The article is very long; that part is fascinating and a fantastic suggestion:
> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
tgv · 17h ago
There already are alternative app stores for iOS and Android. They don't seem to do well. There's no "flocking."
isodev · 17h ago
I believe F-Droid is doing quite ok. So is the Galaxy Store. On iOS, Apple created a very complicated process which is region and even country-specific. Hopefully this will change once the EU, the US, Japan and everyone else currently suing Apple is done with them. But I do share the sentiment from the article - I wish it wasn't necessary to escalate such matters to the level of regulation
krzyk · 17h ago
So the inevitable end of the world that Apple App store apologists predicated didn't happen.
Voultapher · 17h ago
At least on iOS Apple has just been fined 500 million - as a start - because the way they implemented third-party app stores was so blatantly against the DMA. I think we simply don't yet know how users and corporations will react to it.
schnitzelstoat · 17h ago
I agree with him that the retaliatory tariffs don't make much sense but equally basically throwing out copyright law would be crazy, as the US would likely respond in kind and it'd probably hurt Europe more in the long run.
They should stop the anti-competitive practices that prevent third-party app stores and so on though.
bambax · 17h ago
Anti-circumvention laws are not the same thing as copyright. Not in the least. And it's very debatable that copyright should be used for tractors, for example.
If you invent a new engine you can patent it. But if you make an engine that works like any other engine, why should society help you prevent your customers from tinkering with it?
amiga386 · 17h ago
It's not advocating throwing out copyright; it's advocating killing the laws enabling DRM. Imagine!
No laws against removing the region lock on your DVD player.
No laws against fixing your tractor with 3rd party parts.
When Amazon deletes Nineteen Eighty-Four from your Kindle, you can put it right back.
When a games company "turns off" the game you bought, turn it right back on again.
like_any_other · 17h ago
Getting rid of circumvention and reverse-engineering bans is not remotely "copyright law". It is restoring basic ownership rights to our own property.
Mindwipe · 17h ago
You would effectively have to exit all international copyright law treaties to do so, which is defacto removing any international recognition of copyright for works from your country.
like_any_other · 17h ago
Copyright is covered by the Berne convention, which prohibits neither circumvention nor reverse-engineering, so even in this "what you're proposing couldn't easily be done without also doing this other thing, so I'm going to pretend you've proposed that other thing also, but I won't say so explicitly" interpretation, that is not true.
ycombinatrix · 11h ago
>"what you're proposing couldn't easily be done without also doing this other thing, so I'm going to pretend you've proposed that other thing also, but I won't say so explicitly"
that sir, is a strawman argument
Mindwipe · 16h ago
The Berne Convention has been modified multiple times, including by the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which incorporates a requirement for all signatories to implement an anti-circumvention law.
Furthermore, this whole discussion began with claiming it's impossible to undo anti-circumvention/reverse-engineering, without abandoning copyright entirely, because international treaties. Yet these treaties were modified multiple times, as well as new ones entered into. If it's possible to change these treaties to further encroach IP laws into our lives, why would it not be possible to change them in the other direction?
rwmj · 17h ago
Not really. A digital lock is not a creative endeavour in the same way we think of books or records.
esseph · 15h ago
Cryptography isn't creative?
rwmj · 15h ago
These digital locks aren't usually inventing creative new cryptography (at least not the ones which are secure).
isodev · 17h ago
> basically throwing out copyright law would be crazy
Slightly off topic, but aren't we in the process of "throwing out copyright law" for the purposes of LLMs a.k.a the "automated" version of enshitification anyway? We've stretched "fair use" so much already, it won't be too big of a challenge to fit reverse engineering (removing DRM) into it.
Mindwipe · 17h ago
> That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems.
No it isn't.
Like literally, the US and it's tariff madness has literally nothing to do with it. The EU and Canada are both signatories to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and signatories of the WTO provisions that include continued operation to it. They are international treaties with a wide degree of international support, not US inventions. Christ, Europe had a lot more to do with the wording of the anticircumvention provisions in the WIPO treaty than the US did.
People should stop taking Doctorow seriously. He has a long track record of making shit up that is what his audience wants to hear.
rwmj · 17h ago
Because of course we can never change international treaties.
like_any_other · 16h ago
They can be, but the point remains that it is not US tariffs forcing Europe into them - it is the doing of their own governments (whose preferences should not be confused with those of their citizens).
Teever · 11h ago
The assumption underlying this is that the governments that implement the WIPO treaty are doing so without duress or threat of tariffs from the United States which may or may not be true. We'll never know.
But what we do know is that the EU has recently put regulations in place that allow them to curtail the IP privileges given to companies in countries that they feel economically threatened by.
It will be interesting to see them use this or if the mere existence of the law is and the mere possibility of use is them using it.
hoseja · 17h ago
You do realize that US still enjoys its cryptohegemony. CIA surely has a lot of levers to ensure uppity euros don't undermine profits.
whinvik · 18h ago
> In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. "Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying."
