Mitch's Blog

Cisco: ‘Infrastructure debt’ drags down AI deployments. My latest on Fierce Network.

‘Ice batteries’ could heat up data center cooling. Cooling is a bottleneck for next-gen data centers. Nostromo Energy says ice — literal frozen water — can be part of the solution. My latest on Fierce Network.

On a whim, I bought a Godzilla T-shirt from Facebook and now Facebook thinks I want to replace my entire wardrobe with Godzilla- and Kaiju-themed apparel.

Maybe I do.

“Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What We Can Do About It,” is a playful book about a very serious topic. In a breezy 352 pages, author Cory Doctorow looks at how monopolization concentrates power in the hands of the few, erodes the middle class and makes the live of poor people more miserable and precarious.

“Enshittification” is a word coined by Doctorow in late 2022 to describe how tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Amazon captured monopolies.

Step one of enshittification is making things great for users. Remember how wonderful it was to connect with friends and family when you first got on Facebook? How miraculous Google search seemed the first time you used it? How amazing it was to find just the product you were looking for when you first used Amazon, and have that product delivered quickly and conveniently?

Step two is when platforms start degrading the experience for users to benefit business customers. Facebook shoves more and more ads and clickbait into its algorithmic feed. Google piles on the ads and makes its search steadily worse so you you have to dig deeper for what you’re looking for, and look at more ads as you do. Amazon deemphasizes the products you want and instead shows you search results for merchants who have paid to play.

The third and final stage of enshittification is when platforms make everybody miserable — both users and business customers — to benefit themselves and shareholders. Even many of the people who’d prefer to never use Facebook stay on because their kids' schools or medical support groups are there. Advertisers on Facebook and Google get steadily worsening returns on their investments but stay on because that’s where their customers are. Similar, both users and merchants are dissatisfied with Amazon, but neither group leaves because they’re stuck with each other.

I should pause here for a disclaimer: Cory and I are friends and I’ve been a fan of his writing and work since even before he even turned pro — since he was a precocious teen-ager and he and I both used the same online communities around 1990. But if you don’t believe me about how good “Enshittification” is, you can find plenty of other positive reviews online.

How it happened and why it matters

Over the course of the book, Cory documents how big platforms resort to fraud and regulatory capture to maintain their monopolies. He describes how enshittification is not just inconvenient — it erodes the incomes and working conditions of working people. And it’s not limited to the Internet. Amazon warehouse workers toil in sweltering temperatures and suffer high rates of injury, while delivery drivers pee in bottles because their brutal delivery schedules don’t give them time for bathroom breaks. Uber algorithms keep driver pay low. Nurses are forced to bid on work, competing with each other to drive their wages ever lower and lower, while the software that manages the bidding also monitors nurses' credit scores, to take advantage of nurses who are desperate because they have high debt.

Monopoly concentration enables fascism. The U.S. realized after World War II that German monopolies enabled the Nazis, and that realization helped drive anti-monopoly regulation that American Presidents beginning with Carter have torn down. The marriage of monopoly with fascism continues as American CEOs kiss Trump’s ring and donate lavishly to fund the White House Epstein ballroom.

About the word “enshittification” — yes it’s vulgar, and even silly. But that makes it more powerful. It’s a little naughty and fun to say, and it ties together social movements that otherwise wouldn’t have anything in common. Those sorts of alliances have historical precedent: Doctorow cites the example of the ecology movement taking off when people who cared about the ozone layer and owls realized they were in the same fight. And anti-enshittification, like ecology, can bring together unlikely allies — the Environmental Protection Agency was founded, not under Kennedy or Johnson or another Democrat, but under Richard Nixon.

The book ends hopefully. Enshittification can be stopped by tearing down the regulatory protections that prop it up. The Biden administration was an enthusiastic anti-enshittifier and the Trump administration has, surprisingly, shown the will to continue doing some of that. Trump is operating from corrupt motives — he will use monopoly regulation to punish his enemies while giving his allies a free pass — but good can flower from this bad seed. And Trump’s alienation of U.S. allies around the world encourages other countries to spin up industries competing with American monopolies, benefiting everyone — including Americans.

Get the book here: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

At a Cabinet meeting today, drunken Fox News host Pete Hegseth bragged about committing war crimes and lavishly praised convicted felon, sexual predator, pedophile and bribe-receiver Donald J. Trump, who rambled incoherently about the Epstein ballroom, bathroom tiles, the 2020 election and Biden.

Manton Reece @manton has some thoughts on Mastodon: Mastodon CEO change, 2026 reset

I’ve noted a drastic decline in activity in my Mastodon timeline. The people I follow just aren’t posting as much as they formerly did. I’ll sit and scroll the Mastodon timeline for a few minutes and discover to my surprise that I’ve scrolled back through 12 hours.

Of the three Twitterlike services, Bluesky and Threads are far more active for me.

On the other hand, I get far more activity on my posts on Mastodon than I do on Bluesky and Threads — more replies, likes and reblogs. I think it’s because at least two very popular Masto users follow me and occasionally boost my posts, which has helped me attract more followers there. I have 1,100 Mastodon followers, compared with 677 on Bluesky and 285 on Threads.

However, I get most of the activity on my posts on Facebook, with Tumblr a solid second place. Masto is third, Bluesky and Threads a distant fourth and fifth and mitchwagner.com gets hardly any activity at all, and I do it because I just like blogging.

I really want Mastodon to succeed. I like the philosophy, and I like that the platform permits posts of any length (if you choose an instance configured that way). I can’t stand being locked into a 300- or 500-character box.

I hope new management breathes new life into Mastodon. As Cory Doctorow points out, the reason that Bluesky and Threads take off isn’t because proprietary platforms are inherently superior to open source — it’s because those two platforms have much more money than Mastodon does.

It frustrates me that Mastodon and Bluesky insist on being separate silos. They need to get it together and become one thing. Arguing over AT protocol vs. ActivityPub is foolish.