resonance of both words, so that we might understand the real meaning of goodness as though for the first time. It wouldn’t have had the same effect if she’d called it The Good and the Shit.