I think this should be made illegal.
But I also think judging from how bad people are at making laws, what we will get is something that will make it worse for everyone.
bootsmann · 18h ago
It's really funny to me that with both the AI act and GDPR, you will see swathes of threads of people on HN bashing the law only to then later discover the purpose of this legislation from first principles.
octo888 · 17h ago
The same could come to Europe (lowballing broke people), because you can just make employees give their consent by baking it into all employment contracts. Just like the working time directive opt-out (HR say "take it or leave it" to 99.9% of people).
It probably already happens where it's already acceptable to request financial checks such as the finance industry.
bootsmann · 15h ago
The problem is the party selling that data actually. The nurses would need to consent that whomever the data broker got that data from to share their data with the broker and for the broker to share that data with the nursing service.
actionfromafar · 17h ago
You could try, but that would most likely be illegal and also fought tooth and nail by unions, which aren't as neutered as American unions. In Europe, sympathy strikes aren't Verboten like in the US.
octo888 · 14h ago
Many countries in Europe have weak unions (eg Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Portugal, Czech Republic, Greece).
And there is no real EU (did you mean EU by "Europe"?) wide labour law
Mindwipe · 17h ago
It depends on the territory, there's no pan-Europe regulation on it.
Even when the UK was in the EU sympathy strikes were illegal (to a much greater extent than the US).
croes · 17h ago
That would violate privacy laws.
They could put it into the contract but they would be void
octo888 · 17h ago
I don't agree. Which laws? Putting it in the contract is giving your permission. You're allowed to give your permission under GDPR.
A similar thing happened with the Working Time Directive - almost all contracts in my country make you agree to opt-out and that's been like that for over 15 years
gampleman · 15h ago
That's not how European courts have been interpreting it. When they say "free consent" they do mean free as in beer, so a "consent or loose your job" provisions would almost certainly be thrown out.
octo888 · 15h ago
What job is being lost when you are applying for a new job?
> That's not how European courts have been interpreting it
Any particular relevant cases I can lookup?
amiga386 · 13h ago
Firstly, the WTD makes mandatory a number of things that cannot be opted out from. The only thing opt-outable is the maximum of 48 hours work per week on average, and it is left to member states to legislate how that opt-out works (should they choose to have the opt-out at all).
In the UK, to pick a specific example, it is a combination of some workers not being allowed a choice of opt-out (e.g. healthcare workers, self-employed, "gig workers"), some union workers derogating that right to their unions collective bargaining... but for every other worker, the 48 hours is the law. You cannot mandate it in a contract. You can't advertise a job where you set the hours and those hours are on average over 48 hours per week. It's not a valid job and you are immediately in breach of statutory law.
You'll have to look at member states cases, it's on them to define how the opt-out works.
One example: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/61123e81e90e0... "In respect of the 48 hour week the claimant had not signed an opt out and as such if the claimant was working in excess of 48 hours average across
the week then her right was being infringed. It is not in dispute that this is a statutory right capable of protection."
> Putting it in the contract is giving your permission. You're allowed to give your permission under GDPR.
AFAIK the company must make it opt-in, non-mandatory and provide a way to change your mind at any moment.
octo888 · 14h ago
Yes, as I said, by putting it in the employment contract when applying for a job.
Honestly it's hilarious how some people view GDPR. They think CEOs lose sleep at night worrying about it, that they might go to jail for it, or have to pay 100M Euro fine for a breach of it. It's simply not the case.
The reality of EU directives and regulations are very different to how they are sold. Many people fall prey to the marketing
fsflover · 13h ago
> Many people fall prey to the marketing
It seems you did fall prey to the anti-GDPR marketing. It's being actually enforced [0] and doesn't allow "all or nothing" pseudo-consent [1].
There are many much older privacy laws then just GDPR.
aitchnyu · 17h ago
15 years back, I was subscribed to EU official blog which presents their side of tabloid headlines like "Overpaid French suits want to ban blue stickers on only freckled apples". Did they publish ones for AI Act and GDPR, especially as more countries elect manly commonsense billionaire sympathizers?
Seems to me that the illegal part would be the cartel of the 3 apps that cornered the whole market.
An app that doesn’t do this could eat their lunch.
Nurses work at hospitals, the supply of which is constrained artificially by the state, so once you sell all of the ones in a region on your app, you have a monopoly. It is a type of regulatory capture.
whinvik · 17h ago
To clarify, what I think should be made illegal is to take advantage of people by using information about how much debt that they have to lowball them.
sneak · 17h ago
Yes, why? This is the market working as it should. Market participants should be free to use all available information.
The lowballing should be counteracted by competition. There isn’t any competition because the number of hospitals is artificially constrained by the state and a cartel can go to all of them in a region (usually a single digit number) and capture all of them, cornering the market for purchasing labor in that field.
