What do ads for cat beds, giant teddy bears at county fairs, buttons that grant virality, and the inability of a group of friends to decide where to go for dinner have in common? They're all part of the story of the "enshittification of TikTok." In this barnstormer of an essay (originally published in Pluralistic and syndicated under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license), Cory Doctorow explains why it's too late to save the ultra-popular video app, which has become "just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora." TikTok—like Twitter before it, and Amazon, and, of course, TheFacebook.com—has fallen prey to the cycle of platform death. The broad outlines of each tale of platform demise are the same: "First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves." The details, however, vary—apparently, each platform dies in its own way—and Doctorow takes us through all the ways the internet went from a delightful place of creativity and connection to a collection of lost causes that deserve to be killed by fire. Angela Chen | Senior Editor |
