According to Cory Doctorow, we are living in the Enshittocene, wherein the once-friendly internet is being turned against us, not by evil attacking AI robots, but by giant tech corporations. I found the various usages of the word “enshittify” rather hilarious, until I realized that Doctorow is correct, and enshittification is actually not very funny. I caught on pretty quickly because bookstores were the first things to be attacked by the new tech giants (see the third chapter: Case Study: Amazon, page 20), and DreamHaven survived partly because we were on-line way before Amazon.

Enshittification is the transformation of the internet from a user-friendly way to connect with others, to an intrusive mess designed to funnel boatloads of money and private information into a few giant tech companies. Doctorow carefully traces how this was done, beginning with secret data collection and hidden tricks of internet pricing. They took advantage the current governmental reluctance to regulate anything, and crafted new laws to prevent competition. Eventually they were able to erode the basic honesty of tech workers, and the usefulness of their products declined. The details of these are very simply (and snarkily) explained in the book, despite many of them being pretty complicated.

The book is subtitled “Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.” I’m not sure the worsening is sudden, since problems seem to me to be rooted in Reagan-era deregulation and end-stage capitalism. Doctorow really only deals with the enshittification of the internet—now called the “enshitternet”—which arrived well after Reagan. But, honestly, shit on the internet may totally be able to enshittify the world.

Doctorow confirms what we booksellers always suspected—that Amazon was losing money on every book sale. What we didn’t know was that Amazon had enough money to do this indefinitely or, at least, until it had intentionally put a lot of us out of business. From there, it was able to acquire a currently-legal monopoly on books and then everything else. After all, Amazon is secure enough to sell this book. Though, if you buy an e-copy, you’re only renting access to it, which they can remove any time they want.

Happily, Doctorow spends no words predicting that things will get worse from here, though that may be just because of course it will. He also, in the last section of the book titled “The Cure,” has very few suggestions for individual action. But he does offer some bright spots—a few small-but-worldwide government shifts that he believes will eventually lead to positive changes. Overall Enshittification makes for an informative and surprisingly entertaining read.