The problem is not that the bidders have the information. The problem is that there is effectively only one bidder: the cartel.
An app that doesn’t do this (and thus pays more) would quickly have access to the entire labor pool by offering higher wages. It doesn’t exist because of illegal activity. That’s not caused by the cartel having access to, or using, information.
You are addressing the symptoms of the cartel, not the root cause.
whinvik · 16h ago
IMO cartels are inevitable. Almost all sectors end up with 1 or 2 players.
However, I am curious to know how you think we can avoid the problem of cartels.
biorach · 16h ago
Exploitation of the indebted is a symptom that should be addressed regardless.
Plus I think your diagnosis is simplistic.
aredox · 18h ago
Well, you wanted a "free enterprise" society, why do you complain now? Isn't that freedom? Of expression, of commerce, of association...
...Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist?
philipallstar · 17h ago
> Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist?
If you were in a communist country you are definitely worried about the power asymmetry, and rushing to go to West Germany or just out of the USSR, or to the USA from Cuba or out of pre-capitalist China if you could.
lupusreal · 17h ago
In communist countries, labor unions are controlled by the party and serve the interests of the state, not the workers. Strikes are illegal and any pretense of collective bargaining is a farce.
Worker rights only exist in free societies.
Voultapher · 17h ago
Cory Doctorow is one of the best contemporary authors that I know, nearly everything he writes is concise, poignant and relevant and he writes new articles nearly every day. You can find his writing here [1]. One of his most memorable articles for me is about remote attestation and the context in lives in [2], absolutely worth a read.
The thing I don't understand is how unethical stuff like this comes to be built. Take the example where nurses with debt get lower wages because they are desperate. Some manager had to come up with this idea and then get various people to agree and then get a team of engineers to implement it. Thats a lot of people agreeing to do something so clearly evil (to me at least). Are there that many people who just don't care? Whenever I read stories similar to this I always wonder how many people went along without objecting.
spacemadness · 11h ago
Just look at the state of the world for your answer. People sell out their morality for pay all the time. Especially under capitalism.
cebert · 17h ago
For the “Uber of Nursing” example, if employers want to play games like this, the best way to combat it is with symmetrical information. Employees should share their salary offers on a website, which would empower them to get a better sense of whether they are being paid fairly.
kubb · 17h ago
But you understand why one of these things is legal and the other is not?
Because the employer has power and the employee doesn’t.
Of course they should, but they have much more influence on the law so they don’t.
Just watched the talk, it's one of the best opening tech keynote I've ever seen
tmjwid · 18h ago
For further listening, Cory has produced a podcast for CBC that might be a good accompaniment to this article called "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?".
Firefox's offline translation is pretty reasonable these days.
jocoda · 18h ago
> "He believes that changes to the policy environment is what has led to enshittification, not changes in technology."
This is the root cause, and as it looks, there is no cure.
AvAn12 · 18h ago
Agreee. Also money. Once we go from making things because they are cool / helpful / useful / amusing to making things to personally get rich, is enshitofication inevitable?
kubb · 17h ago
It’s evitable, we need to make it impossible to get excessively rich from it (by capping capital accumulation through redistribution).
conartist6 · 15h ago
I think it stems from there not being enough engineers. In aggregate, companies have been able to take over the market for engineering labor and ensure that the only good-paying jobs on the job market at any given time are working for companies that want to use engineers to corner some consumer market so that they can enshittify it.
The cure is to make so much new engineering talent that this is simply impossible
palata · 19h ago
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. Let companies jailbreak Teslas and deliver all of the features that ship in the cars, but are disabled by software, for one price; that is a much better way to hurt Elon Musk, rather than by expressing outrage at his Nazi salutes, since he loves the attention. "Kick him in the dongle."
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it.
krzyk · 17h ago
> making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services
Is anywhere in EU reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, and modifying any products illegal?
Mindwipe · 17h ago
Every country has an anti-circumvention law in the EU. It is a condition of membership.
Not that that makes Doctorow's argument any better or make any more sense.
like_any_other · 18h ago
> making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services
It's amazing that merely learning about how items that we own work (so-called "reverse-engineering") and exercising control over them (jailbreaking - this time the term is apt) has been made illegal. A heinous overreach by corporations into the lives of people that own their products, and a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough, they want to treat as trade secrets products with mass-market availability.
zoobab · 18h ago
"a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough"
Expanding patents to software, in Europe they replaced the 2005 software patent directive by the Unified Patent Court, which will ignore the exclusion of 'computer programs', like the EPO did, with no way for the question to be escalated to the CJEU:
Multinational corporations also became part time judges, because rubberstamping software patents is easier when you can also corrupt the judicial system:
It’s unfortunate that he is continuing to use the term enshittification, because that pretty much guarantees that no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly. Which is a shame, as many of the solutions here are explicitly legal ones. Words and names matter, especially when it comes to political actions.
ikr678 · 17h ago
I think that's a bit of projection on your part, not everyone is scared of naughty words. It was the Australian word of the year in 2024 and appears in our senate hearing transcripts.
keiferski · 17h ago
It has nothing to do with my own personal opinion on vulgar words. It's a basic understanding of how the political system works.
