Rating: 4 Stars

In a nutshell:
Journalist Doctorow explores how technology is getting worse and offers ideas for what can be done to reverse the trend.

Best for:
Anyone is real tired of shit like having to subscribe to be able to print something from a printer they own.

Quote that made me think:
“Companies abuse you if they can get away with it. That’s the crux of enshitification”

“A world without regulation is a catastrophe.”

Why I chose it:
It’s been catching my eye every time I’m in a bookstore but it’s hard back still, so I decided to read the audio version.

Review:
I don’t even know where to start. Doctorow is a great writer, but the main reason this is a four star rating is because I’m still not sure about the ‘and what to do about it’ part of the subtitle of the book. He does a fantastic job of describing all the ways and reasons for the failures of corporations and technology, but the solutions as usual seem to lie in having better people making laws and regulations, and having the workers organize.

The book talks about companies you’d expect – Google, Apple, Meta, uber – and how much they really do suck. For him, enshitification has three steps:
– A company starts out optimizing for its customers. This is the cool part, when companies actually care about the people they are building the product for.
– As a company gets success, they start to optimize for the business, at the expense of the users / customers.
– Finally, the company chooses to optimize for shareholders at the expense of everyone.

And the bigger the companies get, the worse it is. As opposed to ‘too big to fail,’ Doctorow says these companies get ‘too big to care.’ We have effective monopolies on certain things – especially in the social media sphere because the original product helped people connect to others, and they don’t want to lose the ability to stay connected. I meant that’s why I returned to Instagram after a year break – I was bummed that I was missing out on seeing what was going on in the lives of my friends who live overseas. And there isn’t an alternative that they all use.

This review can’t go into all the interesting things I learned (and hopefully I correctly understood), but here are a couple of times I didn’t know but made me feel gross:
– Amazon requires those who sell on their site to sell it at the same price elsewhere. And Amazon shipping costs companies a ton, so sales on Amazon not only suck for the company but also suck for all of us because even if we don’t buy it on Amazon, Amazon influences it.
– App stores take a 30% cut of everything sold through apps. THIRTY PERCENT. Now I understand why I have to buy books on the Libro FM website and can’t buy any through the app — it’s to save that 30%. Gross.

There’s also a huge part of the book focused on right to repair and digital rights that is also infuriating. The anecdote about a ‘carve out’ to allow blind people the ability to convert digital books to be used with adaptive technology is especially farcical.

My biggest take-away isn’t necessary that capitalism is the cause of all this (though, I mean, it’s a big part of the problem), but that our governments are completely failing on this front. There needs to be much stronger regulation as well as much more freedom for the consumers. Which is hard to focus on right now for lots of us since many are fighting for other rights (like the right to not be shot or disappeared by ICE agents, or the right to not be forced to give birth, or the right to have safe workplaces).

There is a lot in this book, and the audio version is read by the author, which I don’t usually see in these types of books, so that was fun. His tone and delivery were needed given the gravity of the topic.

Would I recommend it to its target audience:
Absolutely.

Two Stars

In a nutshell:
A pandemic has hit, and London is in full total lockdown (like, checkpoints and military shooting people who aren’t supposed to be there lockdown). While building a temporary hospital, contractors discover bones that were not there the day before.

Best for:
I’m not sure.

Quote that made me think:
N/A

Why I chose it:
I’ve been mostly enjoying this author this year and this one was available from the library.

Review:
Wooof. So this book had so much potential, but I struggled to finish it. It starts with a note from the author, where he shares that he wrote this book years before the COVID pandemic but no one was interested in it. Then, when the pandemic hit, he tried again and it was published. And I sort of get why publishers would be interested in a book set in a pandemic that doesn’t seem to be exactly ABOUT the pandemic, but this wasn’t great.

The main character is a detective who is about to leave the force. Like, in two days. I can’t even recall his name, but he is estranged from his wife and just done with the job. But he is called to a scene where bones of what turns out to be a young child have been dropped. The story itself goes on with some different point of view chapters, including from someone involved in the murder, and one of the forensic investigators.

The issues I had were with the language choices and character choices the author makes. The child in question turns out to be a young Chinese girl with a facial difference (cleft palate). I genuinely don’t understand why the author felt the need for that to be a defining characteristic, and why he repeatedly had characters talk about how ‘ugly’ the girl must have been. The fuck? What purpose does that serve? Even if they wanted the character to have a standout feature, why make it a facial difference that they would all then hammer home? It’s just weird.

And then there was the forensic officer who uses a wheelchair, and all sorts of language choices and descriptors that I would maybe expect to find in a book written in the 70s, not one published in the 2020s. Their inability to walk does play into the plot of the book at least, but the way the character is treated left me feeling icky.

The background discussion of the pandemic was interesting, especially the distribution of flu treatment, the dire situation in hospitals, and the very serious lockdown rules. IT was much more drastic than the COVID rules, showing how different things might have been with an even deadlier virus. But the rest of the book was not for me.

Would I recommend it to its target audience:
No, because I think it is a bit insulting to the reader.