Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It is a book published in 2025 by Cory Doctorow. You may have heard the word “enshittification” thrown around a lot these days. It is something you can sense when you go to a website to find out some basic information and a popup window comes up in your face wanting your email address. Or it may be when gradually you find it harder and harder to find something on your favorite social media “platform.” Or it may now be the fact that you cannot turn the freakin’ AI thing off on your favorite app after the latest “update.” “Enshittification” visually sums up what has happened to the internets but also to many segments of society especially politics.
While the word “shit” originally must have been used as another word for “feces,” in most languages it is used as a metaphor in a variety of ways. While feces is an organic waste product of living creatures, “shit” is used in all kinds of ways – “that guy is so full of shit” which is certainly true no matter what. The word shit is used often for just about everything down to the explicative – “oh shit!.”
According to Doctorow who invented the word “enshittification” is the digital form of crap that came into being with the rise of “platforms.” It has four stages.
- First, platforms are good for their users
- Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers
- Next, they abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
- Finally they become a big pile of shit.
PART ONE: The Natural History – Case Studies
The book starts with four case studies: Facebook, Amazon, iPhones and Twitter. Here Doctorow explains why each platform has been “enshittified.” What is interesting reading the case studies is that in each case what happened is not some mystery but something everyone has experienced. The visual of each chapter always ends with Doctorow stating that the platform is “a bit pile of shit.” This obviously works for the youth. Grandmother may find it a bit vulgar and offensive.
That’s end-stage enshittification, the stage at which platforms turn into a pile of shit. Facebook isn’t the first platform to reach this stage, but it has managed an improbably prolonged period of shambling continuation, long past the date when we should have put it into ground.
– “Enshittification” by Cory Doctorow (p19)
PART TWO AND THREE: Pathology and Epidemiology
The book goes on to explain that the rise of the tech monopolies is one of the main reasons for enshittification and that it has made for a lack of competition and a skewed political landscape. He talks about workers rights and references technofuedalism, a word invented by Yanis Varoufakis in his book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Technofuedalism is a very accurate word for our present economic times where workers are now the equivalent of serfs.
Donald Trump’s election represents the ultimate triumph of enshittification. The policies that enable enshittification – lax antitrust , regulatory capture, weak labor laws, and state intervention on behalf of incumbents – are all on Trump’s agenda.
– “Enshittification” by Cory Doctorow (p213)
PART FOUR: The Cure
Doctorow’s prescriptions to end the enshittocene, the time period we are living in are all a good start.
- Bring back antitrust and break up the big monopolies
- More regulation
- Better privacy
- Right to repair
- Interoperability
- Ability to move from one platform to another with your data and contacts
Where Doctorow Gets it Wrong
Throughout the book Doctorow muses nostalgically about the early internet, when things were evidently good. I am not sure why he is wearing rose-coloured glasses about the early internet. I remember the 28.8 modems and how slow everything was, email before spam filters so half of your emails were some sort of porn scam with scandalous titles. Viruses that would take down you Windows 98 system for weeks. The personal computer entered everyone’s home. Everyone had to run off to Fry’s Electronics and buy more memory because the machine you never had enough. People started staring at screens instead of reading books or being with their families and actual friends. People stopped thinking, writing letters and talking on the phone. Ironically, the notion that the internet would connect people in the end just isolated people and made them lonely.
For over twenty years I worked as a full-stack web developer. I saw the internet when it was this thing that some thought would go away. Large corporations barely had websites. Small players could upset the status quo with a good website. Silicon Valley clung to the dogma of “move fast and break things” and became a place for libertarians not the idealists of the early computer nerds. Everything eventually became about get rich quick schemes.
Doctorow’s idealized notion of the early internet is a myth. It has always been a place, like the real world for scoundrels and shysters. The internet just made it extremely difficult to enforce any crimes. Crime took on a new international component. If you were scammed by a Nigerian money scam, tough luck friend. With the DMCA of 1998, if your novel, music or other creations were stolen or uploaded to a platform you really had no recourse to protect your intellectual property.
We live in a world now where the tech billionaires have immense political power. They have access to the levers of government. They have access to the habits and emotions of their users. While Yanis Varoufakis sees the modern worker often as a serf, I see the users of the internet more like hostages. Hostages have no control over their situation and communications with others is overseen and controlled without their knowledge. The overlords take their hostages digital lives for free and monetize it however they see fit.
My recommendation is to simply boycott the tech billionaires. Get off of Facebook and other digital platforms. Do the best you can to not buy on Amazon. Patronize your local businesses even if it makes you spend a few more bucks. You will live a fuller life that is grounded in reality not some metaverse. You will meet new people. The world was actually way better before the internet.
Buy the grapes. Boycott the Billionaires!
– Proposed bumper sticker by author