What do you think?
Rate this book
Win a free print copy of this book!
5 days and 02:52:47
5 copies available
U.S. only
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Win a free print copy of this book!
5 days and 02:52:47
5 copies available
U.S. only
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Nonfiction (2025)Winner of the 2026 Locus Award for Nonfiction
Enshittification: It’s not just you―the internet sucks now. It’s been enshittified. That was no accident, and it’s not gonna fix itself. Here’s how we’ll disenshittify it so we can have a new, good internet.
We are all living through the Enshittocene―the Great Enshittening―a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are being turned into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.
The once-glorious internet has degenerated into “platforms” that rose to dominance because they delivered convenient and delightful services efficiently and reliably. But once we were locked in to those services, the tech bosses turned on us, relying on our dependency to keep us using the services even as they got worse and worse. The platform bosses did the same to the companies that had flocked to their services to sell stuff to us. Once we were all locked in―businesses and users―the tech companies stripped out all utility, save the bare minimum needed to stave off total collapse.
In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow shows us where it comes from: not the iron laws of economics, or the great forces of history, but specific policy choices made by powerful people who ignored every warning about the consequences of those choices. These are choices that can be undone. Enshittification is a Big Tech disassembly manual, a road map for the seizure of the means of computation. It is a diagnosis, and it is a cure.
Enshittification: It’s not just you―the internet sucks now. It’s been enshittified. That was no accident, and it’s not gonna fix itself. Here’s how we’ll disenshittify it so we can have a new, good internet.
We are all living through the Enshittocene―the Great Enshittening―a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are being turned into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.
The once-glorious internet has degenerated into “platforms” that rose to dominance because they delivered convenient and delightful services efficiently and reliably. But once we were locked in to those services, the tech bosses turned on us, relying on our dependency to keep us using the services even as they got worse and worse. The platform bosses did the same to the companies that had flocked to their services to sell stuff to us. Once we were all locked in―businesses and users―the tech companies stripped out all utility, save the bare minimum needed to stave off total collapse.
In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow shows us where it comes from: not the iron laws of economics, or the great forces of history, but specific policy choices made by powerful people who ignored every warning about the consequences of those choices. These are choices that can be undone. Enshittification is a Big Tech disassembly manual, a road map for the seizure of the means of computation. It is a diagnosis, and it is a cure.
338 pages, Hardcover
First published October 7, 2025
About the author
Cory Doctorow
260 books6,940 followersCory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of the YA graphic novel In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free, and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and
Little Brother
and novels for adults like
Rapture Of The Nerds
and Makers. He is a Fellow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,540 reviews
April 24, 2026
“It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And those computers suck. This is infuriating. It’s frustrating. And, depending on how important these services are to you, it’s terrifying…”
- Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Perhaps you have noticed a marked decline in your experience surfing through the worldwide web. Certainly I have, and I have been on the internet since the days when you connected via a standard telephone line, copyright infringement occurred openly and unabashedly, and when Facebook required a college email address.
Where once the internet was a place of spontaneous expression, it is now clogged with sparkly influencers begging for “likes” and “subscribes.” Where once you could share pieces of your life with a circle of chosen acquaintances, you are now being tracked by corporations on a continual basis. Where once you might find online communities devoted to niche interests, you are now far more likely to be enveloped by hateful discourse, the intensity of which makes one ponder the nature of the human soul. Today, even the suite of card games that used to be complementary with the Windows operating system has been commodified, so that you have to buy a subscription or subject yourself to volume-amped ads for online casinos and restless leg cures.
Cory Doctorow gave this process a name: Enshittification. In many ways, his book points out the obvious. Yet it has value nonetheless. He provides evidence to support the anecdotes, and shows how the internet’s descent is a feature of intentional choices, not an unintended flaw. Doctorow also provides some suggestions. Even if it is unlikely many of them will be followed, it is still nice to have a blueprint. Finally, it is funny, which is no small thing in a world fueled by un-titrated rage.
***
Enshittification is divided into four parts that mimic the scientific exploration into a disease. Doctorow begins with a “natural history” that comprises a case study of four legacy platforms: Facebook, Amazon, iPhones, and Twitter. He shows how each of these were initially consumer-friendly, in order to lock users in; how they then shifted to being business-friendly; and how they finally withdrew all surplus value for themselves.
This first section is the most self-evident. Anyone who has visited these websites has experienced their devolution firsthand. Facebook used to be a great place to keep in touch with family and friends in distant places. The last time I checked it – simply to clear notifications, as I am phasing it out of my life – my feed was spammed with sponsored posts dedicated to selling me crap or encouraging anger-based engagement.
I admit to more than little sadness over this turn of events. There was a time when I simple adored Amazon, specifically their third-party “penny sellers” who offered used books for one cent, plus $3.99 shipping. Back when I was a public defender making less than forty grand, I’d occasionally treat myself to a $20 spend, and would devote hours to finding the exact four books I wanted. Many years ago, Amazon killed the penner sellers overnight, and it has been downhill since.
***
The second part of Enshittification is devoted to the cause of these problems. Doctorow’s pathological report frames the issue in the negative, asking why companies that are good have not become crappy. In doing so, he focuses on four major factors: competition; regulation; the ability of people to help themselves; and the actions of tech workers.
