Enshittification

Cory Doctorow, a quarter-century internet activist affiliated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, presents a detailed analysis of why digital platforms are rapidly deteriorating and what can be done to reverse the trend. He coined the term "enshittification" in 2022, and the American Dialect Society named it word of the year in 2023. Doctorow frames enshittification not as a vague complaint but as an analytical framework modeled on the study of disease, with identifiable symptoms, mechanisms, and patterns of contagion. The book's first half diagnoses the problem; the second proposes a cure.

Doctorow begins by defining platforms: businesses operating two-sided markets connecting end users and business customers, such as Amazon, Uber, and Facebook. He notes the irony that platforms, essentially middlemen, became the dominant form of online enterprise despite early internet enthusiasm for cutting out middlemen. He lays out the four-stage progression of enshittification. First, platforms are good to their users. Second, they abuse users to benefit business customers. Third, they abuse business customers to claw back value for themselves. Finally, they collapse into worthlessness.

Four case studies illustrate this cycle. Facebook launched as a college-only social network and expanded in 2006 as a surveillance-free alternative to MySpace, giving users a feed of content they chose to see. Once users were locked in by network effects (a service grows more valuable as more people join), high switching costs (everything lost by leaving), and the collective action problem (the difficulty of coordinating a mass departure), Facebook shifted surplus to advertisers through surveillance-based targeting and free traffic for publishers. Then it clawed back that value: it raised ad prices, allowed ad fraud to flourish, coerced publishers into posting full articles on-platform, and forced them to pay to reach their own subscribers. After Facebook lost $250 billion in stock value in a single day in 2022, the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, pivoted to the Metaverse, a virtual-reality-focused strategy that Doctorow presents as end-stage enshittification panic.

Amazon used investor capital to sell goods below cost, locking users in through Prime memberships and digital rights management (DRM, encryption tying purchased media to Amazon's platform). It introduced the "flywheel" model: Low prices attract users, which attracts merchants, whose dependence Amazon exploits. Eventually Amazon imposed junk fees totaling 45 to 51 percent of every dollar merchants earned and turned search results into a pay-to-play system earning $38 billion annually. Apple's iPhone launched as a "walled garden," a tightly controlled ecosystem that Apple touted as a security measure. Apple attracted developers with favorable terms, then doubled its App Store fee to 30 percent, banned apps from mentioning cheaper payment options, and secretly built its own surveillance advertising system on iOS, Apple's mobile operating system, while running a global privacy campaign. Twitter's enshittification accelerated after entrepreneur Elon Musk acquired the platform in 2022 with $22.4 billion in borrowed money. Musk fired most content moderators, sold verification badges to anyone willing to pay, and killed migration tools. Despite this, hundreds of millions of users remain because their communities are there. Doctorow calls this the "Fiddler on the Roof problem": People stay in terrible places because leaving means losing the community they depend on.

Having established the symptoms, Doctorow turns to pathology. He argues that companies enshittify when they can, and that four forces historically prevented them. Competition meant customers, workers, and suppliers could go elsewhere. Regulation imposed penalties exceeding the savings from cheating. Self-help, rooted in the fact that every modern computer can run any valid program, meant that every enshittificatory move invited a technical countermeasure. And tech workers, whose scarcity gave them bargaining power, refused orders to degrade the products they had built.

Doctorow traces how each constraint was dismantled. Competition collapsed first. Starting with the Carter administration, every US president through Biden's predecessor declined to enforce antitrust law as originally conceived, and mergers proliferated until most industries were controlled by five or fewer firms. Amazon spent $200 million in a single month selling diapers below cost to destroy the independent retailer Diapers.com. Internal documents from the Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust trial against Google revealed that advertising executives deliberately worsened search results to force more queries and show more ads. The death of competition also undermined regulation: Effective regulatory proceedings depend on competitors countering one another's claims, and a cartel of five companies easily converges on a unified lobbying position.

Self-help was destroyed by intellectual property law. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), signed in 1998, makes it a felony to bypass an access control on a copyrighted work. Because even printer cartridge chips contain copyrighted programs, using a third-party cartridge can be classified as a federal crime. This principle spread into every product category: cars, tractors, wheelchairs, and insulin pumps.

Tech worker power collapsed last. In 2023, the US tech sector laid off 260,000 workers; in the first half of 2024, another 100,000 followed, despite record profits. Doctorow chronicles the rise and fall of worker activism at Google, where walkouts in 2018 forced the company to cancel a censored search engine for China and AI tools for US drone strikes. Google retaliated by firing AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru in 2020. In early 2023, Google laid off 12,000 workers despite having just spent $70 billion on a stock buyback, enough to cover those salaries for 27 years. The workforce's power to resist enshittification was broken.

The book's second half proposes a cure built on restoring four forces: competition, regulation, interoperability (the ability of services and devices to work with third-party tools and rival services), and tech worker power. Doctorow surveys the global antitrust revival. Lina Khan, Biden's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair, became the most prominent enforcer in a generation, and Google lost three antitrust cases. The EU passed the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, requiring interoperability and banning platforms from competing with their own business customers. Trump's 2024 election reversed much of this progress: Khan, DOJ Antitrust Division head Jonathan Kanter, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head Rohit Chopra were all replaced. However, Doctorow notes that Trump's vice president, JD Vance, praised Khan, and the DOJ agreed with Biden's proposed remedies in the Google case. The antitrust movement, he emphasizes, was driven by popular demand, not corporate money.

On interoperability, Doctorow advocates restoring users' right to modify their devices and to delegate that work to skilled third parties. He chronicles the right-to-repair movement's victories: Massachusetts voters approved automotive repair rights with 75 percent support in 2020, and Colorado banned DRM in powered wheelchairs in 2024. On labor, he argues that scarcity-based worker power is always temporary and that unions are the only durable mechanism for protecting pay and conditions. He highlights the United Auto Workers (UAW) transformation after reformers elected Shawn Fain as president in 2023, leading an unprecedented simultaneous strike against all three major US automakers.

Doctorow concludes by rejecting the claim that enshittification is capitalism's inevitable outcome. The same executives who run the enshitternet today presided over the old, good internet; the difference is not the people but the constraints. The stakes extend beyond the internet, which is the communications infrastructure needed to organize against climate collapse, authoritarianism, and inequality. Reversing enshittification, Doctorow argues, is essential to winning those larger fights.