Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

It originally stood for “application programming interface,” and later “advanced programming interface,” but really, API just stands for “API”—a subtle, sui generis way of talking about a feature of a digital system that has no adequate equivalent in the nondigital world. Stage Three: A Giant Pile of Shit But enshittification never sleeps: right around the time that Apple was running a global ad campaign touting its commitment to privacy, it was also rolling out a secret surveillance system for iPhones, iPads, and other iOS devices. The account-switching stuff is standardized, and there are free, open-code libraries that implement it, which any company can use to update its own server software to permit this kind of freedom of movement between servers. Sure, it took more than a century, but Canada finally has an anti-monopoly cop on the beat.