Written by Brook Schaaf

In the year before the year before last (2023), ensh*ttification was the American Dialect Society’s word of the year, surely a feather in the cap for Cory Doctorow, the activist who coined the term. His 2025 book by the same title, sans asterisk, diagnoses a dismal, recognized malady of the internet economy:

1. First platforms are good to their users.

2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.

3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. 

4. Finally, they become a giant pile of sh*t. 

As you’ve probably guessed, he is not shy about cursing. Indeed, it seems intrinsic to his style, and the dirty word’s catch-and-grab shock quality well represents both the power and futility of his case and cause.  

The four sections of the book investigate this affliction upon the body politic: the disease, the pathology, the epidemiology, and the cure. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Uber, and Amazon are famous software and hardware examples that use network effects, switching costs, IP laws, regulatory capture, and dubious legal mechanisms to lock in and abuse unpaid and paid users alike.

Whether their reaction is on the shrug-that’s-how-the-world-works or burn-it-all-down side of things, I think the average reader would agree with many, if not most, of his criticisms. Where he loses me is in his prescribed cure. 

Doctorow, an experienced political operator, writes with no apparent self-awareness or irony that “It’s hard to overstate how important coalitions are to political struggle.” So far, so good, except the same man goes out of his way to describe the late hotelier Leona Helmsley as “guillotineable.” (Yes, it’s a real word.) He is harsh toward both Trump and the titans of tech who supported his second inauguration without entirely considering, vis-à-vis his own advice, why they’d support him. Because it suited their political interests, as it did Trump’s. One might say they reordered their political coalition to take advantage of changed circumstances.

There is a lesson here for humble affiliate marketers. If we hope to see any kind of big changes, as we do, we need to seek out as many political allies as possible, especially among the powerful. Years ago, we had this in Amazon, which basically funded the early PMA, which in turn fought the destructive, wrong, and ineffective nexus laws, prior to Quill having been overturned. Our part of the coalition represented small businesses against tax authorities and, later, big box competitors of Amazon. It was, unfortunately, a losing battle of attribution, but the times we won made the fight worthwhile.

We now face a bigger challenge in the Zero Click, content extraction era. Lawsuits like Penske’s will help now, as then, but we also have to be ready with legislative suggestions, if not solutions, which we’re not. And, of course, to form a coalition within the open web and on platforms—here we should have no shortage of partners. For example, in the U.K., a group of media companies, including the Financial Times, the BBC, and The Guardian, announced SPUR—the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights. On Instagram, there has been pushback against its “Shop the Look” feature, which repurposes creator content without permission or compensation.

Even if Doctorow is correct in saying, “The ensh*tternet is a source of pain, precarity, and immiseration for the people we love,” it doesn’t follow that he or anyone else can improve matters by lobbing grenades at could-be political allies. 

Maybe he feels he doesn’t need the help. At the end of the book, he claims there is a societal groundswell of support for change and “muscular action underway.” But I just don’t see it, neither here nor in Europe, which doesn’t seem to mind big companies it can tax and control. Observe that no competitors to any of his named offenders have really emerged there (or here). 

I don’t know that the disease in Doctorow’s own mind can be cured, but the rest of us can certainly avoid catching the same sickness.

The post Doctorow Plays Doctor appeared first on FMTC.