The name of a political movement matters. Always has, always will. It's no different for adjacent concepts that describe a phenomenon the movement is organizing against.
Propelloni · 17h ago
I think I get your meaning, but it cuts both ways. The angsty populists of today celebrate the transgression, ie. showing bad manners, dumbing down language, or flaunting low concepts.
Giving something a derogatory name that the yellow press (or rather some Telegram group) can sling around to vent their frustration and fear could be a win in this place. Of course, leadership persons of such groups are usually just demagogues looking out for their personal gain, so it might just as well be another rallying cry leading to really bad policies hitting those that vote in favor the most. But such is the world today ;)
keiferski · 15h ago
I can see this angle, and agree it can be useful as a word to center frustration around. But I don’t think that actually leads to real political change.
conartist6 · 15h ago
There's nothing more powerful than using the real word for how the companies are treating us.
Like shit.
The word spread in common usage about as fast as wildfire because everyone immediately knew what he meant. And the companies are too polite to even be able to say the word! If you can't swear in response to being degraded, pissed on, pissed off, used and thrown away, then you're the kind of sheep they want that they can abuse more and more and more and more and more and more and more without ever facing any consequence.
God forbid that rudeness is involved in collecting the power to stand up to it
komali2 · 17h ago
I disagree that your personal opinion isn't tainting your perspective. You presume that this name negatively affects the political movement opposed to enshittification - even when faced directly with the fact that sovereign governments are engaging seriously with the term.
Is Australia not big enough to count?
keiferski · 17h ago
What laws have been passed that explicitly use vulgar words in their names?
Plenty of terms are used in senate hearing transcripts. Hearings are a completely different thing from actual laws being passed.
As I said, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the government operates.
komali2 · 17h ago
> What laws have been passed that explicitly use vulgar words in their names?
Is that the argument? I understood your argument to mean that the term "enshittification" is holding back the movement because nobody will use it. As others are saying, I don't think there's any issue people take with some drop-in term being used if actual laws are passed discussing the topic.
Plenty of movements involving vulgar language, however, did result in laws being passed - "Fuck the Draft" comes to mind, the attitude surrounding which led to the draft ending (after all, why else would it end?), but also was a central fixture in a supreme court ruling that furthered defined 1st amendment rights in the USA.
So again, I just don't understand how one intellectual describing one aspect of the digital rights movement could negatively impact the movement as a whole, which I interpret as your argument.
keiferski · 17h ago
The argument is:
There is a phenomenon that is very clearly happening. Doctorow and others use a vulgar term to describe this phenomenon.
Because this vulgar term is used, it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon.
As an analogy: imagine if the concepts of inequality or social injustice were primarily described by a vulgar term. Instead of discussing, "democratic backsliding" or "failure of democracy" we said "democracy shit the bed." This would limit the range of the critique, which if one is interested in actually solving the issue, is an immensely impractical move.
komali2 · 16h ago
I don't understand, Doctorow of course uses enshittification all the time but I've see "platform decay" used plenty of times as well. But also, plenty of "Serious" people seem to be discussing it
ABC Radio National interviewed Professor Inger Mewburn, Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University, and titled the interview "'Enshittification' and social media for academics" https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/saturdayextra/enshitt...
So I guess I'm just not seeing how this is limiting anyone's abilities in any way.
keiferski · 16h ago
These are individual media articles, not laws, not academic papers, not think tank reports, or anything that has actual legislative influence. Note that I wrote:
> it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon.
Now, to be fair, I don't think the word is going to sink the whole attempt. But I think it's just juvenile and unhelpful. Why pick a word that is deliberately impractical, and then critique anyone that says, "I agree with your ideas, but maybe pick a more political-friendly name, so it's easier to do something about it?"
ikr678 · 1h ago
There is a whole branch of policy that generally covers enshittification, it's just not called that. Consumer Protection (laws, agency and enforcement) are the answer.
ajb · 17h ago
Being derogatory is absolutely a valid political tactic. But making it your only possible tactic is bad strategy. Sure, "not everyone is scared of naughty words", but politics is about appealing to as many people as possible, not just sounding cool to your in-group.
bregma · 17h ago
Perhaps encrapification would be more acceptable amongst the erudite classes? Or maybe endoodycated? encacapated?
Value engineering. When you can't grow by selling more widgets, your only real choice is to make (almost) the same thing, but cheaper.
But Cory's a polemicist. He'd absolutely prefer the memorable word he coined himself to the acceptable, drab one that already exists.
