Enshittification

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

by Cory Doctorow  · 6 Oct 2025  · 313pp  · 94,415 words

fired up about the esoteric world of internet policy, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. It’s a funny, naughty word, and

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2024, nor why millions of people have used it to describe the inescapable online dumpster fire that’s roasting them alive. The reason for enshittification’s popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening

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a disease. Like a disease, it has symptoms, a mechanism, and an epidemiology. The first part of this book will explain these components of enshittification. But the point of this analysis isn’t to merely give you a more technically informed way to feel demoralized and furious about the state

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history is an ordered catalog of the disease’s progress: What symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order? Here’s the natural history of enshittification: First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those

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users who took one another hostage—which meant the publishers and advertisers were now held hostage, too. Now it was time for stage three of enshittification: putting the screws to the business customers. Stage Three: A Giant Pile of Shit For advertisers, this took the form of rising prices and

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behind a newsfeed void that the algorithm could fill with content people paid to put there: ads and boosted content. This is stage three of enshittification: Facebook has now withdrawn all available surplus, leaving behind the bare minimum it calculates to be sufficient to keep users glued to one another,

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managed an improbably prolonged period of shambling continuation, long past the date when we should have put it into the ground. That’s what distinguishes enshittification from “tech companies turning awful and going out of business.” All our tech businesses are turning awful, all at once, and they’re not

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. These tactics—Prime, DRM, and predatory pricing—make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too. Stage Two: Good to Business Customers Amazon was initially very good to those business

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clicked it. Presumably, the other 4 percent were drunk, or Facebook employees, or drunk Facebook employees. Stage Three: A Giant Pile of Shit But enshittification never sleeps: right around the time that Apple was running a global ad campaign touting its commitment to privacy, it was also rolling out a

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of dissidents and removing their speech. (Despite this, Twitter continued to operate at a loss.) Twitter also engaged in other forms of stage-two enshittification, notably in the staffing of its content moderation division. Content moderation on giant platforms like Twitter is always going to be a difficult proposition, but

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Shit Rather than playing Twitter Kremlinology, let’s instead look at how Musk’s handling of Twitter post-acquisition is an example of how an enshittification speedrun can boomerang on the enshittifier—and how those bad choices can nevertheless inflict serious harms on users. Musk’s tenure at Twitter’s

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business customers and end users created, it did so gradually. Facebook remained (very) profitable, even through its missteps. But under Musk, Twitter speedran the enshittification curve, and it removed value so quickly that it sparked a mass exodus of advertisers and a collapse in revenue that more than offset any

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very incompetent). Rather, this is all to build up to the following: People still use Twitter. Hundreds of millions of people are wading through the enshittification, which rises every day, and continuing to use the service. All kinds of people continue to use it: The marginalized groups that have endured

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Chips are so cheap, so plentiful, and so flexible that we stick them into everything we use. That digital flexibility is key to enshittification. The core mechanic of enshittification is a continuous series of adjustments to the “business logic” of a service—how much it charges, how much it pays, how it

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iWork, and programs like LibreOffice (the program I used to write this book).3 Adversarial interoperability is the key to self-help. The fact that enshittification can always be reversed with a disenshittifying counter-technology always acted as a brake on the worst impulses of tech companies. The threat of adversarial

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few memos did manage to escape the black hole of courtroom secrecy and make a splash. None is more indicative of Google’s path to enshittification than the notes for a presentation prepared by Google VP for Finance Michael Roszak. Roszak said that this presentation was prepared as part of

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to doubt him. That said, the memo’s contents describe the mindset that overtakes a business relieved of any fear of competitors: that is, the enshittification mindset. Roszak wrote: “Search advertising is one of the world’s greatest business models ever created … Illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these

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public internet that leveraged Microsoft’s control over its OS to attempt to dissuade Windows users from joining the real internet in favor of its enshittification-ready walled garden. When that gambit failed, Microsoft took the war to the browser, sabotaging compatibility with a new, popular browser called Netscape, made

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public outcry. The ability of purveyors of cloud-based products to alter their terms, prices, and features at will enables one of the most beloved enshittification tactics of tech business leaders: bait and switch. If you operate a cloud-based app, you can monitor your customers’ every click and keystroke

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’t offering to reimburse customers whose games flopped—only to tax customers whose games did well. Unity is an avatar of the attitudes that produce enshittification. At the time of the shared-success scandal, the company’s CEO was John Riccitiello, best known for calling his customers “fucking idiots” for

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quit. Twiddling Twiddling—the process of changing the costs, prices, recommendation weights, and search rankings through automated or semiautomated means—is a key driver of enshittification. A business with a digital back end can endlessly twiddle all of these virtual knobs. When platforms heat business customers, or shadow ban them, or