***
Examination of these factors comprises the third and best section of Enshittification. In often infuriating detail, Doctorow describes the death of competition, the lack of regulations, the impetus against interoperability, and the loss of worker power, all of which have combined to make the current affairs an entrenched status quo.
Doctorow highlights a number of important concepts worth studying. One of the big ones is the difference between “profits” versus “rents.” In the normal course of events, a seller exchanges a product for the buyer’s money. This transaction gives the seller a profit, and the buyer a good he or she now owns, with all the legal rights that ownership entails. For instance, when I buy a book, I get to decide what I do with it. Maybe I read it. Maybe I lend it to a friend. Most likely it sits for years, along with a thousand other unread titles.
Tech platforms, however, have embraced the idea of rents. They have become the owners of the means of production, and rent them out to users. In the most extreme cases, companies have attempted to take a slice of the profits from its customers, allowing them to profit from success without risking failure. More typically, companies unilaterally change the terms of use on a product that individuals have come to depend upon. By way of example, Adobe tried to force users – many of them professional creatives – into allowing their artificial intelligence models train on their work.
This is an issue that I have been vaguely pondering for a while, especially as I have accumulated a growing digital library of books and movies. I paid money for each of these, yet I “own” them at the sufferance of digital overlords who can remove them at their whim. Which means I do not really own them at all.
This is the reason that people are beginning to gravitate back towards physical media. For years, it has seemed foolish to purchase a movie on disc when you could watch it endlessly on streaming. Now, as it becomes harder to find the right mix of streaming services, and as companies like Disney and Warner Brothers remove titles from their platforms, that has changed.
***
Unlike many doomsayers, Doctorow actually has a plan of action, which he discusses in the closing segment of Enshittification. Some of these solutions are solely directed at the tech world. Others, though, would be helpful for the economy at large.
In particular, Doctorow is a big proponent of trust busting. As companies get larger, competition decreases, and businesses are allowed to set the limit on how little they will offer for the most amount of money. Antitrust actions – or even the threat of such actions – are an important legal tool, given the intense monopolization we are witnessing.
Doctorow further notes the benefits of unions. Labor organizations have been on the decline for years. Partly this is a self-inflicted wound, caused by corruption and poor leadership. But it is also a function of an intense disinformation campaign that has convinced a significant number of Americans that they are better off negotiating with a multibillion dollar corporation on their own, rather than with any help. The results – shock of all shockers – has been years of poor pay, wage stagnation, job insecurity, loss of retirement plans, and mass layoffs.
***
Despite being full of dark realities, Enshittification is rather optimistic that things can get better. Frankly, I have my doubts. It is axiomatic that people with power and money are not going to give them up. Wealth has been concentrating for decades into the hands of a few. Thanks to the Supreme Court, that wealth constitutes speech, which means that the people with all the advantages also get to write craft the regulations, write the laws, and set the rules of the game. This has not only fundamentally altered the nature of American democracy, but begs the question whether we are a democracy at all.
It would take a powerful widespread movement to upend this structure. The raw materials for such a movement are available. After all, roughly 90% of the people in this country are being denied their fair share of the riches of the richest nation in history. Unfortunately, many of the same tech companies that are thriving off the worst user-experience imaginable are simultaneously hosting a bot-ridden, agenda-laced social media cesspit designed to pit one against the other, ensuring that no critical mass for reform can ever be reached.
- Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Perhaps you have noticed a marked decline in your experience surfing through the worldwide web. Certainly I have, and I have been on the internet since the days when you connected via a standard telephone line, copyright infringement occurred openly and unabashedly, and when Facebook required a college email address.
Where once the internet was a place of spontaneous expression, it is now clogged with sparkly influencers begging for “likes” and “subscribes.” Where once you could share pieces of your life with a circle of chosen acquaintances, you are now being tracked by corporations on a continual basis. Where once you might find online communities devoted to niche interests, you are now far more likely to be enveloped by hateful discourse, the intensity of which makes one ponder the nature of the human soul. Today, even the suite of card games that used to be complementary with the Windows operating system has been commodified, so that you have to buy a subscription or subject yourself to volume-amped ads for online casinos and restless leg cures.
Cory Doctorow gave this process a name: Enshittification. In many ways, his book points out the obvious. Yet it has value nonetheless. He provides evidence to support the anecdotes, and shows how the internet’s descent is a feature of intentional choices, not an unintended flaw. Doctorow also provides some suggestions. Even if it is unlikely many of them will be followed, it is still nice to have a blueprint. Finally, it is funny, which is no small thing in a world fueled by un-titrated rage.
***
Enshittification is divided into four parts that mimic the scientific exploration into a disease. Doctorow begins with a “natural history” that comprises a case study of four legacy platforms: Facebook, Amazon, iPhones, and Twitter. He shows how each of these were initially consumer-friendly, in order to lock users in; how they then shifted to being business-friendly; and how they finally withdrew all surplus value for themselves.
This first section is the most self-evident. Anyone who has visited these websites has experienced their devolution firsthand. Facebook used to be a great place to keep in touch with family and friends in distant places. The last time I checked it – simply to clear notifications, as I am phasing it out of my life – my feed was spammed with sponsored posts dedicated to selling me crap or encouraging anger-based engagement.
