Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

The argument keeps proving itself on the platform where people review it: Goodreads, Amazon-owned, dropped its direct-messaging function while one reader was mid-book, and another posted the diagnosis: "GR is becoming enshittified!" That is Doctorow's four-step decay cycle (good to users, then users squeezed to court business customers, then everybody squeezed for shareholders) running live. Even a reader who rejects the antitrust prescription copied the specifics into his notes: some $38 billion a year Amazon takes from merchants for search placement, the felony for cracking HP's ink DRM, the secret Google-Facebook ad deal called Jedi Blue. Another ranks it "way, way better than Careless People." The cure chapter skips the recycling-tier comfort; one admirer sums it up: "regulate, unionize, and strike fear into the hearts of the overlords."

Twenty percent in, after months of anticipation, one reader quit: "this book in reality is just a bunch of blog posts," each section restarting the argument as though you skipped the last one. "I get it. I got it 5 pages ago!" A second reader made it to 35 percent before quitting over the same thing: one sharp idea "stretched into a full-length book" that a long article would have covered. The stitched-blog structure compounds the tone problem: the same point keeps coming back, and it comes back "presented to you in a condescending manner," as though you had not been paying attention to the internet you live on. Even the coinage wears thin, enshit- bolted onto a fresh noun every few pages.