Enshittification
By Cory Doctorow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Have you noticed that our digital lives have gotten progressively worse? Noted futurist and tech writer Cory Doctorow has. So he went to work, and found patterns in how the technologies we use every day from companies like Apple, Google, Meta, and others, started out with a promise to make our lives better, easier, and more open. But the deeper we’ve gone, the more data they’ve taken from us and used not to help society but to get richer. The costs have been democracy, increases in mental health issues and addiction, and in the worst cases loss of life. So how do we take back control of our digital lives? Doctorow thinks he may have the answers. I’m still working my way through this, so I don’t know yet, either.