A warning greets you as you enter FRICTION. Technology that once felt like a gift now holds you hostage to its own survival. Apps follow suit, and the feed that once found you the things you wanted now advertises the things it needs you to want. So you adapt, as always. And therein lies the problem.
This deliberate, staged degradation of digital services, from useful to extractive to ultimately, useless, is what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification. What he’s describing isn't simply oversight. It's a business model working exactly as intended.
Simply put, a system that runs out of people to extract from eventually turns on its users.
Enshittification is about helplessness that got sneakily rebranded as convenience. But it also addresses whether anything can be built that doesn't eventually betray the people who made it matter.
Proposed remedies include regulatory enforcement and labor organising within tech, backed by a political infrastructure that doesn't function the same way in India. This is because India arrived at these platforms under different conditions - as consumers of an infrastructure that we had no hand in designing and little power to refuse.
So what does Enshittification look like from our lens? That’s our framework and our jumping-off point as we dive into Cory Doctorow’s excellent labour of love.
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