I admit to more than little sadness over this turn of events. There was a time when I simple adored Amazon, specifically their third-party “penny sellers” who offered used books for one cent, plus $3.99 shipping. Back when I was a public defender making less than forty grand, I’d occasionally treat myself to a $20 spend, and would devote hours to finding the exact four books I wanted. Many years ago, Amazon killed the penner sellers overnight, and it has been downhill since.
***
The second part of Enshittification is devoted to the cause of these problems. Doctorow’s pathological report frames the issue in the negative, asking why companies that are good have not become crappy. In doing so, he focuses on four major factors: competition; regulation; the ability of people to help themselves; and the actions of tech workers.
***
Examination of these factors comprises the third and best section of Enshittification. In often infuriating detail, Doctorow describes the death of competition, the lack of regulations, the impetus against interoperability, and the loss of worker power, all of which have combined to make the current affairs an entrenched status quo.
Doctorow highlights a number of important concepts worth studying. One of the big ones is the difference between “profits” versus “rents.” In the normal course of events, a seller exchanges a product for the buyer’s money. This transaction gives the seller a profit, and the buyer a good he or she now owns, with all the legal rights that ownership entails. For instance, when I buy a book, I get to decide what I do with it. Maybe I read it. Maybe I lend it to a friend. Most likely it sits for years, along with a thousand other unread titles.
Tech platforms, however, have embraced the idea of rents. They have become the owners of the means of production, and rent them out to users. In the most extreme cases, companies have attempted to take a slice of the profits from its customers, allowing them to profit from success without risking failure. More typically, companies unilaterally change the terms of use on a product that individuals have come to depend upon. By way of example, Adobe tried to force users – many of them professional creatives – into allowing their artificial intelligence models train on their work.
This is an issue that I have been vaguely pondering for a while, especially as I have accumulated a growing digital library of books and movies. I paid money for each of these, yet I “own” them at the sufferance of digital overlords who can remove them at their whim. Which means I do not really own them at all.
This is the reason that people are beginning to gravitate back towards physical media. For years, it has seemed foolish to purchase a movie on disc when you could watch it endlessly on streaming. Now, as it becomes harder to find the right mix of streaming services, and as companies like Disney and Warner Brothers remove titles from their platforms, that has changed.
***
Unlike many doomsayers, Doctorow actually has a plan of action, which he discusses in the closing segment of Enshittification. Some of these solutions are solely directed at the tech world. Others, though, would be helpful for the economy at large.
In particular, Doctorow is a big proponent of trust busting. As companies get larger, competition decreases, and businesses are allowed to set the limit on how little they will offer for the most amount of money. Antitrust actions – or even the threat of such actions – are an important legal tool, given the intense monopolization we are witnessing.
Doctorow further notes the benefits of unions. Labor organizations have been on the decline for years. Partly this is a self-inflicted wound, caused by corruption and poor leadership. But it is also a function of an intense disinformation campaign that has convinced a significant number of Americans that they are better off negotiating with a multibillion dollar corporation on their own, rather than with any help. The results – shock of all shockers – has been years of poor pay, wage stagnation, job insecurity, loss of retirement plans, and mass layoffs.
***
Despite being full of dark realities, Enshittification is rather optimistic that things can get better. Frankly, I have my doubts. It is axiomatic that people with power and money are not going to give them up. Wealth has been concentrating for decades into the hands of a few. Thanks to the Supreme Court, that wealth constitutes speech, which means that the people with all the advantages also get to write craft the regulations, write the laws, and set the rules of the game. This has not only fundamentally altered the nature of American democracy, but begs the question whether we are a democracy at all.
It would take a powerful widespread movement to upend this structure. The raw materials for such a movement are available. After all, roughly 90% of the people in this country are being denied their fair share of the riches of the richest nation in history. Unfortunately, many of the same tech companies that are thriving off the worst user-experience imaginable are simultaneously hosting a bot-ridden, agenda-laced social media cesspit designed to pit one against the other, ensuring that no critical mass for reform can ever be reached.
June 9, 2025
4 stars - Please don’t let the cute cover fool you - this is a very serious book about how both the internet and our world got so crappy (see what I did there?) Using well-researched examples of different big corporations, the author clearly connects the capitalistic 💩 cycle - from initial excitement, functionality and innovation, to putting corporate & shareholder profit before end users and then business customers to total dysfunction and massive profits & soaring stocks. Meta, Uber, Amazon, Apple, streaming - they’re all here and they’re all very guilty of it. Super interesting, timely and also an approachable read & glad I read it early from Net Galley - recommend it highly to those wondering why all companies are 💩 now.
March 25, 2026
*added a star 1/2/26
"Here’s the natural history of enshittification:
1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit." p16
Holy sh-t I need to catch my breath.
Pre-Read Notes:
I'm not super familiar with Cory Doctorow's work, but I know this term from other people who think about the price of the digital world and how it changes the real physical world that we actually live in. When I saw this one available in NetGalley, I jumped. I'm exactly the person he wrote this for!
