Cory Doctorow: Way Past It’s Prime: How Did Amazon Get So Rubbish?
But this is wrong. There are meaningful differences between the internet as it stands today – the enshitternet – and the old, good internet we once had. The enshitternet is a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love. The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet.
Not because the internet is the most important issue facing us today. Far from it. Compared with the climate emergency, genocide, inequality, corruption, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism and sustained racist, homophobic, misogynist and transphobic attacks, the internet is just a sideshow. But the internet is the terrain upon which these fights will be waged.
I find Cory Doctorow’s writing on the enshittification (and I love this term so much!) of the Internet to be very insightful. The part of the article quoted here feels important to me. I think he’s right. The Internet itself is not the primary concern. But it is the medium that we will depend upon to fight for progress on the issues of primary concern. So, it’ll be important to keep at least slices of the Internet open and unenshittified.