(Plus value engineering is only one way to enshittify a product. There's also subscription models, selling data, jamming ads in everywhere... the advantage of Cory's word is that it captures everything).
Voultapher · 17h ago
I'd suspect value engineering to bounce off most people as some abstract concept, enshitification is so much more visceral and evokes an emotional response that matches the feeling of platforms turning to shit.
patapong · 17h ago
I agree with this - beyond the sound of the term, it is also not very obious in what it refers to. In the beginning, it was used with a very specific meaning, of platforms squeezing market participants on both sides. Now, it seems to have come to refer to all instances of online services getting worse and more user-hostile over time. Dare I say, enshittification of the term enshittification?
rolandog · 16h ago
I disagree with your definition; from Wikipedia [0]:
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. [...]
> platforms squeezing market participants on both sides.
Wasn't that chokepoint capitalism? [1] (i.e. controlling supply and demand IIRC)
From Cory Doctorow's original article [2], one might say that enshittification is the degradation of a platform that transforms it from being customer-centric to prioritizing profit extraction at the expense of user experience. I think that the definition has expanded to include other things non-platform, but I feel that that isn't too far a stretch. Nowadays, I might say that enshittification is just unchecked capitalism doing its thing (and we need to be protected from exploiting us).
But I do concede that Cory was indeed exploring some ideas on his original post [2] that may have made it to his book (and thus, are related to your definition):
> Amazon's monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.
> no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly
Eh. Either they weren't going to do so anyway, because doing so goes against the money, or they can come up with a more public-friendly term.
smitty1e · 18h ago
Market decay?
keiferski · 18h ago
Surely there is a better synonym: decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc.
Enshittification sounds like an immature bad joke.
piva00 · 18h ago
Academics are completely free to rebrand the naming if they need to sound more pompous and serious, the semantics are the same.
keiferski · 18h ago
It has nothing to do with being pompous, and this attitude is precisely why none of these solutions will ever go anywhere.
If you want laws to be passed, you need senators and judges and legal scholars to engage with your ideas. None of those people are going to take the idea of “enshittification” seriously with a name like that, nor are they going to put their name on a bill referencing it. There are plenty of examples of citizen activism that lead to a bill, and these bills often are name directly after the activist/movement name.
I’ll say it again: if you want political change, accept that you need to care about the names of concepts.
biorach · 17h ago
They can use a different name. If someone in a position to push this really felt that advancing the cause really needed a rename they could come up with a name today, get consensus tomorrow and move on with life.
This is a non issue
TheOtherHobbes · 18h ago
This is tone policing. "Why are you being so impolite about your abuse?"
The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name.
Government itself has been enshittified, clearly and comprehensively.
keiferski · 18h ago
No, it’s just basic communication skills. Which seems to be a tough ask these days.
card_zero · 17h ago
Cory Doctorow suggests using "platform decay" if the term enshittification bothers you.
"just use one of the dozens of words that failed to gain public attention over the past 25 years".
keiferski · 17h ago
I've already written about 5 comments in this thread explaining why it's a poor choice of a word from a pragmatic point of view.
I'm also not super interested in his rant about people criticizing his approach are just "pearl clutchers."
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 6h ago
> I've already written about 5 comments in this thread explaining [my opinion].
Other people have written more comments in this thread explaining a different opinion. It doesn't really matter how many times you've explained yours. For what it's worth, I think an ancestor comment to this one poignantly addresses a particular perspective:
> The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name.
It might help to tailor your arguments to this perspective as I suspect it is the most common one. I also get the feeling that's how Doctorow figures it's "pearl clutching": it's less about the "bad word" and more about the "profits".
piva00 · 16h ago
Of course it has to do with appearances, hence "pompous and serious", requiring a term change just so it can be taken "seriously" because the portmanteau sounds too crass or colloquial. It's all appearances, the underlying concept if it's called "enshittification" or "rot", "decay", etc. is the exact same, it's just that "enshittification" sounds too crass for a class of people to be allowed to use in their serious business.
It's not about communication, since for communication sake it's much more easily understood by a larger cohort of people if colloquial terms are used, it's simply the need for seriously-sounding jargon to be taken seriously, which is just a play in appearances.
If you want political change you need political action, the name of concepts is just one avenue for that.
keiferski · 16h ago
...for a class of people to be allowed to use in their serious business.
Yes, and that class of people are the ones actually making the laws. The ones that could solve the problems discussed in the article (like nursing apps) legally.
Which is, I assume, actually the point.
komali2 · 17h ago
The easiest answer to your point here is "says who?"
Seriously, can you back up this claim?
keiferski · 17h ago
Sure - take a look at every major piece of legislation passed in the last century. Notice anything about their names? The Patriot Act. The New Deal. They are all pretty "positive" names without any sort of vulgarity or negative connotation.
Then also notice the total lack of major legislation with vulgar, offensive, or immature words in the name.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 5h ago
The ACE Act. Actively Curtail Enshittification.