"Because enshittification isn’t just a way to say “Something got worse.”* It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once." p12
Final Review
(thoughts & recs) I just really wanted to highlight this entire book.
Enshitification is way, way better than Careless People. It will probably get a fraction of the attention, but it shouldn't be that way. Please, if you thought Careless People was an important book, read this one soon after.
My Favorite Things:
✔️ Wow, these case studies are eye opening. Did you know when prices increase at Amazon, it drives them up everywhere else? No? Please read this book.
✔️ In a really important way, this book is extremely sad. It tells the story of how capitalists prey on humans' most basic drive--to be together. "That’s why people are still on Twitter. It’s not that they like the service— it’s that they like one another. And leaving one another is especially hard in moments when things are especially terrible— say, when Elon Musk and Donald Trump are dismantling whole swaths of the US government in a blatantly undemocratic way. Those moments of existential terror are exactly when you need your community the most." p47
✔️ "Enshittification— deliberately worsening a service— is only possible when people value that service to begin with. Enshittification is a game of seeking an equilibrium between how much people like the thing that locks them to the service (often, that’s other people) and how much they hate the management of that service." I'm sorry. But this makes me furious. So much so that M and I are now having discussions about how to stop using some of these huge digital platforms and diversify our spending.
✔️ Doctorow isn't just sharing necessary information here. He's also witty and often funny, despite the heaviness of his topic. "If you operate a cloud-based app, you can monitor your customers’ every click and keystroke to discover which features are most valuable to your deepest-pocketed users, and then you can remove that feature from the product’s basic tier and reclassify it as an upcharged add-on. The CEOs who do this got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” It works with surprising consistency, and tech executives are so confident in the lessons of the Darth Vader MBA that they come over all affronted and hurt when their customers balk." p83
✔️ "The reason Biden’s Democratic administration backed a generationally significant antitrust agenda is that the people demanded it. You. Me. Us. We were pissed off enough, and loud enough, about corporate abuse that a party and a politician with a long history of doing nothing (or worse than nothing) on these issues finally did something. This is even more remarkable than it sounds, because the academic research on this is clear: the US government almost never acts on the policy preferences of working people , when those preferences conflict with the desires of the rich. Something extraordinary happened in 2020– 2024. It’s still happening. Getting rid of the agencies that turned our demands into law doesn’t make those demands go away. Not hardly." p200 This honestly gives me hope.
✔️ "[...A] rule that required social media platforms to facilitate their users’ painless departure would be extremely easy to administer, without any of the fact-intensiveness that makes anti-harassment rules so cumbersome." p220 This might be the most terrible and simultaneously most helpful info in the book. Why? Because it backlights just how unscrupulous big tech companies are for ignoring this detail, and also gives the reader hope. There are options, unlike we've been convinced to believe.
Content Notes: end stage capitalism, social media, bad business, corruption, Tr*mp, politics of privacy, violations of privacy,
Thank you to Cory Doctorow, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, and NetGalley for an accessible digital arc of ENSHITIFICATION. All views are mine.
"Here’s the natural history of enshittification:
1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit." p16
Holy sh-t I need to catch my breath.
Pre-Read Notes:
I'm not super familiar with Cory Doctorow's work, but I know this term from other people who think about the price of the digital world and how it changes the real physical world that we actually live in. When I saw this one available in NetGalley, I jumped. I'm exactly the person he wrote this for!
"Because enshittification isn’t just a way to say “Something got worse.”* It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once." p12
Final Review
(thoughts & recs) I just really wanted to highlight this entire book.
Enshitification is way, way better than Careless People. It will probably get a fraction of the attention, but it shouldn't be that way. Please, if you thought Careless People was an important book, read this one soon after.
My Favorite Things:
✔️ Wow, these case studies are eye opening. Did you know when prices increase at Amazon, it drives them up everywhere else? No? Please read this book.
✔️ In a really important way, this book is extremely sad. It tells the story of how capitalists prey on humans' most basic drive--to be together. "That’s why people are still on Twitter. It’s not that they like the service— it’s that they like one another. And leaving one another is especially hard in moments when things are especially terrible— say, when Elon Musk and Donald Trump are dismantling whole swaths of the US government in a blatantly undemocratic way. Those moments of existential terror are exactly when you need your community the most." p47
✔️ "Enshittification— deliberately worsening a service— is only possible when people value that service to begin with. Enshittification is a game of seeking an equilibrium between how much people like the thing that locks them to the service (often, that’s other people) and how much they hate the management of that service." I'm sorry. But this makes me furious. So much so that M and I are now having discussions about how to stop using some of these huge digital platforms and diversify our spending.
✔️ Doctorow isn't just sharing necessary information here. He's also witty and often funny, despite the heaviness of his topic. "If you operate a cloud-based app, you can monitor your customers’ every click and keystroke to discover which features are most valuable to your deepest-pocketed users, and then you can remove that feature from the product’s basic tier and reclassify it as an upcharged add-on. The CEOs who do this got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” It works with surprising consistency, and tech executives are so confident in the lessons of the Darth Vader MBA that they come over all affronted and hurt when their customers balk." p83
✔️ "The reason Biden’s Democratic administration backed a generationally significant antitrust agenda is that the people demanded it. You. Me. Us. We were pissed off enough, and loud enough, about corporate abuse that a party and a politician with a long history of doing nothing (or worse than nothing) on these issues finally did something. This is even more remarkable than it sounds, because the academic research on this is clear: the US government almost never acts on the policy preferences of working people , when those preferences conflict with the desires of the rich. Something extraordinary happened in 2020– 2024. It’s still happening. Getting rid of the agencies that turned our demands into law doesn’t make those demands go away. Not hardly." p200 This honestly gives me hope.
