Enshittification

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
by Cory Doctorow
Published 6 Oct 2025

Twiddling is a system of pumps that digital platforms can use to move value from business customers to end users and back again, siphoning off a bit more for themselves every time, until all the surplus value has been harvested for executive bonuses, dividends, and stock buybacks—enshittification, in other words. Twiddling is the how of enshittification. While we can all see enshittification from the outside as platforms are good to users, then to business customers, then to themselves, twiddling is the invisible thing that’s going on inside the companies. Because twiddling takes place inside the corporate black box, it’s hard to get your head around it.

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The capitalism of twenty years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find one another, offer mutual aid, and organize. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names, and cryptocurrency scams. We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device. We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important, also.”

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In 2022, after decades of striving to get people 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 it’s funny and naughty to say, and I’m proud of that. But that’s not why the American Dialect Society named it its word of the year in 2023, nor why Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary named it its word of the year for 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 and what we should do about it.

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language
by Adam Aleksic
Published 15 Jul 2025

Finally, once sellers were also dependent on marketing through Facebook, the platform enshittified itself by running more ads and doubling transaction fees—squeezing more 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 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 business priorities.

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,” New York Times, June 3, 2023. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Caroline Bourque, “The Making of 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 Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, www.ucl.ac.uk. Accessed August 26, 2024. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art,” Philosophical Review 79, no. 3 (1970): 334–67, www.jstor.org/​stable/​2183933.

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.[*3] Who cares about old definitions when you can use new labels to create new demand? The real winners, of course, are the social media 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 points in time: First, social media platforms will make the experience as good as possible for their users, to build up a consistent following.

The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 15 Apr 2025

One can also question the economic value of many of the prominent consumer-­facing digital innovations, ­whether social media or the kind of blocking that software companies use to extract consumer surplus, from printers that ­will not work if other manufacturers’ ink cartridges are used to tractors that farmers thought they had purchased but are banned from 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 using social media (Allcott et al. 2020). And yet ­there is also a vast amount of innovation taking place, in digital (generative AI, robotics), in materials science (nanotechnologies, composites), in biomedicine (mRNA, genomics, biomarkers), and in manufacturing pro­cesses (additive manufacturing, biomanufacturing), as well as rapid declines in the costs of renewables generation, potentially paving the way for a switch away from the fossil fuel energy system.

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For example, manufacturers have (1) hindered access to internal components; (2) monopolized parts, manuals, and diagnostic tools; and (3) used software to impede repairs with substantially identical aftermarket parts.” It notes that the practice extends to autos and medical equipment. In fact, ­there are many examples of corporations using software 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 a t i o n 95 market power by an intermediary platform that can progressively capture value from all sides of the market. HP can brick software to prevent buyers of its printers from using ink cartridges from other manufacturers; they are locked into its ink subscription s­ ervice if they ever signed up (Harding 2023).

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In all ­these examples, l­egal and practical owner­ship of the physical object is not effective owner­ship ­because of the bundled software and the assertion of intellectual property rights. Practices such as t­ 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 or subscription models do offer user advantages such as flexibility and lower costs, and in addition access to economies of scale, improved range and variety, and distinctive capabilities on the part of specialist providers.

The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
by Chris Hayes
Published 28 Jan 2025

My views are echoed by huge shares of the populace, and some of the most intensely pessimistic outlooks on the future are shared by the youngest among us.[1] This sense of doom, 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 go from thriving to dying: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things 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.

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And even then! This is of course the “dream of connection” that tech companies have marketed and promised. Facebook’s entire value proposition for years has been some 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 or a mall, we should have noncommercial options for this kind of connection. And this isn’t some pie-in-the-sky hypothetical. Right now, one of the fastest-growing and most widely used messaging apps in the world is the end-to-end encrypted app Signal, which is developed and distributed by a nonprofit 501(c)(3): “As a nonprofit,” their website tells users, “we don’t have investors or profit-minded board members knocking during hard times, urging us to ‘sacrifice a little privacy’ in the name of hitting growth and monetary targets.”

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75 Chapter 8: Reclaiming Our Minds World Happiness Report 2024, University of Oxford: Wellbeing 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. Twenge, “The Sad State of Happiness in the United States and the Role of Digital Media,” World Happiness Report, March 20, 2019, accessed May 29, 2024, https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/the-sad-state-of-happiness-in-the-united-states-and-the-role-of-digital-media/.

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
by Liz Pelly
Published 7 Jan 2025

As it turned out, stream-fraud schemers were only considered as such when they didn’t personally benefit the big players in some way.7 In the hands 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 clamoring to harness its potential: it opened up a possible new pool of cheap content.8 * * * When people were paying attention, the debate about generative AI was fierce.

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Spotify Just Deleted a Bunch of Its Uploads After Detecting ‘Stream Manipulation,’ ” Music Business Worldwide, May 3, 2023, https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/ai-music-app-boomy-spotify-stream-manipulation/. 2 For the Boomy CEO quote, see: https://x.com/MusicAlly/status/1650852184819376128; for the Boomy press release announcing its partnership with Warner, see: https://www.wmg.com/news/boomy-partners-with-ada-worldwide-on-global-distribution-deal. 3 “Spotify Ejects Thousands of AI-Made Songs in Purge of Fake Streams,” Financial Times, May 8, 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/b6802c8f-50e7-4df8-8682-cca794881e30. 4 Elizabeth Dilts Marshall, “Spotify’s Daniel Ek Praises AI’s Potential to Boost Music Creation—and the Company’s Bottom Line,” Billboard, April 25, 2023, https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-praises-artificial-intelligence/. 5 “Music AI Ethics Tracker,” Water & Music, https://www.waterandmusic.com/data/ai-ethics-tracker. 6 Joe Coscarelli, “Capitol Drops ‘Virtual Rapper’ FN Meka After Backlash over Stereotypes,” New York Times, August 23, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/arts/music/fn-meka-dropped-capitol-records.html; “AI rapper FN Meka dropped by Capitol over racial stereotyping,” BBC, August 24, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-62659741; Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, “(A)I, Rapper: Who Voices Hip-Hop’s Future?,” Public Books, April 21, 2022, https://www.publicbooks.org/ai-rap-synthesis-tools-black-hip-hop/. 7 Marshall, “Spotify’s Daniel Ek 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 of Endel, see https://endel.io/about. 10 Websites for other “personalized background music” apps: notboring.software/product/vibes, wiredvibeapp.com, lifescoremusic.com/; Mike Powell, “Natural Selection: How a New Age Hustler Sold the Sound of the World,” Pitchfork, November 2, 2016, https://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/9971-natural-selection-how-a-new-age-hustler-sold-the-sound-of-the-world/. 11 “Passive Mindfulness with Oleg Stavitsky, CEO & Co-Founder of Endel,” The Look Up!

Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters
by Joanna Walsh
Published 22 Sep 2025

Unlike physical space, the net is not zero sum; but there is so often nowhere else to go, particularly for the amateurs I’ve written about in 203this book, who are not hackers, techies or nerds, but who have other skills – or no formal skills at all – and who need a ready-made platform in order to make something. Twitter 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 visibility and, with it, sponsors. Creators are back in the age of the patron. It’s often been said that the social contract of the internet was free use in exchange for data.