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

by Cory Doctorow

Synopsis:

Enshittification: it’s not just you—the internet sucks now. Here’s why, and here’s how we can disenshittify it.

We’re living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.

Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution.

When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say “things are getting worse.” He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better).

The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users—and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die.

Doctorow’s argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror.

Here, now, in Enshittification the book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and—most important—how they can be undone.

Cory Doctor’s Enshittification is a book-length treatment of his theory of why various products and services are getting worse. The basic theory is that first, these products and services treated customers well to entice them and get them on board, and get them nice and locked in. Then, they turned to businesses and offered them access to those customers, slightly enshittifying things for those customers (e.g. by pushing ads from the business customers into the feed of their friends’ posts). Then, once the businesses were also locked in, they started to hike the rates and enshittify things for them as well.

There’s more to it, but that’s the basics, and it holds up pretty well through exhaustive examples of companies both well-known (like Amazon, Facebook and Google) and less known (like a baby-rocking tool that played womb sounds to soothe babies, which now needs a monthly subscription fee). Example after example after example… stop, please, I’m already dead.

After that, though, Doctorow does start going into what he thinks can be done about it, and ends on a surprisingly hopeful note about legislation and the appetite for change. I’m not sure how much of his optimism I agree with, weary as I am from other situations where we might’ve thought the world was improving, but where we’ve backslid. That said, I know that I’m weary and pessimistic, and thus not even a little bit able to be objective.

It’s a useful book; not surprising to me, overall, almost common sense at times — but it helps to articulate everything, and like I said, ends on a surprisingly hopeful note.

I did dislike his tone sometimes (writing out “womp womp” after describing setbacks and so on really got on my nerves), but that’s a fairly minor complaint vs. the usefulness of dissecting the situation and understanding what drives it.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)