The author of the book argues that software, far from eating the world, has taken aim at the other end of the alimentary canal and has delivered enshitification of products.
The book begins by taking you through case study after case study of how the process works. Initially, Facebook was launched as a platform for users. You could see only the posts that people you were connected with published. It was kept clean so that you had the incentive to come back, and since your friends were all on the same platform, it acted as a lock-in as well. Once the user was locked in, Facebook began opening up the news feed and surfacing posts from publishers and advertisers. At this stage, they were making the product better for their business users and making it worse for individual users. Once the business users were locked in and became dependent on the distribution, they started rent seeking and turning the screws on them. Making it harder to surface posts unless the publishers paid top dollars for them.
Case after case, Apple, Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon, the same playbook follows. Make the user very happy, tie them into the platform. Then focus on the business user, drivers in the case of Uber, sellers in the case of Amazon, make them really happy, tie them in and then become a rent seeker.
Before software, it was possible to rent seek and try to extract the most out of your customers, but this was a fraught process. For instance, in a retail store, you could change the price of a product 2 or 3 times in a day, but with digital displays, it is now possible to change it with the click of a mouse. Norway, which has the highest penetration of digital price tags in store shelves, records 2000 price changes per day in stores on average. Technology has made rent seeking and bad behaviour a lot easier.
Paying the Uber partner less or increasing the pricing as soon as it starts raining is very easy. What is worse is that the companies hide behind the garb of the platform and behave as if they have no control over how the price changes. They use the term “dynamic pricing” to escape taking the responsibility for what they are doing.
Google recruited all of its engineers with the promise to be the “do no evil” company. As the company began to saturate the market, it needed new ways to generate more income. The decision was to make search worse! If people had to work their way through more pages, the likelihood of clicking ads increased. The engineer who had spent countless nights building the product refused. The company had to cave to the engineers.
Engineers in Silicon Valley are some of the highest-paid employees in the world. This is not because the companies love them. Look no further than how Amazon treats its delivery workers who must pee in a bottle to meet delivery quotas. They treat their engineers well because there is a supply shortage, or at least there was till AI showed up. The only thing that AI is good at is writing code (So long as it does not have to think about how a human would try to break it).
The rapid and rabid push towards AI is to break the bargaining power that engineers have so that these companies can continue to enshitify their products and create more avenues for seeking rent.
The author endorses a push for more antitrust action against companies that dominate industries and a push to increase competition. He closes by quoting Martin Luther King, who said, “The law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.”