About

In Alpha. LLMs generated the initial draft but checked by a human.

Enshit gives each entry a stage from 1 to 4 and a short note. The word comes from Cory Doctorow’s writing; see Wikipedia on enshittification for a plain overview (with the usual English spelling). The pattern: products start useful, then lean on lock-in and rent-seeking until the experience gets worse for the people using them.

Stages are subjective. They’re based on public signals—pricing, ads, product changes, policy—not inside information. Treat them as opinion, not fact or investment advice.

Reading list

• Cory Doctorow, “TikTok’s Enshittification” (Wired, 2023)—the platform case study that popularised the term.
• Cory Doctorow, “TikTok’s enshittification” (Pluralistic, 2023)—same day as the Wired piece, with more links.
• Enshittification (Wikipedia)—short summary and further reading.
• Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009)—the argument that late capitalism feels inevitable, and what that does to politics and culture.
• David Graeber, “Bullshit jobs” (2013 essay, later a book)—why so much paid work looks useless even to the people doing it.
• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)—how behavioural data and prediction markets became a business model.
• Naomi Klein, No Logo (1999)—brands, anti-corporate politics, and the culture of globalised consumer capitalism.
• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)—a standard account of how neoliberal policy reshaped states and markets from the 1970s onward.

Colophon

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