Why the Internet Is Turning to Shit

Summary

About a year ago, I bought a hardcover thesaurus—Roget’s in dictionary form, the Delacorte edition, printed in 1992. It’s huge, it’s heavy, and it smells faintly of mildew, probably because it was sitting on a shelf in a New Orleans used bookshop for years. But it was a necessary investment, because when I Google synonyms for a word, I can no longer trust that the results I get will be accurate or useful. Or, for that matter, when I Google anything. Instead, some weird AI-generated gunk is likely to come up, or a “sponsored” ad, or both. Plenty of people online have noticed this phenomenon. Around the time I hoisted the jolly Roget, a series of viral screenshots showed that when people Googled the question “how many rocks should I eat each day?,” the search engine told them to consume “at least one small rock.” Its AI had apparently scanned a parody article from the Onion and treated it as a real information source. More recently, I’ve noticed that whenever I Google a politician’s name, even if I put a year like “2018” in the search field, I mostly get very recent news stories, and have to dig for the information I actually want. (Try it yourself, folks.) Google is shit now, compared to its former self. But why? just look at this mess. embarrassing. In his forthcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, tech writer and novelist Cory Doctorow offers some answers. It would be an exaggeration to say Doctorow created the concept of “enshittification”; back in 2018, Esquire’s Dan Sinker was writing about Facebook’s “enshittening,” and that same year Naked Capitalism blogger Yves Smith described the “crapification” of modern Boeing planes. But it’s certainly Doctorow who’s done the most to popularize the idea, to the extent that the venerable Merriam-Webster dictionary added “enshittification” to its roster of words this January. As they define it, the term means “the degradation in the quality and experience of online platfor...