Fantastic book about why the internet sucks now and how it came to be that way, though a bit repetitive toward the end.
“Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users. Over time, they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers. Ultimately, they degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximise short-term profits for shareholders.” (Wiki)
Google, Amazon, all social media, Apple, Windows… it’s all awful now.
Bonus excerpt:
Take Tim Cook, Apple’s billionaire CEO, who was elevated to replace founder Steve Jobs after he figured out how to move Apple’s manufacturing to Chinese sweatshops without compromising quality. (The answer turned out to be partnering with the electronics giant Foxconn to create factory environments that were so unbearable that the company installed suicide nets to catch workers who had reached the ultimate breaking point.)
Also:
This is why the roads leading to Amazon depots are littered with sealed bottles of human urine. There is no way for drivers to meet quota and keep their jobs if they’re stopping to pee, so, caught between a kidney stone and a hard place, they pee in bottles in the van, tightly screwing on the lids afterward (something you don’t forget to do twice). Amazon doesn’t like the bad press this generates, so it has ordered DSP operators to search returning vans for pee bottles, with punishments for drivers caught with evidence of having indulged the inescapable human need to eliminate their bodies’ waste, forcing the drivers to huck them out the window on the way back to the depot.