Doctorow offers a masterly polemic, its scope so sweeping that it does, finally, seem to explain every pungent odor wafting from Silicon Valley ... Doctorow tells it all in good humor. Somehow he believes that tech can be brought to heel, that a coalition of the fed up and fearful will usher in a new wave of trust-busting regulation, or at least nudge things in the right direction. I hope he’s right.
A pointed and efficient text, driven by Doctorow’s snarky prose, which reads like what it is: professional blogging extended for three-hundred-plus pages. The book covers a lot, but it leaves the reader craving a grander application of his concept to other aspects of culture and society ... The book stops short of fully extrapolating enshittification to national politics, but the term is certainly also relevant in that realm.
He certainly knows how to make an idea memorable. You could not ask for a clearer, more ambitious or better-written business book than this one ... The book does not allow itself to be slowed down by evidence: this keeps the reader entertained, but also creates questions about cherry-picking ... Overall, however, Doctorow deserves thanks for his service.
Doctorow’s map of the steps to enshittification suffers somewhat from being too neat ... Still, what is perhaps most striking—and where the book truly succeeds—is in Doctorow’s detailed anatomy of enshittification, his comprehensive account of the sheer inventiveness of Facebook and the others, which makes 19th- or 20th-century robber barons seem tame by comparison ... For its occasional flaws, Doctorow has performed a valuable public service.
This is Doctorow in full-on angry author mode; he pulls no punches here, naming names and calling out guilty parties for the things they have done. It might be stretching things a bit to say that the book is a rallying cry for consumer rebellion, but readers will be upset, informed, and inflamed after reading this one.
We might quibble with the ‘suddenly,’ but there is no doubt that it’s an accelerating trend ... These observations are all true to some degree, but they do not arrive without a whiff of an Econ 101 just-so story ... Many of the details still stand out as shocking ... I am not sure this state of affairs is as novel to capitalism as Enshittification makes it out to be, and this is a frustrating aspect of the book ... He can also be frustratingly sloppy with his terms.