✔️ "[...A] rule that required social media platforms to facilitate their users’ painless departure would be extremely easy to administer, without any of the fact-intensiveness that makes anti-harassment rules so cumbersome." p220 This might be the most terrible and simultaneously most helpful info in the book. Why? Because it backlights just how unscrupulous big tech companies are for ignoring this detail, and also gives the reader hope. There are options, unlike we've been convinced to believe.
Content Notes: end stage capitalism, social media, bad business, corruption, Tr*mp, politics of privacy, violations of privacy,
Thank you to Cory Doctorow, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, and NetGalley for an accessible digital arc of ENSHITIFICATION. All views are mine.
April 14, 2026
In a Nutshell: An engrossing exposé on the enshittification of the internet and all its components over the last few years. Well-researched with substantial and concrete examples. Informative without getting too techy. Don’t be fooled by the cover; this is a serious and scary book. Much recommended.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Canadian author Cory Doctorow has been an internet activist for more than twenty-five years. He has worked on digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics, among other themes, and has actively lobbied for liberalising copyright laws. Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification’ in a blog post in 2022, to indicate the process by which online products and service gradually decay in quality until they are *shit*. While the concept was already being spoken of, his term caught on and became a widespread neologism, chosen as the ‘Word of the Year’ by The American Dialect Society in 2023.
Enshittification is a word that needn’t be explained at first glance. If I tell you that social media has been enshittifed, you would know what I mean without requiring a definition of the verb. However, this book make me realise that enshittification goes far beyond what it suggests at surface level, and despite that farcical tone thanks to its poopy premise, is actually a worrisome concept.
This book is informative in an all-pervasive way. Many who aren’t active on social media might think that they are better off. Well, they are… But are they entirely safe? Not at all, and this book proves why.
Doctorow begins this book with a background on ‘enshittification’ and goes on to elaborate upon the various ways in which the term is relevant to every single one of us who uses the internet. He substantiates every claim he makes with solid real-world examples. Some were the expected guilty parties such as Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Twitter; some entries were a bit more surprising at least to me. (Case in point: Apple and Uber.)
Those of us on social media (Not counting Goodreads as SM, even though I know its current owner Amazon is utter 💩) already know the difference in how our feeds were when SM just started vis-à-vis the doomscroll of sponsored trash that we see these days. Doctorow explains this degradation through a proper sequence of events that applies to all mega tech corporations, whether through computers or smartphones, websites or apps, tech devices or household gadgets. Wherever there is the internet, there is enshittification in some way or the other.
What makes the book even better is the author’s approach towards the topic. Though the content is tech-intensive by its very nature, Doctorow makes it as accessible as possible. Every term is explained, and every action of the companies mentioned herein is evaluated in a way that makes sense not just to tech-savvy readers but to general users as well. He even adds in humour wherever possible. These remarks are somewhat snarky in tone, but I think that is the best match for the vibe of the book.
I also love how fearless the author is in his declarations. His insightfully scathing remarks about the current US president’s destructive corporate and glocal policies had me virtually whooping. In a world where most content is moderated to suit the rich and powerful, such a filter-free tone is refreshing.
The book isn't limited to the US alone, but as most of the global mega corporations are headquartered in the USA, a major chunk of it is US-centric. But this shouldn’t be used as a deterrent. After all, no matter where we are in the world, we still use the same internet, and whether our countries are mentioned or not, most governments are the same when it comes to surveillance.
As an avid reader and a reluctant social media user (Goodreads is my only happy online space these days), I assumed that at least half of the topics dealt by the author would be familiar to me. I was so wrong! I have read two other books related to social media – Sarah Frier’s “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram” (An investigative nonfiction about Instagram) and Sarah Wynn-Williams’ “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” (A memoir-cum-exposé of the author’s years at Facebook.) Both these books were impactful at least to some extent. But they would have been scary only to those who still believed idealistically in the goodness of social media. Doctorow’s book reaches far, far beyond these books, and shows us how much surveillance of our lives is constantly going on, even if we aren’t online. If you have ever wondered how your phone shows you ads for toilet paper when you were only talking about it verbally with your family member, you will learn the reason from this book. The whole thing is scary!
Does the book fulfil the promise of the tagline and also tell us what we can do about enshittification? It does. Is it an easy process? No. Will it help? Hah! Are you really that gullible?
The only negative is that the content gets repetitive at times. But repetition does lead to better retention (and in this case, hopefully to awareness and online safety as well), so I won't hold this against a book that is otherwise so educational.
🎧 The Audiobook Experience:
The audiobook, clocking at 10 hrs 17 min, is narrated by the author himself. He is a masterful narrator, and as he says, who better than the author himself to know how to voice the book as he envisioned it? The audio version is hence a great way of experiencing this book.