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Darth Vader MBA and announced that, henceforth, your $1,695 bassinet would lose its “advanced” features unless you paid the company $20 a month. Enshittification is a game of moving value away from end users and business customers to shareholders. The SNOO switcheroo was a pure value grab: Happiest Baby

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IP law, which felonize anyone who disenshittifies SNOOs, say, by making an alternative app for it that restores all the features they’ve confiscated. Enshittification is when you combine the banality of evil with an internet-connected device and a federal law that criminalizes doing anything with that device that

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their market power to keep the prices high, even as they killed the secondary market. In other words, they moved value from students to shareholders. Enshittification. It’s grimly funny when enshittifying companies protest that they’re only trying to build a “sustainable” business, one that allows them enough recurring

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on them. In a world where IP law didn’t protect executives at Happiest Baby, Anova, Adobe, textbook companies, and the rest of the enshittification vanguard, enshittifiers would have to contend with the possibility that their sleazy tactics would be neutralized by a rival company hoping to poach their customers

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from trucking to groceries, hotels to aerospace. When Boeing airplanes start falling out of the sky, this is the force at work: consolidation, regulatory capture, enshittification. All of these sectors love IP laws (in the sense of “laws that let me control my critics, customers, and competitors”), but with tech, it

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and Tuyul Apps As any chickenized reverse-centaur could tell you, enshittified tech can transform any job into a nightmare. But in the absence of enshittification, in a world where workers can seize the means of computation, digital technology is a powerful tool for clawing back power from the bosses

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to customers, who love a bargain. DoorDash started out offering money-losing deliveries that it subsidized out of its investors’ capital. (Stage one of enshittification: Allocate surpluses to end users.) Now DoorDash wants to recoup that investment by removing its subsidy. If it can trick Dashers into clocking in on

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overestimating the degree to which their conduct has been normalized, mistaking the court of public opinion for a McKinsey staff retreat. When they pull the enshittification lever too hard, they get their fingers caught in it and hop around in agony, howling at the unfairness of it all. You love

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Marc “Shared Success” Whitten. Unity’s stock price cratered and never recovered. This is how it’s supposed to work. Bosses want to yank the enshittification lever, but they can’t, because it’s gummed up by several factors: By competition. By regulation. By interoperability. By the tech workforce. Once,

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short (or talked themselves into abandoning this approach), they were supplanted by better services. The old, good internet, in other words, was a place where enshittification had consequences. Competition, regulation, interoperability, and the moral sensibilities of tech workers all combined to keep tech honest, and to punish tech that wasn’t

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cost of leaving. A new, good internet is possible. More than that, it’s essential. Antitrust Is Back, Baby To halt the internet’s enshittification and throw it into reverse, we need to restore the four forces that discipline technology firms, pressuring them to treat us well and tossing the

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over the world have figured out that there is something rotten going on with corporate power. A genuine, spontaneous groundswell of popular rage at the enshittification of everything is all around us. Lina Khan is an extraordinary leader, a person who can articulate the legal and economic basis for that

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rules, but what about the old, bad ones? Interoperability—the latent power of every digital system to run every valid program—is a powerful anti-enshittification force. Sure, platforms shouldn’t do bad things to their users and business customers, and sure, our democratically accountable lawmakers and enforcers should step

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route around them. It’s not merely that interop provides immediate relief for users—it also imposes immediate and lasting costs on companies that choose enshittification. When users engage in adversarial interoperability, the business whose products or services they modify immediately loses a key relationship with that user, and will

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: Greetings, followers of my reader! This is Cory Doctorow writing to you, and your friend has very nearly finished reading my excellent 2025 book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, available at finer bookstores everywhere, as well as on monopoly electronic retail sites that

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, regulation, interoperability, and labor power, which is good, because at the same time, all over the world, we are experiencing an unprecedented wave of enshittification, too. The Bad News We are living at the confluence of two long-term trends that used to run in parallel and that are now

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are insulated from competition, they capture their regulators, and they lord their power over their workers. In other words, they are ripe for the enshittification practices of price gouging, deception, and out-and-out fraud. The only saving grace here is that the cartels operate mostly in hard goods industries

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to chronicling the terrible world of “smart” appliances has it. The digitization of every industry opens up new opportunities for twiddling and, with it, intensifying enshittification. Enshittification is coming for everything. Recall the example of grocery stores implementing electronic shelf labels (page 128). When Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon Fresh (an online

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world. You routinely insert your body into eminently enshittifiable computers—like a house with a “smart” thermostat—and you are likewise expected to wear these enshittification targets about your body (like the phone in your pocket) or even inside your body, like your implanted defibrillator. That is the bad news.

