Chances are that you have experienced enshittification without even knowing there was a word for it. If you can remember the dial-up days of the internet, you might remember that when Google first appeared, it was absolutely amazing. The other search engines of the time, like Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Infoseek and AltaVista, were clunky and unpredictable in what they returned. Google, by comparison, worked like magic, letting you find exactly what you were looking for with minimal effort. So why does Google now serve up a mess of ads and sponsored links with any useful results far down the page?
Or more recently in web history, remember when using Facebook was enjoyable? You could log on and your feed would show you all of your friends’ latest updates. You could read and reply to their posts, and you’d probably roll your eyes at yet another photograph of somebody’s lunch. Log on to Facebook today and your feed is filled with tons of AI-generated rubbish, ads, endless promoted content with political ranting, and worse.
What happened to the internet we knew and (maybe) loved? Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in a 2022 article to describe this phenomenon. In October 2025, he expanded on his article in the book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
Another name for enshittification is “platform decay”. Many online businesses today operate as a “platform” or middleman, connecting users (buyers) with business customers (sellers). A classic example of this is eBay. I am looking for a first-edition copy of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album; eBay will connect me with someone with a copy to sell. In return for this service, eBay takes a slice of the money paid to the seller. Similarly, Facebook connects users who want to connect with each other and advertisers who want to sell them things. Uber connects people needing a ride with drivers who want to take them somewhere, and so on.
Doctorow begins his book with a description of the stages of enshittification of a platform:
Stage 1: The platform is good to its users. The platform, often replete with venture capitalists’ funding, spends money to make its services valuable at little or no cost to the users. The user base grows, which in turn makes the platform more valuable, with more people to connect with etc.
Stage 2: The platform abuses its users in order to be good to its business customers. The platform leverages its users’ data to provide value to its business customers, for example by allowing the business customers to show the users targetted advertising. The user experience becomes less pleasant and useful.
Stage 3: The platform abuses its business customers to increase its own profits and stock value. The fees charged to advertisers constantly increase, and/or publishers of content on the platform are forced to give ever-increasing amounts of content for free in order to be featured. The user experience degrades accordingly.
Stage 4: The platform becomes a giant pile of shit. Both the users and business customers are being screwed, but they are locked in to the platform, and moving elsewhere is difficult. Either they stay there and make the best of a bad situation or gradually leave until the platform dies.
Doctorow offers detailed case studies of Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Apple’s iPhone hardware, and how they gradually became enshittified. He points out that enshittification is not just limited to online services but is becoming increasingly common in other areas of life, as more and more everyday objects contain computers of some sort running software. If this software can be tweaked, the product can be enshittified.
For example, printer manufacturers now include microchips in their replacement ink cartridges so that if the printer does not read the correct data from the cartridge, the printer doesn’t work. Potential third-party manufacturers of ink cartridges are prevented from doing so by strict intellectual property (IP) laws protecting the code on the chips, so they cannot be reverse-engineered. In this way, you’re locked into the manufacturer’s brand of ink and whatever price they wish to charge for it.
As an example from my own life, my 2012 Jeep came with a GPS navigation system that just worked. In 2024, I replaced it with a Toyota RAV-4. This car also has GPS navigation – but it requires a subscription to activate it. Toyota are charging their customers to turn on a feature that is already built in to the car. Why? Because they can, and because it makes them more profit. I have previously written about this and other subscription experiences.
The next section of the book offers an explanation of how we got to the current state. Doctorow raises the obvious question of why, if enshittification boils down to maximising profit at any cost, all business have not always become enshittified. He posits that four processes hold the process of enshittification in check.
Competition: If Company A provides a product or service and Company B comes along with the same or better quality product or service at a lower price, customers will flock to Company B. This in turn will force Company A to improve their offering. Today, with many business sectors operating under near-monopoly conditions, this incentive is much diminished.
Interoperability: This concept can be a key to competition and the reduction of monopoly. For a long time, Microsoft Office was the dominant suite of productivity software, so if you wanted to be able to read, say, Microsoft Word files, you had to buy thrift product. In the early 2000s, Apple figured out how to read the file formats for Office and launched their own competing product, the iWork suite. Users were no longer locked in to Microsoft’s products if they wanted compatibility with them.
Regulation: Cheating your customers, workers or suppliers has legal consequences, often in the shape of fines. At some point, the cost of these fines outweighs any savings that may come as a result of the cheating. Continuing to cheat will incur ever harsher penalties, which will eventually cause the company to fail. Monopoly-like conditions again help companies to escape regulation, especially when governments see regulation as hostile to business.
Tech Worker Power: It is difficult to enshittify your product if the workers in your company see it as ethically wrong and refuse to do it. At one time, there were many more positions to fill than there were workers available to fill them, so if workers didn’t like what a company was doing, they would go elsewhere. Today that is much less the case, with tech giants regularly laying off thousands of workers, so making those who remain far less likely to stand up to management.
Today, with many business sectors operating under near-monopoly conditions, these restricting factors have far less power. Free of these constraints, companies can indulge in all kinds of shady practices. Doctorow once again gives several detailed examples of how companies have tried and often succeeded in defeating these restricting forces. Many of the details in this section are genuinely shocking if not downright horrific.
The final part of the book discusses possible solutions to enshittification. Unsurprisingly, these solutions boil down to a strengthening of the four restricting forces. Doctorow once again takes each in turn and discusses in detail how progress has and is being made in each area, and what may need to be done in the future to re-strengthen each restricting force.
Revisiting his notion that the platforms or middlemen are powerful, Doctorow maintains that “[a] new, good internet is built on policies that reduce middlemen’s power when they act against our interests, and protect them when they act to further those interests.” Right now, he says, we are in a pretty grim place, with enshittification coming for all areas of our lives, not just the online ones. The good news is, though, that change does seem to be possible and there are signs that it is in fact happening. A better future is possible. However, we have a long way to go and a lot of battles to fight before we get there.
In conclusion, there is so much food for thought in Cory Doctorow’s book that it is difficult to do it any kind of justice in this brief review. I highly recommend that you read it for yourself if you are at all concerned about the direction in which technology companies are currently leading our world. Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It is in my opinion an essential book for our current and future times.
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