When was the last time you were genuinely surprised and delighted by a brand, product or service? The chances are that it occurred in a market where there are no or low costs to switching suppliers and where employees are empowered to move beyond standard processes. Big tech tends to discourage both these concepts and Cory Doctorow’s book, Enshittification: why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it, sets out how and why large tech monopolists or would-be monopolists would set their strategies to degrade their customers’ experiences.

Doctorow’s thesis is that tech platforms attract users by providing an excellent experience that provides people with good content and features that support great engagement. Once the user has developed an affinity to the service, value is transferred from the user to the platform’s business partners. When both are locked in, the service is degraded and value is harvested by the platform’s owners. Doctorow illustrates how this framework applies to software and hardware providers alike, providing case studies for Facebook, Amazon, Apple (through its iPhone) and Twitter. You’ll not be surprised to learn that none of these come out well, but nor do the other many other companies whose sharp or just icky practice are mentioned. This is a book with very few heroes.

A lot of the talk about this book gets sidetracked by its slightly edgy name. Perhaps in English-speaking countries it has managed to gain some extra visibility by appealing to everyone’s inner six-year-old, but part of the reason that I bought the book was that I happened to be in Vienna in December and bookshops were promoting the title in German and French as well as English. The argument doesn’t need the title to gain traction.

That said, you should approach this book expecting a polemic, albeit a very good one. It’s quite easy to think of arguments in favour of much of Apple’s business model and still come away feeling remarkably less warm towards Apple.

Adobe seems to have done a particularly fine job in alienating its user base. This was a company that revolutionised design and publishing. Photoshop and, later, InDesign, were must-haves. But while Adobe now requires publishing professionals to rent (rather than buy) their software, many of those professionals have suspected Adobe of wanting to scrape their created content to provide an AI tool which will undercut those professionals’ livelihoods.

Many of Doctorow’s findings will ring true. For me, there was a useful bit of dot-joining, of concepts I had thought of, vaguely,  but hadn’t drawn together. First, the way that certain companies treat workers they are not afraid of. Platforms have a bad reputation for the way in which they treat delivery workers, but, until relatively recently, software engineers have had to be treated well. As AI begins to supplant coders, we are already seeing that dynamic change. Second, smart devices that charge you to access the data that you have generated. Third, renting rather than purchasing software or services which changes the dynamic between consumer and provider, in favour of the latter. Fourth, the implications of market consolidation on regulation and consumers’ rights.

Doctorow concludes that (partly because of attempts by the Biden administration’s FTC) there is the potential for optimism. The UK CMA, despite its chair being dismissed for, it is suggested, being insufficiently friendly to big business, and replaced by the former head of Amazon UK, has recently stood up for news organisations against AI scrapers, and the supposedly too-close business secretary Peter Kyle has been replaced. But I think I will need to revisit this section in a few months’ time, as new technology continues to alter the balance of power between big tech and mere data points such as you and me.