If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
To my surprise, my life's work has turned out to be a long series of attempts to get people to engage with the abstract, distant issues of tech policy before it's too late. This is hard, because people naturally devote their attention to things that are concrete and immediate (for very good reasons!).
For nearly 25 years, I've worked with my comrades at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to raise the salience of these abstract, technical ideas. I've come up with metaphors, parables, framing devices, narratives, and then…a dirty little word: enshittification. It turned out that this word, and the minor license to vulgarity it confers, was the secret to unleashing a tide of interest in these issues, to my immense surprise and gratification.
But I don't confine my efforts to coming up with words to engage people on these matters. For several years now, I have been developing myself as a collagist, combining public domain images with Creative Commons-licensed materials to create several collages every week that aim to illustrate these abstract, technical issues in an engaging, visual way:
This got a lot easier with the 2025 publication of my international bestseller Enshittification, and not just because a lot of people read that book. It was also because the US edition, from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux had a gorgeous cover:
That cover featured a (literally and figuratively) iconic variation of the "pile of poo" emoji, with angry eyebrows and a grawlix-scrawled black censor's bar over its mouth. It was designed by the brilliant Devin Washburn of No Ideas studio:
https://www.noideas.website/
Devin's poop emoji became my go-to visual shorthand for illustrating stories about enshittification, an instantly recognizable way to identify my subject matter:
I liked it so much I ordered a couple hundred enamel pins and a couple thousand vinyl stickers featuring the design, and handed them out for free to people I met on my 33-city book tour. Everywhere I went – and every time a video went out showing me wearing the pin – I was inundated with requests to buy this stuff. But my pins and stickers weren't merch (stuff you could buy) – they were swag (stuff I gave away). I had no interest in getting into the merch business!
But you folks kept asking, and also, I really loved that design, so I offered Devin a cash buyout for the rights to his enshittification poop emoji and then I released it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license that lets you use it any way you want, including for commercial products, provided you attribute it and link back to the original:
With all proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most profound and powerful disenshittifying force on the planet Earth!
But because this is CC licensed, you can make your own merch and swag! I made this great print-on-demand lawn flag my for front garden so I could let my enshittification flag fly:
My goal here is to create a free, open, remixable visual language for talking about platform decay, not owned by me or anyone, a part of the commons. Use it to illustrate anything you want, especially if you want to analogize enshittification to other phenomena, like politics or other non-digital phenomena. Semantic drift is good, actually!
You can get the high-rez of Devin's enshittification poop emoji from the internet's three most important repositories of Creative Commons licensed work.
I've supported Creative Commons literally since the very beginning. I worked with Larry Lessig, Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein on the launch of the original licenses in 2002/3, and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first book released under a CC license:
https://craphound.com/down/download/
Creative Commons is one of the most amazing feats of stunt-lawyering ever attempted, and it has been an unmitigated success, with tens of billions of works licensed CC, including all of Wikipedia. Like EFF, CC is a charitable nonprofit that depends on individual donors to keep its work going. The org turned 25 this year (along with my career as a novelist), and they've launched a giant fundraiser to carry their work forward.
As my contribution to the fundraiser, I've provided them with 375 signed, numbered copies of Canny Valley, my (otherwise) not-for-sale, extremely limited edition book of my collages, with an intro by Bruce Sterling. The book was designed by type legend John D Berry and printed at Pasadena's Typeworks, a century-old, family-owned print shop, on 100lb Mohawk paper, with a PVC binding that will last for generations:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/10/canny-valley/
CC tells me there's still some copies of Canny Valley left in the fundraiser. If you're intrigued by my collaging and want to own this very strange and beautiful little artifact, here's where to go:
The irony is almost impressive:
“If your votes don’t matter, we need to redraw the map to stop them from mattering.”
If you can win fairly with ideas and policies, why does the map always need to be redesigned when certain communities gain political power?
That’s the part people keep noticing.
And when people bring up the history — from Jim Crow laws to the weakening of parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — somehow the response is always:
“Stop talking about it.”
Funny how history only becomes “irrelevant” when it starts connecting to the present.
People aren’t imagining patterns.
They’re watching them happen in real time.
hy does the map always need to be redesigned when certain communities gain political power? That’s the part people keep noticing. And when people bring up the history — from Jim Crow laws to the weakening of parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — somehow the response is always: “Stop talking about it.” Funny how history only becomes “irrelevant” when it starts connecting to the present. People aren’t imagining patterns. They’re watching them happen in real time.
