A complicated and unsatisfying solution

I have recently finished reading Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification, and I expect my old Edutech friends were nodding along as I was. We were there for it, man: dial-up modems, Netscape, uploading teeny tiny pictures to decorate web pages written in HTML, discussing it all in IRC chat.

The web was a wilderness, but despite its origins most of us on it were good actors. Global communication, peaceful coexistence, publication for people who could not be heard before. Web pages, blog rings, then Web 2.0 and interactivity. I was there for it, I did it, I taught with it. Then with the rise of Learning Management Systems, I saw that the frontier, the Wild West of the open web, was closing. I rang the death knell in 2018 here on this blog. (Before this, in 2010, I had not believed that it was true. That was when net neutrality was still a thing.)

From wonderful to kinda whatever

Doctorow focuses on platforms, such as Google and the Metaverse, and on providers that became platforms, like Amazon. The process he explains is simple. At first, a start-up is disruptive, innovative, trying to solve a problem that makes people unhappy. It creates something, a product or platform, and people join. Think MySpace, then Facebook. Its engineers work tirelessly, often without much sleep and crappy pay, to make the product better, make people happier. Google’s original tag line was “don’t be evil” (a corporate motto they abandoned in the same year I said the web had closed).

Once it gets really big, the company’s obligation shifts. Instead of making things better for the customer, it begins to make things better for itself. Having hired the best of the best, listened to their engineers, made the product really, really good, they now have huge market share. The competition has been eaten, absorbed, killed, or purchased. There is no reason to improve the product except to keep the good techies on board. (With AI, they won’t even need to do that.)

The consumer, originally empowered by choosing to stay or go elsewhere, now has only the illusion of choice. All your friends are in Facebook, making it difficult to leave, and you’d also be leaving all the cool posts you wrote. All your email is Gmail (sure, you can export it — got a program that reads .eml?). The drugstore down the street doesn’t have what you need anymore, so you order from Amazon.

The pandemic cemented the reliance on “walled gardens”, platforms that were easy to use and difficult to avoid. Alternatives are very expensive, and all the big guys can offer you the product for cheap or “free” (you and your data are the payment).

This is where, according to Doctorow, enshittification begins.

A deliberate decrease in quality

I had noticed it happening, but I didn’t have a name for it. Old 19th century models of monopoly were cemented in my brain.

But I felt the squeeze. (And I had seen it before, when the Learning Management System Canvas got the monopoly on California colleges and got worse and worse, less responsive to its users and more ass-kissing to its shareholders.)

These days, I search Amazon for something I know exists (tree wrap, magnesium citrate, wide-calf compression socks) and the top results are brands I’ve never heard of, with higher instead of lower prices. I try to sort by price and it won’t do it, throwing inferior and higher-priced items to the top. I search Google and, just within the last year, the search results are crap, from dubious websites I’ve never heard of, and I have to load many pages before getting to a source I can trust.

I’ve learned this is all intentional. It’s not the result of the pandemic, market forces, changes in taste, or tariffs. If Google gives you crap results and you only have Google, you go to page 2. Then 3. Then 4, searching. Each page serves you fresh ads. Google wants you to keep looking. It now really is a search engine, not a find engine. (Doctorow claims that Google engineers don’t use the consumer version at all, but rather the old, good Google available only to them. He now pays to use Kagi.)

Author beware

As a self-published author, I experience it, especially within the last year. Ingram now completely dominates the book printing market for indies in the US. Everyone else is gone or niche. I submitted my current book to get a proof on January 29. I still do not have a copy now in March, although it costs four times as much to print and ship it as it did four years ago. Yes, there are other printers for my own copies, but Ingram is the only one that supplies bookstores, shops, retail outlets with paperbacks and hardcovers. No Ingram, no books in stores. The product itelf, which used to be vastly superior to others even though they all used Ingram too, is of lower quality.

The book market has been saturated by self-published authors since the pandemic, when everyone decided they had a book in them (in many cases, it should have stayed there). We have to do our own publicity. We turn to social media to get known, but again, just within the last year, even our followers don’t see our posts. If I don’t buy expensive ads, my ordinary posts don’t get seen. If I do, they mostly don’t get seen either.

It’s not just that there are too many products. We sign up to follow people so we can see what they post, but instead we get a bunch of stuff Facebook or Instagram or TikTok thinks might encourage us to buy something. Your aunt’s post with the family pics? You’re gonna miss it. But since on another computer you were looking for shoes, or Alexa heard you say “shoes”, your feed is full of shoe ads and podiatrist influencers.

My efforts to get seen vs …

This year I decided to go back to writing a newsletter for subscribers, of which I have several hundred, which in the social media world is bupkis but every one of them is important to me. Other writer friends have gone over to Substack, the newest walled garden where few enough authors are there that it can make writers money. Eventually it will grow and grow and be enshittified, too, but for now (even according to Doctorow), it is the game.

I’m gonna be very contrary about this. I always have been, cranky about anything imposing on my use of the open web. This year I had given up my mail list to return to my blog, having people subscribe to posts. They didn’t, and RSS never became user-friendly so my readership remains a select and wonderful group. But this wonderful group told me they weren’t getting the images in the posts, the videos were blank squares, the links didn’t work. I’d been using Jetpack inside my WordPress installation, so I looked it up and sure enough, they don’t do videos in emails.

So I tried to go back to Mailerlite, where I had been forced to copy my newsletter blog posts before and spent hours cleaning it up because they didn’t like straight-up HTML. Well, in the last year, they don’t like a lot of things. My newsletters now would have to be composed using blocks, one block for each type of content (text, video, image, logo, all in a vertical line). Over 50% fewer choices for formatting than I had before. I would learn it, and then be stuck there, and they’ve already enshittified it just in the time I’ve been gone.

A current plan

My solution? All the choices are bad. If I join Substack for newsletter or blogging, I’ll have to abide by their formatting and spend most of my time in their walls. If I use Jetpack, my subscribers won’t get my images and video. If I return to Mailerlite, I’m stuck in their system and they force me to upload all my media onto their servers.

So today I took a time machine back to 2004, cleaned up my blog, created announcement emails in MailerLite with just a link and a button I’ll link to my Newsletter blog post for the month. Yes, when subscribers want to read my newletter, they’ll actually have to click in the email, once a month.

Why? Because I want to invite subscribers to my home on the web, not a fast-food joint run by someone else where the coffee costs $15. I may be the last of the “will work for pizza” generation, but that’s what I’m doing, at least for now.

 

 

All text copyright Lisa M. Lane 2026 and is not to be used without permission.