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violates the law in, say, the UK also likely violates the laws in those other countries. And since tech firms run the same sleazy enshittification playbook in countries all over the world, a successful case from one country can be filed in many others, relying on the facts and arguments

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, there will be motive, means, and opportunity for other countries to develop their own tech tools, networks, clouds, social media, and messaging. Conclusion: Is Enshittification Just Capitalism? A confession: I am no true believer in markets as the best arbiter of how our society should work, who should be in

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So those same bosses, with the same moral and psychological flaws, doing the same thing they always have, are producing a wildly different outcome. The enshittification lever that was once stuck fast can now be moved with a fingertip, all the way to 100. This has real, material consequences for our

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it on Wired.com, which kicked off the first wave of interest beyond my own readership. In late 2023, the American Dialect Society named enshittification their Word of the Year, and then Nóra Ó Murchú asked me to come to Berlin and give the Marshall McLuhan Lecture at the Canadian

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Jochen Wegner picked it up for Die Zeit. Next, Brooke Gladstone and her colleague Katya Rogers from On the Media were kind enough to feature enshittification in a three-part series on their show. That prompted a flurry of interviews, podcast appearances, invitations to submit articles, and so many other

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that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term “enshittification” very loosely indeed, to mean “something that is bad,” without bothering to learn—or apply—the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what

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precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of “enshittification” is worse than a self-limiting move—it would be a self-inflicted wound. Notes Introduction 1 Though it’s fine with me if you

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of Beeper Mini Repealing the Law of “Felony Contempt of Business Model” Restoring Labor There’s Bad News and There’s Good News Conclusion: Is Enshittification Just Capitalism? Acknowledgments Notes Also by Cory Doctorow A Note About the Author Copyright MCD Farrar, Straus and Giroux 120 Broadway, New York 10271 Copyright

The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters

by Diane Coyle  · 15 Apr 2025  · 321pp  · 112,477 words

repairing themselves on the ground that John Deere claims copyright over the software needed to run them. Cory Doctorow (2023) has coined the memorable term enshittification to capture the decline in value users are getting from digital businesses with market power. ­There is research suggesting ­people are happier if prevented from

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and IP claims to limit competition and extract more money from customers. Activist Cory Doctorow (2023) has colourfully entitled the practice as an example of enshittification, the progressive worsening of ­things that used to work well through the exploitation of De m a t e r i a l i s

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­ hese have led to a broader debate about the overextension of IP law and likewise owner­ ship claims over data. But no won­der the enshittification nomenclature is catching on. In all ­these malign examples, economic value is being withheld from consumers by companies with market power. The as-­a-­service

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value created. Th ­ ere are both benign and malign aspects of dematerialisation. It is hard to believe that the progressive degradation of consumer experience—­the enshittification—­will be allowed to continue. 98 Chapter Thr ee In any case, industrial policy, as well as competition and consumer protection policies, would benefit from

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examination of hedonic and eudaimonic well-­being. Psychological Assessment, 28(5), 471–482. https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1037​/pas0000209 Doctorow, C. (2023, January 23). The “enshittification” of TikTok. Wired. https://­www​.­wired​ .­com​/­story​/­tiktok​-­platforms​-­cory​-doctorow/ Doherty, M. (2015). Reflecting factoryless goods production in the U.S. statistical system

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-­GDP (extended GDP), digital ­services and, 137 e-­NABLE, 141 enabling capitals (intangibles, organisation, and trust), 228–33 endogenous growth theory, intangibles and, 230–31 enshittification, 41, 94–95, 97 environment: increasing demand for natu­ral resources, 205–6, 206; overlooked in economic statistics, 16; resource use missing in indices, 244

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

by Adam Aleksic  · 15 Jul 2025  · 278pp  · 71,701 words

platforms, which take a commission from all these newly created sales. How convenient for them. * * * In 2022, the Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the inevitable decline in quality on all social media platforms. It’s a brilliant observation, pointing at their economic priorities at three different

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revenue out of both users and businesses. It was able to do this by exploiting its sheer dominance in online communication and user data.[9] Enshittification can take many different forms. Google and Amazon, for example, are selling more and more advertising space at the top of search results. On social

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media, however, you consume whatever content is placed in front of you through highly personalized recommendations, so enshittification happens through the algorithm. Facebook used to show your friends’ content in chronological order, but then reshuffled it to recommend content that aligns with its

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a Microtrend,” Business of Home, Aug. 2, 2023, businessofhome.com. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Cory Doctorow, “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok,” Wired, Jan. 23, 2023. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Cory Doctorow, “ ‘Enshittification’ Is Coming for Absolutely Everything,” FT Magazine, Feb. 8, 2024. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 “Algorithmic Attention Rents,” UCL

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. See also British accent Appalachian, 92–93 Middle English, 37 Standard American, 4, 37–38, 51, 81–82, 145, 160–61, 207–9, 215–16 enshittification, 180–82 entertainment influencer accent, 87–89, 92, 97 entertainment-oriented content, 118 episodic memory, 201 eras, 202 Eras Tour, 110–11 escape room music

