Brown Stage Capitalism

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2025-10-07-brown-stage-capitalism-enshittification-doctorow-review/



Five years ago this October, the richest man in China “disappeared.” Rumors swirled that he had been sent to a “re-education camp.” The Atlantic dubbed it “The Undoing of China’s Economic Miracle.” Alibaba founder Jack Ma was, the American Enterprise Institute wrote, a casualty of “China’s Takeover of Western Capitalism.” Cory Doctorow had a different view. In a 56-part thread on Twitter, the British-Canadian novelist-polymath explained how Jack Ma’s retreat was part of a broader campaign by the Chinese government to preserve its money supply from the whims of the yield-chasing ultra-wealthy.

The day I started reading Enshittification, Doctorow’s bleak nonfiction treatise on how and why Big Tech platforms are “all turning into piles of shit, all at once,” the exiled Ma made a shocking comeback. Alibaba, the platform he had founded to connect small and medium-sized manufacturers with international wholesalers and retailers, announced it had developed a proprietary semiconductor that would enable the company to wean itself off Nvidia’s H20 chips, which are critical processors for AI development and whose trade is closely monitored and restricted by wary authorities on both sides of the Pacific. Just a few days later, the federal judge who had called Google Search an illegal monopoly issued a ruling stating that he had no intention of doing anything about it.



Google is a main character in Enshittification. In 1999, the year after its founders published their idea for a search algorithm as an academic research paper, they hired a guy named Ben Gomes to figure out how to crawl enough web pages to catch up with then-dominant Yahoo and AltaVista. Twenty years later, an exec named Prabhakar Raghavan, who’d come to Google from a post as Yahoo’s chief of strategy, issued a “code yellow” to address what he saw as an emergency: Growth in Google search queries had plateaued. Gomes was incredulous, noting in an email:

By this point, of course, Google had decided to do the bad things many, many times, often in collaboration with Facebook and Apple. It paid Apple as much as $20 billion in 2021 to make its search engine the default on the iPhone and its Safari browser, thus ensuring that the only company that feasibly could launch a competing search engine would be fiduciarily obliged not to. It conspired with Facebook to manipulate the market for internet advertising in sometimes shameless ways that extracted extreme and often fatal amounts of cash from both advertisers and online publishers (Google has also been ruled a monopolist in the online advertising market; a trial determining the penalty is in progress). It secretly worked with the military to develop AI-based targeting for drone strikes, and with sources close to the CCP on a since-abandoned project to build a Great Firewall–compatible version of Google. And in spite of its wholesome academic corporate culture, Google executives gaslit and marginalized employees who reported top executives for sexual predation, paying a $310 million fine in 2020.

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