Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

Many people have a vague sense that online platforms feel worse than they used to, but struggle to explain why. Facebook is a familiar example: once a place to see updates from friends and family, it has become dominated by ads, promoted content, and algorithmic noise. In Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Cory Doctorow argues that this decline follows a predictable pattern — one driven not by cultural decay, but by economic and legal incentives that reward platforms for degrading their services over time.

Doctorow’s premise is that this degradation of platforms – for which he coined the term enshittification – is an inevitability, and that companies in all sectors would tend towards doing this. In his eyes, it is external forces such as regulation, worker power, and competition that prevent this from happening.

The book opens with several illuminating case studies explaining how Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Uber have all followed this path. In each case, Doctorow highlights a trajectory:

1. Things start out great (often at a loss to the company),
2. Things get worse for end users - for example, users on Facebook,
3. Things get worse for business users, for example, companies advertising on Facebook

Doctorow highlights how digital platforms harness the power of network effects that keep users on a platform. A big draw in continuing to use a platform is that other people you know are using it; this inertia allows them to get away with more than they would otherwise be able to. As Doctorow succinctly points out:

“Facebook users cannot help but take one another hostage”

He argues that we need to fight for a less consolidated internet, borrowing the term technofeudalism from Yaris Varoufakis to describe the current situation in which rents are winning out over profits. In the digital economy, Doctorow suggests, we are now faced with a new feudalistic landscape over which app store owners such as Apple and Google can passively earn large rents by being the sole suppliers of software for their devices, charging a 30% fee on payments on their platforms, while the developers are the ones who have taken the risk in developing the software and gathered the factors of production to do it. Doctorow points out that in effect, these platforms are rent-seekers. They are uniquely positioned to be able to unilaterally change the terms of using their platform and this allows them to more easily engage in this behaviour; and Doctorow dedicates a lot of time in explaining how these conditions have arose through an era of weak regulators and anti-competitive practices.

I enjoyed how Doctorow summarised the current state of legislation. He focuses primarily on the landscape in the United States – in particular the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – but he also comments on initiatives in the EU, UK and Canada on regulating these big tech firms. I found this book particularly interesting because while there seems to be acknowledgement amongst people I know that the internet is becoming worse, it often seems attributed to a wider sense of societal malaise or cultural decline. I was impressed by how Doctorow stays away from this and tries to trace these examples back to measurable, determinable events.

In the last section of the book, aptly titled The Cure, Doctorow gives his own suggestions on what the future of tech legislation should look like:

“We can make platforms less important, instead of less terrible”

He points out that giving the users a right to exit, and enforcing interoperability between different vendors would increase competition in the market and therefore prevent companies from degrading their platforms, lest their users simply switch to a different provider of the same services. I appreciated how he gave policy suggestions, rather than just giving the reader a sense of hopelessness that this battle had already been lost.

However, I did remain slightly unconvinced by his core argument that breaking up these monopolies will inevitably fix the problem. Doctorow gives numerous examples on how rival tech firms collude, or continue to enshittify even in the face of competition. To me, this seems like enshittifcation despite competition, not because of it, which weakens the argument somewhat.

Still, this is a thoughtful and well argued book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in technology and the political and economic structures that shape it.