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Pluralistic: Amazon achieves enshittification inception (04 Sep 2026)
# Today's links
* Amazon achieves enshittification inception: Cheating on your fraud is a hell of a thing.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* Object permanence: Electrolite is back; Mafia rules; Aaronsw on Wikipedia; Proctorio's memory hole.
* Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
* Recent appearances: Where I've been.
* Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Colophon: All the rest.
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# Amazon achieves enshittification inception (permalink)
Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money.
Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods.
This means that it costs Amazon itself _nothing_ to get the merchandise _it_ sells to your door: _more than 100%_ of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon is covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who _compete with Amazon_ in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit).
Then there's AWS, Amazon's cloud business. This is another extraordinary success story: every company needs servers, and that's especially true of an e-commerce company like Amazon. By building _more_ servers than it needs, Amazon transformed its own data infrastructure from a cost center into another profit center. Amazon's customers – many of whom are _also_ its competitors – pay Amazon so much to rent space on its servers that Amazon gets its own (prodigious) computing _for free_ , and realizes a profit on top of that.
Taken on their own, these two facts constitute an extraordinary business story: one of the largest corporations in the history of the world has converted its two largest cost centers into profit centers, and those profits are substantially generated by extracting payments from the company's own competitors!
Amazon's logistics and cloud computing are extraordinary, but they are eclipsed by the company's _most_ profitable line of business, which is _payola_.
"Payola" is a word that old people like me just barely have context for and for anyone under fifty the word is likely a mystery, so a brief explanation is in order.
"Payola" comes from a massive 1950s scandal over bribes that record labels paid to radio DJs and station managers to play their music. Radio stations were given the use of a scarce and precious resource – exclusive control over slices of the only electromagnetic spectrum in the universe – and were expected to program material that the American public would find enjoyable, edifying and educational. In this system, radio stations were expected to make shrewd guesses about the music the public would enjoy the most, and play that.
Because the selection process for the music that DJs played on the American public's spectrum was completely opaque, and because those selections could make fortunes for record labels, the system was ripe for corruption. Labels slipped literal envelopes full of cash and drugs ("payola") into the hands of DJs, station managers and owners, bribing them to turn songs into "hits" by cramming them into Americans' ears. The biggest predictor of a radio hit wasn't whether people liked the song so much that the stations rushed to play it, but rather, how much the labels were willing to spend in bribes to get their song played:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
This was a bad system all around. The American public got worse music. Musicians' own royalties were eroded by the label accountants' practice of charging off bribes to "promotions" they deducted from artists' royalty statements. Radio stations sucked. Labels bid away each other's margins, depriving themselves of operating capital to find and record new music and starving them of free cash flow to pay to musicians, employees and shareholders. As with every instance of corruption, this was a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses, which is why it continued for so long (decades!) and got so bad before anyone took action to end it.
Amazon's payola isn't about radio play – it's about _search_. When you search Amazon, the top results do not represent Amazon's best guess about what product will best match your query: rather, Amazon _auctions off_ those top results to its platform sellers. Amazon's search results reflect who paid the biggest bribe, not who has the best product.
To pay for those bribes, platform sellers have to raise prices. Amazon helps them do this, by imposing a "most favored nation" clause on its sellers that requires them to sell on Amazon at a price that matches or beats the price charged everywhere else (Target, Walmart, a mom-n-pop, or the factory store):
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing
Thus, Amazon imposes an _economy-wide_ tax on nearly every product you buy. Amazon's junk fees average 51-60% of the purchase price of the things you buy there, and because Amazon has captured a supermajority of the richest 10% of Americans (who have almost all pre-paid for a year's shipping through Prime), every seller _must_ sell on Amazon, or forego any hope of selling to most of the country's most prolific shoppers.
Any seller who signs up for Amazon is agreeing to turn over _the majority_ of their sales income to Amazon, and any seller who raises prices to recoup those sums, _must_ raise prices everywhere, at every retail outlet in the country.
AI has made Amazon _much better_ at enforcing Most Favored Nation terms, because AI is actually pretty good at parsing competitors' websites and finding instances of discounting, which Amazon instantaneously punishes by relegating the sellers' product listings to page umpty-billion of Amazon's search results.
There are plenty of junk fees that go into Amazon's 51-60% rake. A large slice comes from fees Amazon charges for access to its (very profitable) logistics system. Failure to use Amazon's fulfillment system _also_ relegates your listings to the dregs of Amazon search results, so sellers pay a massive premium to have their parcels delivered by Amazon, to the exclusion of cheaper alternatives that are just as fast and reliable. _That's_ why Amazon fulfillment is so profitable!