It's all political theater and a real political will to end enshittification will end it. That is what's missing, not a positive-sounding name.
croes · 18h ago
They all miss the point that it’s done on purpose.
It’s not because some underlying physical law.
decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc. all sound like the poor companies couldn’t do anything about it
Ygg2 · 18h ago
Platform decay. But I think people are confusing effects of capitalism with just how bad online stuff gets.
subjectsigma · 17h ago
I hate the name too, it has this distinct Toys R’ Us feel to it. It makes Doctorow seem like a petulant baby, even though his general message is sound. And every time I see Doctorow mentioned there’s at least one comment saying it’s a bad name. People criticized RMS for years for using terms like “iCrap”, etc. but for some reason Doctorow is allowed to do this
ajb · 18h ago
I totally agree. The term is a puerile way of "owning the cons" following Haidt's idea that conservatives have a strong sense of disgust and liberals do not. The problem is that a) many conservatives are also a potential constituency for increasing integrity in the private sector, and b) many people on the political left also have a strong sense of disgust.
Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot of his writing, and the site he used to run (boingboing) serve the market of people for whom disgusting things are entertaining or funny, so I think he has a blind spot here.
keiferski · 18h ago
I don't even think it goes as deep as right vs. left. It's more of a "hacker culture" (whatever that means in 2025) obsession with being subversive and fighting anyone that suggests metaphorically putting on suit and tie could actually solve the problem.
...as evidenced by the responses to my comment – the sheer hostility to the idea that maybe it's not a great idea to use the word shit in an activist project that aims at political change.
And so you're really not going to get any real change here, because it's easier to complain online and do nothing, while simultaneously shouting away anyone that suggests some minor changes would be more productive. The exact same conversation happens in the open source / free source movement.
p3rls · 9h ago
I can barely remember the boingboing era of the internet, but when I found out Doctorow was a serious writer I remember having a similar reaction...
Then again, look how the term has taken off, perhaps it's we who are the shit-marketers.
> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
They should stop the anti-competitive practices that prevent third-party app stores and so on though.
If you invent a new engine you can patent it. But if you make an engine that works like any other engine, why should society help you prevent your customers from tinkering with it?
No laws against removing the region lock on your DVD player.
No laws against fixing your tractor with 3rd party parts.
When Amazon deletes Nineteen Eighty-Four from your Kindle, you can put it right back.
When a games company "turns off" the game you bought, turn it right back on again.
that sir, is a strawman argument
https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wct/
Furthermore, this whole discussion began with claiming it's impossible to undo anti-circumvention/reverse-engineering, without abandoning copyright entirely, because international treaties. Yet these treaties were modified multiple times, as well as new ones entered into. If it's possible to change these treaties to further encroach IP laws into our lives, why would it not be possible to change them in the other direction?
Slightly off topic, but aren't we in the process of "throwing out copyright law" for the purposes of LLMs a.k.a the "automated" version of enshitification anyway? We've stretched "fair use" so much already, it won't be too big of a challenge to fit reverse engineering (removing DRM) into it.
No it isn't.
Like literally, the US and it's tariff madness has literally nothing to do with it. The EU and Canada are both signatories to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and signatories of the WTO provisions that include continued operation to it. They are international treaties with a wide degree of international support, not US inventions. Christ, Europe had a lot more to do with the wording of the anticircumvention provisions in the WIPO treaty than the US did.
People should stop taking Doctorow seriously. He has a long track record of making shit up that is what his audience wants to hear.
But what we do know is that the EU has recently put regulations in place that allow them to curtail the IP privileges given to companies in countries that they feel economically threatened by.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument
It will be interesting to see them use this or if the mere existence of the law is and the mere possibility of use is them using it.
I think this should be made illegal.
But I also think judging from how bad people are at making laws, what we will get is something that will make it worse for everyone.
It probably already happens where it's already acceptable to request financial checks such as the finance industry.
And there is no real EU (did you mean EU by "Europe"?) wide labour law
Even when the UK was in the EU sympathy strikes were illegal (to a much greater extent than the US).
A similar thing happened with the Working Time Directive - almost all contracts in my country make you agree to opt-out and that's been like that for over 15 years
> That's not how European courts have been interpreting it
Any particular relevant cases I can lookup?
In the UK, to pick a specific example, it is a combination of some workers not being allowed a choice of opt-out (e.g. healthcare workers, self-employed, "gig workers"), some union workers derogating that right to their unions collective bargaining... but for every other worker, the 48 hours is the law. You cannot mandate it in a contract. You can't advertise a job where you set the hours and those hours are on average over 48 hours per week. It's not a valid job and you are immediately in breach of statutory law.
https://www.acas.org.uk/working-time-rules/the-48-hour-weekl...
https://www.acas.org.uk/working-time-rules/jobs-with-differe...
> Any particular relevant cases I can lookup?