(Editing to Add: This query came up in the comments, hence adding this info here for everyone. You won't find this audiobook on Audible. The author has made his reasons clear in the book as well as on his Kickstarter page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...) . I borrowed the audiobook from my library, but if you want to purchase it, you can try getting it through other Audiobook sellers such as Libro.fm or buy it directly from the author's online store here: https://shop.craphound.com )
Overall, I thought I already knew a lot about this subject but this book taught me even more. I am already careful about what I reveal on social media. This book might just make me paranoid of the whole internet!
Definitely recommended to anyone who wishes to know how much of our personal content isn't personal anymore, whether by choice or by compulsion or by sheer unawareness. This isn't a flawless book, but its information is more than enough to overcome the hurdles. Don’t allow that scatological title to turn you off. After all, you already know we are living in shitty times. Might as well read a book that acknowledges this.
4.5 stars, rounding it up for the audio version and in solidarity with the message.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I follow the Goodreads rating policy:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ - Lifelong favourite!
⭐⭐⭐⭐ - I loved the book.
⭐⭐⭐ - I liked the book.
⭐⭐ - I found the book average.
⭐ - I hated the book.
The decimals indicate the degree of the in-between feelings.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Connect with me through:
My Blog || The StoryGraph || Instagram || Facebook ||
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Canadian author Cory Doctorow has been an internet activist for more than twenty-five years. He has worked on digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics, among other themes, and has actively lobbied for liberalising copyright laws. Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification’ in a blog post in 2022, to indicate the process by which online products and service gradually decay in quality until they are *shit*. While the concept was already being spoken of, his term caught on and became a widespread neologism, chosen as the ‘Word of the Year’ by The American Dialect Society in 2023.
Enshittification is a word that needn’t be explained at first glance. If I tell you that social media has been enshittifed, you would know what I mean without requiring a definition of the verb. However, this book make me realise that enshittification goes far beyond what it suggests at surface level, and despite that farcical tone thanks to its poopy premise, is actually a worrisome concept.
This book is informative in an all-pervasive way. Many who aren’t active on social media might think that they are better off. Well, they are… But are they entirely safe? Not at all, and this book proves why.
Doctorow begins this book with a background on ‘enshittification’ and goes on to elaborate upon the various ways in which the term is relevant to every single one of us who uses the internet. He substantiates every claim he makes with solid real-world examples. Some were the expected guilty parties such as Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Twitter; some entries were a bit more surprising at least to me. (Case in point: Apple and Uber.)
Those of us on social media (Not counting Goodreads as SM, even though I know its current owner Amazon is utter 💩) already know the difference in how our feeds were when SM just started vis-à-vis the doomscroll of sponsored trash that we see these days. Doctorow explains this degradation through a proper sequence of events that applies to all mega tech corporations, whether through computers or smartphones, websites or apps, tech devices or household gadgets. Wherever there is the internet, there is enshittification in some way or the other.
What makes the book even better is the author’s approach towards the topic. Though the content is tech-intensive by its very nature, Doctorow makes it as accessible as possible. Every term is explained, and every action of the companies mentioned herein is evaluated in a way that makes sense not just to tech-savvy readers but to general users as well. He even adds in humour wherever possible. These remarks are somewhat snarky in tone, but I think that is the best match for the vibe of the book.
I also love how fearless the author is in his declarations. His insightfully scathing remarks about the current US president’s destructive corporate and glocal policies had me virtually whooping. In a world where most content is moderated to suit the rich and powerful, such a filter-free tone is refreshing.
The book isn't limited to the US alone, but as most of the global mega corporations are headquartered in the USA, a major chunk of it is US-centric. But this shouldn’t be used as a deterrent. After all, no matter where we are in the world, we still use the same internet, and whether our countries are mentioned or not, most governments are the same when it comes to surveillance.
As an avid reader and a reluctant social media user (Goodreads is my only happy online space these days), I assumed that at least half of the topics dealt by the author would be familiar to me. I was so wrong! I have read two other books related to social media – Sarah Frier’s “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram” (An investigative nonfiction about Instagram) and Sarah Wynn-Williams’ “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” (A memoir-cum-exposé of the author’s years at Facebook.) Both these books were impactful at least to some extent. But they would have been scary only to those who still believed idealistically in the goodness of social media. Doctorow’s book reaches far, far beyond these books, and shows us how much surveillance of our lives is constantly going on, even if we aren’t online. If you have ever wondered how your phone shows you ads for toilet paper when you were only talking about it verbally with your family member, you will learn the reason from this book. The whole thing is scary!
Does the book fulfil the promise of the tagline and also tell us what we can do about enshittification? It does. Is it an easy process? No. Will it help? Hah! Are you really that gullible?
The only negative is that the content gets repetitive at times. But repetition does lead to better retention (and in this case, hopefully to awareness and online safety as well), so I won't hold this against a book that is otherwise so educational.
🎧 The Audiobook Experience:
The audiobook, clocking at 10 hrs 17 min, is narrated by the author himself. He is a masterful narrator, and as he says, who better than the author himself to know how to voice the book as he envisioned it? The audio version is hence a great way of experiencing this book.