While the Amazon tax is extracted through several types of junk fee, the most _profitable_ junk fee of them all is Amazon's search payola. In fact, search payola _is the most profitable business that Amazon operates, full stop_.
Payola accounts for more of Amazon's profits than _anything else_ the company does. It's more profitable than _all_ the things Amazon sells directly. It's more profitable than AWS, Amazon's industry-leading cloud service.
Amazon has created a system where the most sales go to the companies that pay the highest bribes, and those companies pass the cost of those bribes onto their customers. The first item on a typical Amazon search results page is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The top row is 25% more expensive. The best result is usually on the second screen, somewhere around the 17th position:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers
Amazon actively helps its biggest bribers close the sale. Amazon has _lots_ of "comparison shopping" systems built into the service, but one comparison tool is conspicuous by its absence: an "apples to apples" tool that lets you compare _unit_ prices. Amazon's most prolific bribe-payers package their goods in weird quantities, selling everything from batteries to t-shirts to shampoo in larger or smaller quantities than their competitors. Sorting your search results by price doesn't actually tell you who's got the cheapest price _per item_ , because the company with the cheapest AA batteries might be selling a smaller _quantity_ of batteries at a higher price _per battery_.
Per-unit pricing is standard in retail. Indeed, if you go into a(n Amazon-owned) Whole Foods, you'll find per-unit pricing on the shelf tags, telling you how much the product costs per ounce or fluid ounce. Amazon _clearly_ understands why shoppers would want to compare unit pricing, but offering a per-unit sort option to its search would make the bribery racket a lot less effective, because searchers could just sort by _unit_ price and find the best bargain.
Let me remind you: _payola is Amazon's single largest source of profits_. When I was researching _Enshittification_ , Amazon's take from payola was in the mid-$30 billion. A year later, when I did tour stops with Tim Wu (who was promoting his excellent book _The Age of Extraction_), I learned that this number had climbed to more than _$50 billion_. This year, it's on track to top _$80 billion_.
Amazon calls this bribery system an "advertising" product, but it's not "advertising" in the sense of the ads that Amazon's platform sellers might have once placed in the local newspaper. It's _payola_ , more akin to the practice of packaged goods companies buying end-caps and whole shelves in the grocery store (a practice that is, in its own way, every bit as corrosive, though no grocery store has Amazon's economy-wide chokehold).
But there _is_ a way in which this payola can be compared to advertising: it _competes_ with advertising. Back in the old days, before a series of K-shaped recoveries created a vast chasm between America's haves and have-nots; before Amazon captured the majority of well-off American households with Prime; people shopped in _lots_ of places, and in those days, companies advertised in _publications_ , not on Amazon. Websites, newspapers, and newspaper websites made billions from those ads. Amazon's payola scheme (along with Google, Facebook and other tech monopolists) have captured almost all of that money.
As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by _all the newspapers in the world_ by _300%_. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the _Washington Post_ and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers.
This is _pure_ enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the _most_ successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive _even as_ it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses – and once again, it's _the most profitable thing Amazon does_.
And then…Amazon _made it worse_.
You know how people like to say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product?" It's _bullshit_. The "advertisers" who bribe Amazon for top search placement are the customers here, they're "paying for the product," and they are getting _reamed_. I don't just mean they're getting screwed by being forced to shell out payola – I mean that Amazon is _cheating them_ on that payola!
Remember: Amazon doesn't just _sell_ search placement; they _auction_ it. Every time you run an Amazon search, the company conducts a special kind of auction called a "sealed-bid second-price auction" (SBSPA):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction
Under an SBSPA, bidders secretly tell the auctioneer the _very highest price_ they're willing to pay. The auctioneer then charges the highest bidder a price equal to the _second-highest_ bid, plus one cent.
This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but it's actually a clever solution to one of the major problems with traditional, "open call" auctions (where bidders call out the prices they're willing to pay until one bid emerges victorious). Say you're at an open call auction where the top bid is $10. You can call out $11, and then the other person will call out $12, and so on and so on. It's tedious and time-consuming. That's bad enough when you're at an estate auction that's unloading hundreds of items, but it's untenable for an eyeblink auction meant to determine search results that the user expects to get in an instant.
In physical auctions the top bidder often clobbers other bidders with a _big_ increase – going from $10 to $50, say. This can end the auction quickly, but it means that the high bidder often overpays for their purchase.
In an SBSPA, every bidder enters their highest price, but none of the other bidders know what that price is. This encourages everyone to name their _true_ highest price, _but_ it protects the top bidder in the instance in which they are willing to pay a _much_ higher price than anyone else.
