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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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Asklemmy
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What you're seeing is called 'enshittification'. In this particular example, in 2019, Prabhakar Raghavan โ the ex-McKinsey, ex-Yahoo MBA who ran ad revenue for Google โ came up with an ingenious solution: just make search worse. If you have to run multiple searches to find what you're looking for, that creates multiple chances to show you an ad. No really. This is real. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Why do people put up with this? You can find out more about enshittification here:
Short explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE
Longer explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZaoWpQ-3Zs
Book: https://craphound.com/shop/
Enshittification is a modern way of saying late stage capitalism. As long as we submit to capital and reject collectivism this will always be the course
Yes, the 'greed is good' neoliberal lunatics have taken over the economics asylum and are privileging capital over labour.
However, Doctorow specifically addresses the question, 'Isn't enshittification just late-stage capitalism'. He talks about specific government policy decisions, made by named individuals, that have ensured that the people making the worst choices will 'succeed' in business at the expense of human rights. He wants us to fight for elected governments not to be pushed around by monopolies and oligarchs, and for a 'new good internet' where adversarial interoperability is allowed to mitigate the worst crimes of the enshittifiers.