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ACCORDING TO LIZ - We are all experiencing it. My voice-in-the-wilderness mutters have been joined by others suffering from tech refusing to do what we want it to do.
And it has now risen to a dull roar with Canadian sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow’s creation of the term “enshittification” which appeared in essays published just a few years ago and a book that came out earlier this month.
We now live in a modern-day Animal Farm where technology, ostensibly developed to assist the masses, is now constraining and twisting their work.
A contemporary comment drawing on the Roman satirist Juvenal’s line “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – in English: “Who will guard those self-same guards?” – is “Who will check the consequences of spell check and grammar checking apps?
Especially when these entirely change the meaning of what the writer is trying to say?
What's more, to whom do people have to turn when tech screws up or doesn’t work?
The A.I.-operated voice-recognition systems on companies’ hotlines? Ones designed to drive people over the edge if they weren’t spitting mad already?
Like many of us, as the world was digging itself out of the Covid crisis, Doctorow reached the inescapable conclusion that, instead of improving with refinement, digital platforms were rapidly deteriorating.
As a writer, Doctorow’s work revolves around how technology can be used for the betterment of mankind, for enhancing human individuality and driving improvements in the quality of people’s lives. Or the flip side is how Big Government and the ascendance of multinational control over our lives are agents for the control and repression of mankind.
The prevalence of the world wide web has become increasingly embedded in people’s daily lives. Nearly 97% of Americans use the internet; 85% consider it a vital service for communicating and commerce, for entertainment and for education.
As a result, digital platforms have moved from being a novelty service linking techie-heads together with the added benefit of posting a few ads, to sophisticated service providers intent on monetizing what they do and beholden to corporations prioritizing augmentation of their own value through these technologies.
With spending in this sector careening towards $4 billion, the importance of businesses providing the online infrastructure to facilitate interactions between groups – be it for sales or social media, specialized websites or dedicated apps – has become increasingly valuable in today’s global economy.
The appeal to both platform providers and users is the scalability for negligible cost after initial investment, and their omnipresent accessibility through the world wide web, minimizing labor and operational expenses while maximizing resource management and return.
Ultimately platforms connect buyers and sellers and, in contracting for and extracting their fees, have a disproportionate ability to set and increase costs often outside the oversight of regulators.
But what happens when tech fails? Consolidation can be dangerous. Starlink went down for several hours on July 24 leaving millions of users worldwide without connectivity; another event on September 15 affected tens of thousands of Americans; and this past Sunday night Amazon Web Services experienced outages impacting many websites, including that of the New York Times.
Digital platforms also collect an immense amount of data on users which has perhaps even greater value. And is leading to increasing consumer distrust of the industry.
New profiteers have glommed onto educating businesses on how best to exploit the new technology. For a cascade of profit... but not necessarily the consumers’ best interests.
Instead of helping improve the economy for ordinary Americans, Trump has further facilitated the greed of the tech billionaires who have become even more offensively rich and powerful during his reign so far – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg. The men who sat behind Trump at his inauguration.
The scientific progression of Doctorow’s theory goes:
1) a platform starts out being good for its users;
2) when the most successful have forced out competition, they can then monetize their users to lure in businesses;
3) when platforms have looked in those business customers, they can increase rates and fees, leveraging every possibility to pad their pockets, converting come-on freebies to more costs of doing business; and
4) escalating consumer costs, both directly and indirectly.
Everyone is then trapped in this cycle, and only the shareholders of these digital platforms have anything to celebrate.
Lina Khan, Biden’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission was instrumental in pursuing many of the most egregious offenses of the tech brotherhood, and cited Doctorow as key to explaining the phenomenon in laymen’s language:
“He’s making real intellectual contributions in presenting a framework for how to think about what we experience as consumers… I’ve always found him so lucid and astute and able to synthesize a lot of experiences that people were having and be able to distill them in a digestible way.”
The ascendancy of digital platforms is only one way that Big Tech is transforming our lives and taking away our self-determination.
Having A.I. enhanced products direct our phone calls, edit our documents, choose what we buy, what news we follow is a clear and potential danger to human interaction and life as we know it.
Technology should be harnessed to serve us, not humans harnessed in the service of corporate profitability.
Both A.I. and technology need to be relegated to being tools to facilitate flexibility, human creativity and happiness, customizing and prioritizing personal experience. Machine and algorithm-directed conformity and passive consumption should be discouraged at all costs.
Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It was published on October 7, 2025.
For all these issues, keep complaining until the corporations are so overwhelmed they have to address the consequences or risk nimbler competitors seizing the opportunity to provide real service.
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
