Revisited: Enshittification, AI, and the Middleman

Show notes We’re revisiting our earlier conversation about Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification—the process by which digital platforms begin by serving users, then shift toward serving business customers, and eventually extract value from everyone involved. When we first recorded this episode, Doctorow’s new book about AI had not yet been published. It is out now: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before It’s Too Late. We’ll be discussing that book in an upcoming episode. In this re-release, Kimberly has added a short new introduction connecting enshittification to an idea from our more recent discussion of Megan Garber’s Screen People: The medium is the middleman. A middleman does not simply pass something along. A middleman selects, packages, ranks, translates, recommends, and takes a cut. With digital platforms, that cut may be financial: advertising revenue, seller fees, subscription fees, or data used to target and price users. With AI systems, it may also be less visible. The cut may be context, uncertainty, minority perspectives, privacy, workers’ bargaining power, or our ability to find and evaluate information without an opaque system deciding what comes first. In the original conversation, Kimberly and Jessica discuss Doctorow’s three-stage account of enshittification and explore how it shows up across everyday platforms and services. In this episode What Cory Doctorow means by “enshittification” Why platforms often begin by serving users well How platforms shift from serving users to serving advertisers, sellers, and other business customers Why people and businesses become locked into platforms even as those platforms get worse Amazon search results, sponsored listings, subscriptions, and shopping friction Facebook, Instagram, Google, feeds, ads, and the disappearance of friends’ posts Uber, algorithmic wage discrimination, and data-based predictions about worker “desperation” Personalized pricing and the possibility of companies charging people based on what they appear willing—or able—to pay Private equity, consolidation, strategic acquisition, and why it is difficult for smaller businesses to compete Competition and regulation as forms of discipline for corporations Interoperability, generic printer ink, app stores, ad blockers, and the right to repair Labor power, worker organizing, and why AI-driven workforce reductions may weaken collective bargaining Why “the medium is the middleman” helps connect platform economics to AI-mediated knowledge Related episode and reading Our discussion of AI, trust, scientific communication, and the “middleman” idea: How Do AI Chatbots Change Truth, Trust, and Scientific Communication? Read the Substack post In that episode and accompanying post, we discuss how AI systems can act as cultural intermediaries: filtering, ranking, summarizing, reframing, and recommending knowledge while making their mediating role difficult to see. Books mentioned Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before It’s Too Late Megan Garber, Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency Note This is a re-release of an earlier conversation with a newly recorded introduction. The main conversation was recorded before the publication of Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Leave us a comment or a suggestion! Support the show Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/