(Editing to Add: This query came up in the comments, hence adding this info here for everyone. You won't find this audiobook on Audible. The author has made his reasons clear in the book as well as on his Kickstarter page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...) . I borrowed the audiobook from my library, but if you want to purchase it, you can try getting it through other Audiobook sellers such as Libro.fm or buy it directly from the author's online store here: https://shop.craphound.com )
Overall, I thought I already knew a lot about this subject but this book taught me even more. I am already careful about what I reveal on social media. This book might just make me paranoid of the whole internet!
Definitely recommended to anyone who wishes to know how much of our personal content isn't personal anymore, whether by choice or by compulsion or by sheer unawareness. This isn't a flawless book, but its information is more than enough to overcome the hurdles. Don’t allow that scatological title to turn you off. After all, you already know we are living in shitty times. Might as well read a book that acknowledges this.
4.5 stars, rounding it up for the audio version and in solidarity with the message.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I follow the Goodreads rating policy:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ - Lifelong favourite!
⭐⭐⭐⭐ - I loved the book.
⭐⭐⭐ - I liked the book.
⭐⭐ - I found the book average.
⭐ - I hated the book.
The decimals indicate the degree of the in-between feelings.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Connect with me through:
My Blog || The StoryGraph || Instagram || Facebook ||
October 9, 2025
A slight spoiler, but I love that this book spends 250 pages on “here’s what enshittification means” and gives incredibly detailed and valuable lessons on the ways it functions and how to spot and analyze it. And then with 5 pages left, Doctrow throws his hands in the air and just says “fucking run with it. Bastardize the idea” because what he sees as the enshittification is a problem that’s growing and must be combatted with thousands of imperfect methods. Essential reading if you want books on 21st century business or technology histories
November 1, 2025
3.5 ⭐
As a millennial who grew up on the internet, I've seen the humble, amazing beginnings of everything. From MySpace bulletins to the early days of Facebook (back so far as when we had to have a mandatory "First Name Last Name is" before every status update), I remember when the internet was this cool thing that lived in the "computer room" at your parents house where you could visit after school and enjoy such luxuries as a chronological feed and apps like Echofon keeping Twitter accessible from your desktop's taskbar.
Because of this, Enshittification is glaring. In this book, Doctorow explains how we got here (here, being the Enshittocene) and how we can get out. Through tons of examples and case studies, this book breaks down all the ways internet giants like Uber, Facebook, and Amazon have gone from incredible tools that we all loved to use, to things we all hate but are now stuck using, even though they have become shells of their former selves, hated by both their users and the advertisers paying to keep them alive.
Now, as far as the book itself goes, if you're a fan of Doctorow's already, or you're someone like me who is chronologically online and has watched all this happen to your favourite social media apps and services, a lot of what's in here is probably stuff you already know or at the very least, won't surprise you.
While this is an enjoyable read, for the most part, I found that Doctorow repeated himself and called back to things he already brought up a lot, to the point where I started to not want to pick it up anymore. I feel as though this were trimmed by ~100 pages, it would be a much more solid book and I would instead give it 4 stars.
All in all, despite the length, I would still recommend this book, especially if you feel like something is off with the tech and apps you interact with every day but can't really put your finger on why, or you want to learn more about the mechanisms behind why everything sucks now.
As a millennial who grew up on the internet, I've seen the humble, amazing beginnings of everything. From MySpace bulletins to the early days of Facebook (back so far as when we had to have a mandatory "First Name Last Name is" before every status update), I remember when the internet was this cool thing that lived in the "computer room" at your parents house where you could visit after school and enjoy such luxuries as a chronological feed and apps like Echofon keeping Twitter accessible from your desktop's taskbar.
Because of this, Enshittification is glaring. In this book, Doctorow explains how we got here (here, being the Enshittocene) and how we can get out. Through tons of examples and case studies, this book breaks down all the ways internet giants like Uber, Facebook, and Amazon have gone from incredible tools that we all loved to use, to things we all hate but are now stuck using, even though they have become shells of their former selves, hated by both their users and the advertisers paying to keep them alive.
Now, as far as the book itself goes, if you're a fan of Doctorow's already, or you're someone like me who is chronologically online and has watched all this happen to your favourite social media apps and services, a lot of what's in here is probably stuff you already know or at the very least, won't surprise you.
While this is an enjoyable read, for the most part, I found that Doctorow repeated himself and called back to things he already brought up a lot, to the point where I started to not want to pick it up anymore. I feel as though this were trimmed by ~100 pages, it would be a much more solid book and I would instead give it 4 stars.
All in all, despite the length, I would still recommend this book, especially if you feel like something is off with the tech and apps you interact with every day but can't really put your finger on why, or you want to learn more about the mechanisms behind why everything sucks now.
January 19, 2026
It was really depressing to be reading this in the midst of Goodreads taking away the direct messaging function, further enshittifying an already enshittified site that wishes its users would -- to quote another article about the current state of the internet -- "Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things."
The tech monoliths are moving toward a state of technofeudalism where they get to own everything, and we just rent anything important for our life from them.