Say you're that person who raises the bidding from $10 to $50 – you have no way of knowing whether the other bidders would have dropped out at $15 or at $45. If you were the only person who was willing to pay more than $15 for the item, you've just vastly overpaid (by $34.99). But in an SBSPA, you name your true price, but you only pay the price you _would have paid_ if you'd gone through the tedious, expensive, time-consuming process of an open call auction.
Amazon's search auctions are SBSPAs. A merchant tells Amazon the _maximum_ they're willing to pay to be at the top of the search results for a given query, but they _pay_ a price equal to the _second-highest_ bid, plus one cent. This lets auctions run so quickly that they can be used as the basis for ordering a search results page.
That's how it's _supposed_ to work, anyway. The FTC and 22 states just filed a suit against Amazon because Amazon was _cheating on its own SBSPA process_ :
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-states-sue-amazon-over-secret-ad-surcharge-scheme
Over the past 7 years, Amazon has been secretly charging the winning bidder an amount equal to _their own_ sealed bid, _not_ the amount that the next-highest bidder was willing to pay (plus a penny):
https://gizmodo.com/ftc-sues-amazon-for-allegedly-duping-advertisers-2000805199
According to the suit, Amazon did this _80%_ of the time. That is _tens_ of _billions_ of dollars Amazon extracted from platform sellers, who passed those costs onto you, _and_ onto _every other retailer_ in the country (thanks to AI-enforced Most Favored Nation policies).
Amazon's defense is that this is all a big misunderstanding. Platform sellers just didn't understand how a SBSPA worked. Amazon has a _special_ kind of SBSPA where they could unilaterally and secretly charge the winning bidder the maximum price they'd pledged, if, in Amazon's judgment, the closing price for the auction was below "the true market value of the ad placement":
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/ftc-alleges-amazon-illegally-made-20-billion-by-rigging-billions-of-ad-auctions/
This is darkly hilarious. The whole _point_ of an auction is to determine "true market value." That's why neoclassical economists _worship_ auctions as the world's best form of "price discovery" and why economics Nobels are awarded for "auction design":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory
The _definition_ of "true market value" is "the closing price in an auction." Amazon claiming that it secretly jacked people because the auction generated a price that was "below the true market value" of an ad tells you that the whole business is a sham. The point of Amazon's payola scheme is only and ever a way to parasitically extract the maximum amount a platform seller is willing to part with, and by running a fake SBSPA, Amazon was able to trick its customers into revealing those maximum prices.
Cheating on a bribery scheme is a _mood_. This isn't just enshittification, it's enshittification _inception_. Amazon managed to enshittify their own enshittification!
This case was brought by Trump's FTC, which means that Amazon can get out of it by paying a chud podcaster to tweet at the president and he'll order them to drop it, just like he did with Ticketmaster:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit
But – just as with Ticketmaster – the feds aren't the only parties to the suit. With 22 AGs ("Aspiring Governors") on the suit, there's a chance this will go to trial. We might even learn the identity of the inventor of this enshittification-squared gambit, a veritable Louis Pasteur of enshittification. Assuming that person doesn't go to prison, the Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne can give that sloshing, ambulatory pile of hot liquid garbage a Nobel Prize in Economics.
(_Image:Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, modified_)
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# Hey look at this (permalink)
* Gridfinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridfinity
* US court rules Google will not have to sell ad exchange after losing antitrust case https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/
* Minding the Gaps in Surveillance Pricing Reform https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/minding-the-gaps-in-surveillance
* Zack Polanski seeks to stand for by-election in former PM Starmer's seat https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge41ee40vwo
* What Are We Supposed to Call This? https://www.usermag.co/p/what-are-we-supposed-to-call-this
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# Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago Electrolite relaunches https://web.archive.org/web/20010927195348/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/electrolite.html
#25yrsago How to play Mafia https://web.archive.org/web/20011113011546/http://www.stud.ntnu.no/studorg/mafia/
#20yrsago How Wikipedia entries get written http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
#5yrsago Proctorio's awful reviews disappear down the memory hole https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency
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# Upcoming appearances (permalink)
* Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5
https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/
* Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6
https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0
* Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
* London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
* Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17
https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow
* Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28
https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/
* South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
* Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=
* Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/
* Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow
* Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01
* Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
* Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
* Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
* Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
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# Recent appearances (permalink)
* The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In)
https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020
* How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now)
https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy
* Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy)
https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816
* Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory
* Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with
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# Latest books (permalink)
* "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
* "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
* "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
* "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
* "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
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# Upcoming books (permalink)
* "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to _Enshittification_ , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
* "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
* "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
* "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
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# Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
**Currently writing:**
* “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (11893 total).
* "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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