You'll have to look at member states cases, it's on them to define how the opt-out works.
One example: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/61123e81e90e0... "In respect of the 48 hour week the claimant had not signed an opt out and as such if the claimant was working in excess of 48 hours average across the week then her right was being infringed. It is not in dispute that this is a statutory right capable of protection."
UK's Employment Rights Act 1996 section 101A: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/18/section/101A
AFAIK the company must make it opt-in, non-mandatory and provide a way to change your mind at any moment.
Honestly it's hilarious how some people view GDPR. They think CEOs lose sleep at night worrying about it, that they might go to jail for it, or have to pay 100M Euro fine for a breach of it. It's simply not the case.
The reality of EU directives and regulations are very different to how they are sold. Many people fall prey to the marketing
It seems you did fall prey to the anti-GDPR marketing. It's being actually enforced [0] and doesn't allow "all or nothing" pseudo-consent [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813801
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39272861; (upd:) an even better link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974361
Edit: their very last entry was on GDPR: https://wayback.archive-it.org/11980/20200131184218/https://...
Seems to me that the illegal part would be the cartel of the 3 apps that cornered the whole market.
An app that doesn’t do this could eat their lunch.
Nurses work at hospitals, the supply of which is constrained artificially by the state, so once you sell all of the ones in a region on your app, you have a monopoly. It is a type of regulatory capture.
The lowballing should be counteracted by competition. There isn’t any competition because the number of hospitals is artificially constrained by the state and a cartel can go to all of them in a region (usually a single digit number) and capture all of them, cornering the market for purchasing labor in that field.
The problem is not that the bidders have the information. The problem is that there is effectively only one bidder: the cartel.
An app that doesn’t do this (and thus pays more) would quickly have access to the entire labor pool by offering higher wages. It doesn’t exist because of illegal activity. That’s not caused by the cartel having access to, or using, information.
You are addressing the symptoms of the cartel, not the root cause.
However, I am curious to know how you think we can avoid the problem of cartels.
Plus I think your diagnosis is simplistic.
...Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist?
If you were in a communist country you are definitely worried about the power asymmetry, and rushing to go to West Germany or just out of the USSR, or to the USA from Cuba or out of pre-capitalist China if you could.
Worker rights only exist in free societies.
[1] https://pluralistic.net
[2] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
Because the employer has power and the employee doesn’t.
Of course they should, but they have much more influence on the law so they don’t.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353
https://social.kernel.org/notice/AqJkUigsjad3gQc664
This is the root cause, and as it looks, there is no cure.
The cure is to make so much new engineering talent that this is simply impossible
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it.
Is anywhere in EU reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, and modifying any products illegal?
Not that that makes Doctorow's argument any better or make any more sense.
It's amazing that merely learning about how items that we own work (so-called "reverse-engineering") and exercising control over them (jailbreaking - this time the term is apt) has been made illegal. A heinous overreach by corporations into the lives of people that own their products, and a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough, they want to treat as trade secrets products with mass-market availability.
Expanding patents to software, in Europe they replaced the 2005 software patent directive by the Unified Patent Court, which will ignore the exclusion of 'computer programs', like the EPO did, with no way for the question to be escalated to the CJEU:
https://ffii.org/unified-patent-court-has-an-eu-treaty-legal...
Multinational corporations also became part time judges, because rubberstamping software patents is easier when you can also corrupt the judicial system:
https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-k...
The name of a political movement matters. Always has, always will. It's no different for adjacent concepts that describe a phenomenon the movement is organizing against.
Giving something a derogatory name that the yellow press (or rather some Telegram group) can sling around to vent their frustration and fear could be a win in this place. Of course, leadership persons of such groups are usually just demagogues looking out for their personal gain, so it might just as well be another rallying cry leading to really bad policies hitting those that vote in favor the most. But such is the world today ;)
Like shit.
The word spread in common usage about as fast as wildfire because everyone immediately knew what he meant. And the companies are too polite to even be able to say the word! If you can't swear in response to being degraded, pissed on, pissed off, used and thrown away, then you're the kind of sheep they want that they can abuse more and more and more and more and more and more and more without ever facing any consequence.
God forbid that rudeness is involved in collecting the power to stand up to it
Is Australia not big enough to count?
Plenty of terms are used in senate hearing transcripts. Hearings are a completely different thing from actual laws being passed.
As I said, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the government operates.
Is that the argument? I understood your argument to mean that the term "enshittification" is holding back the movement because nobody will use it. As others are saying, I don't think there's any issue people take with some drop-in term being used if actual laws are passed discussing the topic.
Plenty of movements involving vulgar language, however, did result in laws being passed - "Fuck the Draft" comes to mind, the attitude surrounding which led to the draft ending (after all, why else would it end?), but also was a central fixture in a supreme court ruling that furthered defined 1st amendment rights in the USA.