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

doesn’t mean the internet itself is broken,” she argued. But maybe it was actually broken. Former Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle in which platforms initially offer users value to attract massive audiences, then shift focus to advertisers and suppliers, and finally prioritize

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-meme-explained. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Just because you aren’t”: Knibbs, “Internet Isn’t Dead.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “enshittification”: Cory Doctorow, “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok,” Wired, January 23, 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “tends to

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REFERENCE IN TEXT “People tend to watch”: McGrady, “What We Discovered on ‘Deep YouTube.’ ” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “useless platform Kremlinology”: Doctorow, “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Given my understanding”: Matthew Yglesias, “The Case Against Meta,” Slow Boring, August 29, 2022, https://www.slowboring

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Paris (TV series), 212 Eminem, 21, 23, 27, 37, 175 “End of Men, The” (Rosin), 143 Enemokwu, Jehucal Emmanuel, 253 England, Jason, 210 Enron, 186 “enshittification,” 231 Entertainment Weekly, 170 entrepreneurial heroism, 6, 103, 106–7, 186, 266, 272 Epstein, Jeffrey, 189–91, 198, 263 EssilorLuxottica, 168, 253 Ethereum, 240 Evans

The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes  · 28 Jan 2025  · 359pp  · 100,761 words

, that the future will be worse, applies to politics and climate as well as the trajectory of technology. In 2023, the American Dialect Society named “enshittification” as its word of the year. The term was coined by tech theorist and early blogger Cory Doctorow to describe the process by which platforms

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better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”[2] You see this process everywhere you look: the internet is getting worse day by day. The experience of it, the feel of it, the

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version of “easily see pictures of your grandkids.” And for a while it worked, before it fell victim to the market logic of spam and enshittification. But in the same way you can hang out with your friends at a public park or at a beach instead of at a restaurant

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Research Centre, March 20, 2024, accessed September 4, 2024, http://doi.org/10.18724/whr-f1p2-qj33. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Cory Doctorow, “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok,” Wired, January 23, 2023, accessed September 23, 2024, www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Jean M

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Elias Sports Bureau, 161 Elizabeth II of England, 152 Ellison, Ralph, 2 email, 178–80 energy access, 157 energy efficiency, 158–59 Engels, Friedrich, 119 “enshittification,” 252 entertainment, 70–72, 75, 196 Entfremdung, 118–20 environmentalism, 183–85 Epictetus, 109 Eräsaari, Matti, 65 Ernst & Young, 126 ESPN, 49, 170 evolution, 37

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

by Tim Wu  · 4 Nov 2025  · 246pp  · 65,143 words

profits increasing, needed to drive “engagement,” which they did by making them increasingly cluttered, manipulative, and unhealthy—the process my old pal Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.”[2] This was the direct by-product of serving two masters: 1) users, and 2) advertisers, which is the model of the so-called attention

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18, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/​2014/​07/​20/​books/​review/​the-peoples-platform-by-astra-taylor.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Cory Doctorow, “ ‘Enshittification’ Is Coming for Absolutely Everything,” Financial Times, February 7, 2024, https://www.ft.com/​content/​6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly  · 7 Jan 2025  · 293pp  · 104,461 words

of major labels and streambait consultants, AI was looking likely to become just another tool of what the writer Cory Doctorow called platform decay, or “enshittification,” and it was all going to be monetized by streaming. Spotify supported AI-generated music for the same reason that other industry power players were

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Praises AI’s Potential”; “The Guy Behind the Viral A.I. Drake Song,” YouTube video uploaded by @yokai, May 21, 2023. 8 Cory Doctorow, “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok or How, Exactly, Platforms Die,” Wired, January 23, 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/. 9 For a basic overview

The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (And Who Benefits)

by Maximilian Kasy  · 15 Jan 2025  · 209pp  · 63,332 words

users to leave, the quality of services can be reduced, and the focus can be shifted to profit extraction. Cory Doctorow coined the memorable term enshittification for this process, where networks are first artificially closed off and then maximal profit is extracted from users. (This term was chosen by the American

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, 84; scalability of use of, 95 engineers/computer scientists: and AI ethics, 97–98; capacity of, as change agents, 100–101. See also technical expertise enshittification, 105–6 ethics. See AI ethics Ex Machina (film), 3, 4 expert systems, 10, 26 experts, dangers of reliance on, 12, 15, 35, 107–8

Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

by Joanna Walsh  · 22 Sep 2025  · 255pp  · 80,203 words

is a paradigm for other platforms. As they become increasingly driven by shareholder profits to the exclusion of functionality – what Cory Doctorow in 2023 called ‘enshittification’ – is it any wonder that amateurs expect more for their work than likes? Tailoring their output, they second-guess the platform’s requirements to win