If it were a “Black Mirror” episode it would be too on the nose. Renowned tech critic Cory Doctorow’s book “Enshittification” hasn’t even been out for a single day, and Amazon is already peddling AI-generated copycats.
One was even listed days prior to the release of the genuine article, suggesting a well-timed effort to rip sales away from the author on the book’s release.
The slop was first flagged by Doctorow himself, who posted a frustrated screenshot of one of the offending knockoffs on X-formerly-Twitter. “Love that the slop merchants are using my book to (further) enshittify Amazon, and that Amazon’s terrible QA standards is letting ’em do it,” the author fumed.
His screenshot shows a listing for a “self-help” paperback book listed for one dollar less than the kindle version of Doctorow’s. Everything about the knockoff appears to have been hastily copy and pasted from an AI chatbot, with even the title a bloated mess of SEO-buzzwords: “The Key Understanding You Get from Enshittification Workbook — How to Execute Cory Doctorow’s Plan for Reclaiming the Internet, Fighting Platform Decay, and Escaping the Digital Trap for Good.”
The product description isn’t much better, exhibiting further signs of a slapdash ChatGPT job: “The Internet Didn’t Just Get Worse — It Was Engineered to Collapse,” it opens. “You feel it every time you open an app that used to feel magical but now just feels predatory… This isn’t accidental. It’s enshittification — and Cory Doctorow gave it a name because you were never meant to see it.”
The irony here is that this is a perfect example of the idea of Doctorow’s actual book. He even penned an article in the Guardian just days ago, using Amazon as an example of the exact phenomenon he calls “enshittification.”
Also known more formally as “platform decay,” enshittification is a term describing the breakdown of digital platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
Essentially, it’s the process where companies like Google offer high-quality digital services, gaining huge numbers of users who come to depend on the platform. Once a captive audience is established, those companies begin to court businesses partners at the expense of users, inundating them with more ads, weakening technical capabilities, or throttling services for non-paying customers.
Finally, when a platform has captured both users and businesses, the company behind it begins degrading the experience for both groups, in order to extract maximum profit.
What makes platform decay fascinating is the intent behind it. Meta didn’t become the cesspit of AI boomer slop it is today by accident, for example — these are calculated decisions with billions of dollars riding on them.
The same can be said of Amazon. With a $2.4 trillion global empire, there’s no reason Amazon couldn’t clean up its cluttered UI and crack down on all the dropshipped junk and AI counterfeits that now dominate its useless search feeds.
Why don’t they? For that answer, you’ll have to read the book. Just make sure you order the right one.
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