Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (www.versobooks.com)

Cory Doctorow’s forthcoming book coins and explains “enshittification,” a three‑stage playbook by which dominant online platforms intentionally degrade user experience: lure users with attractive features or free access, monetize attention via business customers and adtech that warps platform dynamics, then entrench monopoly power and extract remaining value for executives and shareholders. The result, Doctorow argues, is a web awash in misogyny, conspiratorialism, surveillance, manipulation, fraud and “AI slop” — harms driven not by technical inevitability but by perverse business incentives. For the AI/ML community this diagnosis matters because platform incentives shape data, models and evaluation. Engagement‑optimizing algorithms create feedback loops that amplify toxic or manipulative content, contaminate training datasets, and reward shortcuts over robustness or alignment. Doctorow’s proposed remedies — breaking up monopolies, stronger privacy and antitrust enforcement, tech unions, and building alternative architectures — point to technical priorities: data provenance and curation, model auditing and red‑teaming, deployment governance, federated or decentralized systems, and incentive‑aware objective design. The book reframes many “AI problems” as socio‑economic design problems, arguing that solving them requires structural policy change alongside technical fixes.