Book reviews: ‘Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What We Can Do About It’ and ‘It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin’

‘Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What We Can Do About It’ by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow “certainly knows how to make an idea memorable,” said Henry Mance in the Financial Times. While not everyone will appreciate his new book’s scatological title, the prolific author, blogger, and internet activist deserves thanks for bloodying the world’s biggest tech companies by succinctly diagnosing how they’re ruining users’ lives. “You could not ask for a clearer, more ambitious, or better-written business book than this one,” all of it expanding on a theory Doctorow put forward three years ago describing a three-step process of “enshittification.” In his view, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others have become giants by first earning users’ trust. But in stage two, they abuse their users to benefit advertisers or other business customers, and in stage three, they abuse their business partners—because their dominance allows them to.

“This may sound merely like capitalism at work,” said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. “Doctorow thinks it’s closer to feudalism,” and it’s easy to see why. Where capitalists make things, today’s tech companies act like medieval rentiers, using land they control to extract wealth from and immiserate those who need the land. Google made its search results worse so that users would search again and see more ads. Tesla charges buyers monthly subscription fees for services they’ve already paid for. Amazon manufactures cheap imitations of the products shoppers truly want and makes the original products harder to find on its website. Doctorow builds these and other offenses into “a masterly polemic, its scope so sweeping that it does, finally, seem to explain every pungent odor wafting from Silicon Valley,” including the Foxconn sweatshops in China that are adorned with anti-suicide nets. Surprisingly, Doctorow believes such companies can one day be tamed by fed-up customers. “I hope he’s right.”

Though the book “covers a lot,” it “leaves the reader craving a grander application of his concept to other aspects of culture and society,” said Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. Doctorow, for example, stops short of expanding his scope to national politics. And as brilliant as his analysis is, said Paul Krugman in his Substack newsletter, Doctorow neglects to mention how enshittification has “messed with the heads” of the people running the big tech companies. “They were loved when the public imagined, falsely, that they were the good guys. Now they aren’t. And it drives them crazy.” That’s bad for all of us. “The increasingly antidemocratic rage of tech bros is, I’d argue, in part driven by their awareness that people don’t love and admire them the way they used to.” That leaves the rest of us at their mercy both as consumers and citizens.

‘It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin’ by Marisa Meltzer

Jane Birkin had a certain je ne sais quoi—“to her misfortune as much as to her advantage,” said Anahid Nersessian in The New Yorker. As the title of this new biography suggests, the British-born actress and pop singer had “it”: “an undefinable, unmistakable glamour that shifts our collective sense of what’s cool.” But “being famous for your ineffable qualities is perilously close to being famous for no reason,” and Birkin (1946–2023) struggled, unjustly, to achieve a sense of self-worth. As her diaries prove, she was “a wonderful writer.” She also achieved greatness in music and film. To fully understand her, though, you have to have appreciated who Birkin was from about age 40 on, and author Marisa Meltzer is “not quite sure how to handle this phase of Birkin’s life.”

“But for a chance encounter,” said Roxanne Roberts in The Washington Post, Birkin’s name would probably be little remembered. Prior to 1984, when Hermès released a handbag that Birkin had sketched for the brand’s CEO when the two met on a Paris-to-London flight, Birkin’s run as an icon was fading. Born into wealth, she first won stardom in the swinging ’60s by way of a naked romp in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and by age 22 had moved to France, paired up with singer Serge Gainsbourg, and scored a major hit with a breathy duet that sounded like the couple making love. Gainsbourg turned out to be just the second of three famous lovers who disappointed her, and in Meltzer’s portrait, Birkin comes across a person who “bounced through adulthood and parenthood without much of a plan, protected by fame and enough money to wing it.”

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Still, the camera loved Birkin, and Meltzer does “a stalwart job” of detailing what it saw and how the star grew into her fame, said Joan Juliet Buck in Air Mail. The Hermès bag named for her now sells new for $12,000 and up, and that wouldn’t have happened if Birkin’s own taste hadn’t already made her a street-style paragon. “The absurd arc of her public destiny reflects our unstoppable drift from culture to commerce”: The bag is now more famous than she is. In reality, she was fun, curious, and kind, “one of the generous people who give more than they get.”