So again, I just don't understand how one intellectual describing one aspect of the digital rights movement could negatively impact the movement as a whole, which I interpret as your argument.
There is a phenomenon that is very clearly happening. Doctorow and others use a vulgar term to describe this phenomenon.
Because this vulgar term is used, it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon.
As an analogy: imagine if the concepts of inequality or social injustice were primarily described by a vulgar term. Instead of discussing, "democratic backsliding" or "failure of democracy" we said "democracy shit the bed." This would limit the range of the critique, which if one is interested in actually solving the issue, is an immensely impractical move.
Financial Times: The enshittification of apps is real. But is it bad? https://www.ft.com/content/acaf3fb1-d971-48ad-8efb-c82787cdd...
Not in the title, but Warzel uses the term in his Atlantic article, "Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/strea...
ABC Radio National interviewed Professor Inger Mewburn, Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University, and titled the interview "'Enshittification' and social media for academics" https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/saturdayextra/enshitt...
Bonus: The Italians are using the term. "Anche TikTok sta andando in malora (il fenomeno dell'enshitting)" https://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/blog/stazione-futuro/20...
So I guess I'm just not seeing how this is limiting anyone's abilities in any way.
> it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon.
Now, to be fair, I don't think the word is going to sink the whole attempt. But I think it's just juvenile and unhelpful. Why pick a word that is deliberately impractical, and then critique anyone that says, "I agree with your ideas, but maybe pick a more political-friendly name, so it's easier to do something about it?"
But Cory's a polemicist. He'd absolutely prefer the memorable word he coined himself to the acceptable, drab one that already exists.
(Plus value engineering is only one way to enshittify a product. There's also subscription models, selling data, jamming ads in everywhere... the advantage of Cory's word is that it captures everything).
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. [...]
> platforms squeezing market participants on both sides.
Wasn't that chokepoint capitalism? [1] (i.e. controlling supply and demand IIRC)
From Cory Doctorow's original article [2], one might say that enshittification is the degradation of a platform that transforms it from being customer-centric to prioritizing profit extraction at the expense of user experience. I think that the definition has expanded to include other things non-platform, but I feel that that isn't too far a stretch. Nowadays, I might say that enshittification is just unchecked capitalism doing its thing (and we need to be protected from exploiting us).
But I do concede that Cory was indeed exploring some ideas on his original post [2] that may have made it to his book (and thus, are related to your definition):
> Amazon's monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[1]: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
[2]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittificaiton/#relentl...
Eh. Either they weren't going to do so anyway, because doing so goes against the money, or they can come up with a more public-friendly term.
Enshittification sounds like an immature bad joke.
If you want laws to be passed, you need senators and judges and legal scholars to engage with your ideas. None of those people are going to take the idea of “enshittification” seriously with a name like that, nor are they going to put their name on a bill referencing it. There are plenty of examples of citizen activism that lead to a bill, and these bills often are name directly after the activist/movement name.
I’ll say it again: if you want political change, accept that you need to care about the names of concepts.
This is a non issue
The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name.
Government itself has been enshittified, clearly and comprehensively.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/
"just use one of the dozens of words that failed to gain public attention over the past 25 years".
I'm also not super interested in his rant about people criticizing his approach are just "pearl clutchers."
Other people have written more comments in this thread explaining a different opinion. It doesn't really matter how many times you've explained yours. For what it's worth, I think an ancestor comment to this one poignantly addresses a particular perspective:
> The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name.
It might help to tailor your arguments to this perspective as I suspect it is the most common one. I also get the feeling that's how Doctorow figures it's "pearl clutching": it's less about the "bad word" and more about the "profits".
It's not about communication, since for communication sake it's much more easily understood by a larger cohort of people if colloquial terms are used, it's simply the need for seriously-sounding jargon to be taken seriously, which is just a play in appearances.
If you want political change you need political action, the name of concepts is just one avenue for that.
Yes, and that class of people are the ones actually making the laws. The ones that could solve the problems discussed in the article (like nursing apps) legally.
Which is, I assume, actually the point.
Seriously, can you back up this claim?
Then also notice the total lack of major legislation with vulgar, offensive, or immature words in the name.
It's all political theater and a real political will to end enshittification will end it. That is what's missing, not a positive-sounding name.
It’s not because some underlying physical law.
decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc. all sound like the poor companies couldn’t do anything about it
Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot of his writing, and the site he used to run (boingboing) serve the market of people for whom disgusting things are entertaining or funny, so I think he has a blind spot here.
...as evidenced by the responses to my comment – the sheer hostility to the idea that maybe it's not a great idea to use the word shit in an activist project that aims at political change.
And so you're really not going to get any real change here, because it's easier to complain online and do nothing, while simultaneously shouting away anyone that suggests some minor changes would be more productive. The exact same conversation happens in the open source / free source movement.
Then again, look how the term has taken off, perhaps it's we who are the shit-marketers.