Past Its prime: Charlie’s guide to the Amazon jungle

Now and then, I try to order something on the internet and wonder when it all turned to sludge.

Once upon a time, you could look up a product, read a few honest reviews, and click “Buy Now with 1-Click.” Now you scroll past half a mile of fake brands, fake ratings, and prices that make no sense.

In fact the closest match to your search terms now averages 17th position in your list of results.

Welcome to what some bright spark in 2022 called enshittification, the slow, inevitable process by which every good online service rots like a dead fish on a sunny day.

First they treat you like royalty. Then they start squeezing you a bit. Finally they squeeze everyone including the suppliers and online merchants, and what’s left is a steaming pile of mule muffins.

Amazon is the poster child. It began by selling books at a loss and delivering them to your door with alarming alacrity. Then compact discs, then Kindle books and mp3 music. Then it sold everything else that you could have got at K-Mart, Sears, or Walmart.

Then it started charging sellers huge “optional” fees and filling the top of your search results with whoever paid the biggest bribe to be there. It’s not the best match anymore; it’s the best bribe.

Now, no matter where you shop, you’re paying what one analyst called the “Amazon tax,” because the sellers all have to raise prices everywhere to cover Amazon’s cut. Even your neighborhood store ends up more expensive. The loopy smile logo has become a smirk.

Some say it’s just capitalism doing what capitalism does. But this is worse. It’s monopolism with better branding. When one company owns the shop, the warehouse, the search engine, and even the reviews, the rest of us become data points in a giant shopping barrow we can never escape.

Here in Cuenca, I can still walk down to the corner ferretería, ask the owner for a replacement hinge and a couple of screws, and get an honest price. No algorithm, no “People Also Bought Screws” Seems like that’s how the old Internet felt, before the Great Enshittening.

For more on the idea, see Cory Doctorow’s book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Enshittification) on Amazon US available effective October 8th, 2025.