The DIY Deshittification Guide: An Overview

At the end of my post on how to deshittify Facebook, I promised Amazon was next. Then I sat down to write it and realized the problems (plural) posed by Amazon's enshittification are much different than Facebook's, and we should start by looking at what kinds of problems we'll be trying to work around, and why.

For each company we deal with (Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Netflix and other streamers, banks, ...) the kind of dystopian trap we're in changes what "making it less bad" even means.

So before the Amazon posts (and there will be several, because Amazon is a big, weird beast), we need a field guide to traps.

Different Traps

First, why the term "trap"? Because for each of these companies, leaving is hard to do, at least without spending more money, more time, more effort, or losing something else you value. They wouldn't be so shitty if it was easy to go somewhere else.

Here's the Facebook trap in one sentence: you can't leave, because the people you love are there.

Or rather, you can leave, but not without losing touch with some of your friends and family. So you stay, and in return Facebook grabs your attention and your personal data and raises your blood pressure. But at least the harm mostly falls on you. The good news is that if you make it a bit less shitty for yourself, you solve a lot of the problem, and you are not complicit in making things worse for other people.

That's why the Facebook post could be a checklist.

The Amazon trap is different. You could leave tomorrow. Delete your account tonight and nobody you care about disappears from your life. (I personally have been able to leave tomorrow since about 2006.)

What keeps you at Amazon? It's cheaper, it's faster, and it's easier. It's one search box instead of eleven, and sometimes it's the only place on Earth that sells the discontinued part for your discontinued thing at a price that isn't outright extortion.

But the harm from Amazon comes in many forms:

• Harm to you. Search results that are mostly ads. Review scores gamed into meaninglessness. Counterfeits mixed into the same bin as the real product. Brands named things like XZQBLT. Prime Video showing ads on the service you already pay for. So-called "dynamic pricing" that is actually surveillance pricing. Amazon punishing sellers for offering you a better price anywhere else, even on their own websites.
• Harm to other people. Warehouse workers timed to the second. Third-party sellers handing over roughly half of every sale in fees. Local stores that can't compete with a company that spent two decades not needing to turn a profit.

Fixing your own Amazon experience does nothing about that second list. You can tune your settings to improve your search results, but somewhere a worker is still skipping a bathroom break to make rate.

With Facebook, harm reduction solves the problem you have. With Amazon, it solves half the problem, and maybe not the half that bothers you most.

The Three Questions

Before deshittifying anything (not just Amazon), ask yourself three questions. This is the triage, and it's the skeleton of every post in this series from here on.

1. What holds you there? Hostage relatives? Convenience? Twenty years of photos? Other data (watch history, playlists, etc.)? Your employer? The answer determines which escape routes exist, and what you'll lose if you leave.

2. Who gets hurt? You, other people, or both? If it's mostly you, harm reduction is a complete answer. If other people are getting hurt, it isn't, and now it's an ethical issue that only you can answer.

3. What are you actually trying to accomplish? This is the big one, because there are three different goals hiding in "I hate what this company has become," and they don't have the same solution space:

• A better personal experience. Tools: settings, extensions, habits. (The Facebook post.)
• Clean hands. Not wanting your money in the machine, whether or not the machine notices. Tools: boycotts, alternatives, doing without.
• Actually changing the system. Tools: antitrust, regulation, interoperability, unions. Notably not on the list: your individual shopping cart.

People argue past each other about this constantly. Someone pursuing clean hands lectures someone pursuing a better experience; someone pursuing systemic change rolls their eyes at both. They're all doing something legitimate. They're just doing different things, with different tools, and no tool from one project works on another. A boycott won't fix your search results. An ad blocker won't unionize a warehouse. Sending a letter to an attorney general or elected official asking for antitrust enforcement won't keep the company from selling your personal data.

Cory Doctorow, who coined "enshittification," is blunt about this: enshittification is a monopoly problem, and you don't shop your way out of a monopoly. But "individual choices won't fix it" is not the same as "individual choices are pointless." It just means you should be honest with yourself about which of the three goals your choices serve.

Also, there is no perfect solution. Not wanting your money in the machine is a good motive, but sometimes you can't realistically avoid it. Avoiding rideshare companies is great until you're stuck twenty miles from home with no alternative.

A Field Guide to Traps

Enshittified products don't all trap you the same way. Here's a rough taxonomy, and a preview of where this series can go:

The hostage situation. Your people are inside. Facebook, WhatsApp, the family group chat that will never, ever move. Escape is a collective-action problem, which means escape mostly doesn't happen. Aunt Sally posts the "matching family pajama" photos on Facebook every year, and you're never getting her to move to Signal.

The convenience trap. You could leave; it would just cost you money, time, and selection, every single day, forever. Amazon, DoorDash, Uber. The door is wide open and almost nobody walks through it.

The data hostage. They have your stuff. Twenty years of email, every photo of your kids, your book library. Google Photos, Gmail, Kindle. Leaving means either a heroic migration project or abandoning your own past. Kindle and its ilk don't sell you ebooks, they sell you the right to read books that are still locked up tight behind their DRM.

The hardware trap. You already paid for the object, and now it's leverage. Printers that reject affordable ink, tractors that only the dealer may repair, "smart" TVs stuffed with ads, doorbells that stop working when a server shuts down.

The subscription trap. You used to own your software tools; now you rent them, and the rent keeps rising. Adobe is the poster child, but the model is spreading like a rash. You used to own your own music, but now you're locked into Spotify (or Apple Music, or whatever) and the rent is rising even while musicians get less.

The company town. There is no alternative, full stop. Ticketmaster, where the fee has its own fee. Your ISP, if you're like most Americans. Deshittification advice here is nearly useless. This is where only the systemic tools matter.

The conscript. You never chose the product at all. Your employer did. Teams, Workday, whatever your HR department inflicted on you. Insurance is the worst, since they'll change it out from under you every year and somehow your copays always go up.

Notice that Amazon appears in more than one of these. The store is a convenience trap. Kindle is a data hostage. Alexa is a hardware trap. Amazon isn't one trap; it's "The Every Trap Store". That's why it gets a cluster of posts instead of one.

What's Next

The Amazon posts, in roughly this order:

1. Making Amazon-the-experience less bad. Amazon's search results are its Home feed: fully optimized against you, and partially fixable. This is the direct sequel to the Facebook post.
2. Loosening the chain. Reducing your dependence on Amazon without pretending everyone can quit: where else to look, category by category, and what it actually costs.
3. Clean hands, and what they're worth. What boycotts do and don't accomplish, what actually helps the workers, and why I admire people who quit Amazon entirely even though I haven't. This is voting with your feet.
4. Collective Action. Ideas about simple things you can do to help. Amazon won't notice if you stop buying from them. But collective or community action might start nudging things in a healthier direction. Writing letters. Voting with your voting things ... um, hands!

Let's have the plan as before: use harm reduction where it works, focus on other things where it doesn't, and no shame either way. We're allowed to stay in the trap while we study the lock. Yes, this is a "we" situation, not a "you" situation.