Where this was said
Enshittification and the Digital Spread of Sludge
At 40:15 · chapter starts 39:55
Before introducing the final guest, Dubner zooms out to place healthcare sludge within a broader digital phenomenon. He notes that early internet was relatively sludge-free, but the digital revolution has turbocharged sludge's spread. In 2023, the American Dialect Society named 'enshittification' — a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow — its word of the year. Dubner reads Doctorow's crisp four-stage diagnosis: platforms first serve users well, then abuse users to serve business customers, then abuse business customers to claw back value for themselves, then die. Dubner emails Doctorow, who confirms that automated notification spam overlaps directly with enshittification: concentration of suppliers, absence of regulation, and the speed of digital tools all enable 'new kinds of fuckery not seen in previous eras.' The passage lands as the episode's most quotable cultural critique.
Platforms start by being good to users. Then they abuse users to please business customers. Then they abuse business customers to recapture value for themselves. Then they die. Cory Doctorow's 'enshittification' is the linguistic crystallization of what everyone feels but struggles to articulate about today's internet.
