Recently I started reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. A former colleague recommended it to me a while ago and told me it had blown her mind when she was younger. Long story short, I did not enjoy it. In its defence, it was written in 2008, the world and technology were different back then and I have since spent a decade working on the surveillance issues, a core topic of the book, so maybe I’m just not the right audience.
I did, however, enjoy the intro. In it, Doctorow talks about the writing process, and explains his choice of copyright (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) which is the reason the link above redirects to the full book, hosted on his own site. Along with this, he explains that each chapter is dedicated to a bookstore he loves, simply as a way to remind people to buy books to support authors if they can.
Now in the version I read, chapter two starts with this text:
“This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet bookseller in the world. Amazon is amazing — a “store” where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they’ve elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly invented new and better ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold — the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! — and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy something from Amazon approximately every six days). Amazon’s in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first century and I can’t think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.
Amazon” Little Brother, Cory Doctorow, 2008
(Note: this text was replaced at some point and is not visible in the latest version linked above)
Cory Doctorow is mostly known these days because he coined the term enshitifcation. Enshitification describes how the quality of online services degrades over time because customers are locked in and don’t have any other option. They are stuck using services that continuously become worse and worse while the platforms extract as much revenue as possible, at their expense. The term resonated so strongly that it made its way into numerous dictionaries and has become a common word to describe the impact of updates rolled out by major platforms and services (think Copilot for example).
My good friends at the Forbrukarrådet (the Norwegian Consumer Council) even turned the idea into an amazing video:
Amazon is a prime example of enshitifcation. It started as a good product, and a good idea. It made books available to people that couldn’t previously access them. It provided a platform for merchants to sell their products without having to setup a website, payment system, delivery and so on. But over time it turned into an unavoidable giant that abuses its dominance for its own own profit. Refuse to be on Amazon and you might be invisible because people won’t find your products. Accept to use it and you might see those very products counterfeited by Amazon themselves, despite being already paying whatever the company decides its fees are today. You might even be forced to lower your prices so that the company can continue to offer the best possible deal.
Seeing Cory Doctorow endorse Amazon in the 2008 version of this book didn’t change the admiration I have for him and his work. It just reminded me of how fast things can change and how quickly we can be betrayed by the companies, infrastructure and the systems we use.
I was a big advocate for Google products in 2008. Gmail was free, cutting edge and worked amazingly. Google Reader was an simple and efficient way to follow the RSS feeds of my favourite blogs. I even joined Google Circle when it launched and used it for a full year as an alternative to Facebook because it was already a walking privacy nightmare. I bought into the “Don’t be evil” motto and de-googling my life a few years later took time and efforts (but was certainly helped by Google killing all its best services one by one).
Remembering and acknowledging the endorsements and behaviours of the past can guide our efforts to invent, or reinvent, the future of tech looks like. Tara Tarakiyee recently blogged about the need for feminist and decolonial tradition in critiquing and addressing technology’s failures. I argued that digital sovereignty requires more than just European tech. Those are pieces of the puzzle we need to assemble to build technology that serves us rather than exploit us. Understanding where we went wrong in supporting systems and entities that now oppress users is part of this picture, it ensures we don’t repeat the same mistakes and build the same exploitative tools, only with a different paint job.
Reflecting on the time I was advocating for Google, one thing I was lacking was a clear understanding of its business model. The monetisation of users’ data as the fuel that made the company profitable escaped me for a long time, and when I started reading EFF blogs and get involved in the digital rights movement, Google was already a monopoly. Nonetheless, remembering how it felt to support and embrace these products and companies serves as a lesson. Now whenever I see something new pops up, I always have questions: Who is building this? What happens if they suddenly change their mind and start being evil? Is the code public? What is the business model?
Those are hard questions to answer for those who build technology as well. But the last decade of tech scandals has shown that we must work collectively to find answers and propose solutions that won’t turn into another tool of exploitation. There are already many of those out there, building on principles that ensure a degree of control over technology that would prevent a single entity from enshitifying it for profit. Decentralised, interoperable and open-source software are important ones in my view, as they prevent exactly this: allowing users to move around, take control over the tools they use and exercise their rights.