While painting this gloomy portrait of the world today, Cory Doctorow tries to throw in some hopeful things he sees that might enable us to push back. But having just finished the book, it's hard to see anything but the walls of the hole we are in, especially since all his analysis barely touches on the ramifications AI will have on this whole affair, and I'm guessing it won't be good.
Very informative and highly recommended.
The tech monoliths are moving toward a state of technofeudalism where they get to own everything, and we just rent anything important for our life from them.
While painting this gloomy portrait of the world today, Cory Doctorow tries to throw in some hopeful things he sees that might enable us to push back. But having just finished the book, it's hard to see anything but the walls of the hole we are in, especially since all his analysis barely touches on the ramifications AI will have on this whole affair, and I'm guessing it won't be good.
Very informative and highly recommended.
March 29, 2026
Surprise surprise, Enshittification is a shitty book. That's honestly too bad because the matter is extremely important and needs way more light shining on it. I really want to know what causes "enshittification" and how to battle it. But it's just too damn boring. I kept zoning out or going back to my PC or phone... I dnf at 20% because I both couldn't stand Doctorow's snarky, sassy, annoying way of writing and the extremely boring, copious filler material, droning on and on. I get it. I got it 5 pages ago! The problem is that this book in reality is just a bunch of blog posts by Doctorow combined together. The cohesion is fragile at best, non-existing at worst. It makes sense that it uses "blog" speak, that all-knowing, annoying way of writing to quickly entice readers, and that each part drags out, like stand-alone blog posts. It sucks, and I looked forward to this for months!
I guess if you love reading blogs you'll love this though.
I guess if you love reading blogs you'll love this though.
March 5, 2026
I have only been on Goodreads since 2018 but since I joined there have been several major changes and IMHO, all of them made the site worse. Remember the old book pages? PM? Why does every change make the site worse? GR is becoming enshittified! But, so Doctorow argues, are most if not all internet platforms. What exactly is enshittification? Doctorow provides a nice schematic:
While Enshittification focuses upon internet platforms. A platform basically serves as a middleman between buyers and sellers (think Amazon, Ebay or Uber). Another word for a platform is an intermediary which serves to connect people with one another. Doctorow argues the problem rests with no intermediaries per se, but rather when these intermediaries become too powerful. A quarter into the digitized 21st century and intermediaries have never been so powerful.
Doctorow focuses upon platforms here, but also applies this to broader aspects of the goods and services we consume. So, what explains the Great Enshittening? Doctorow approaches this like a disease investigation, with sections deemed "the Pathology," "the Epidemiology" and so forth. Basically, Doctorow argues that while all companies would like to enshittify their products to gather more value for them at their user's expense, there are features of our economy that historically have held them back. The four 'checks' he depicts in detail are: 1. the Discipline of Competition; 2. The Discipline of Regulation; 3. The Discipline of Self-Help (e.g., policies that allow people or firms to fix their problems by themselves), and 4. The Discipline of (Tech) Workers. Again, while all four apply to most firms, Doctorow focuses upon the tech industry.
With detailed case studies (Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple) Doctorow demonstrates in detail how all four of these 'checks' have been eroded in the last 25 years. In all sectors of our economy firms have been consolidating, becoming larger and with more market share. A large reason behind this concerns how the US basically abandoned anti-trust from the late 70s to know (thanks to Milton Friedman and neoliberalism). No competition, no impetus to improve your product. Regulation? Please. Regulators have been bought off or become part of the revolving door. Regarding self-help, computers have the ability to run any code, making them interoperable, but due to IP laws, firms restrict this, locking in people. Finally, workers with unions had power; today, what unions? Tech workers were scarce so the tech industry 'wooed' them with nice salaries, free gourmet food, etc., but now? Witness the mass tech layoff in the last few years. In all cases, the 'checks' that used to keep firms in check have eroded.
Doctorow's book really hit home for me. Lucid, clear and well argued. I loved the discussion of intellectual property here. Going back to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), firms lobbied for and won a precedent-- digital rights management (DRM). Copyright being perceived as too weak in a digital environment, DRM are another way to control content. You cannot copy DVDs because they are encrypted with DRM for example. Now, what the DMCA did was install HUGE penalties for cracking DRM. If you, say, 'crack' a DVD you bought, say to make a back up copy, you can still be liable for a 500,000 dollar fine and 5 years in jail. Even if you just have the 'tools' to do so, and never even use them, the same penalty applies. Over the years, various firms and industries have widened the use of DRM. When you buy a car today, you cannot turn of the surveillance of you (which is collected and sold to insurance companies for example) because that would mean 'cracking' the code in your car's computer. Ditto with car repairs; try putting a third party part in your Volvo and it may not work. Why? The part did not have the right chip. You can stick a chip on anything and call it smart, and then DRM provisions apply. Why cannot not you use different ink on your printer than from HP? Each HP ink cartridge has a chip with DRM. Ugly!!
All in all, a fantastic book! If you ever wondered why the internet gets worse each year, you really need to read this. Plus, Doctorow, an unrepentant optimist, has many positive things to say on how to rectify the situation. Kudos Cory! 5 unshitty stars!
1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. They then abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.
The pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you'll start seeing it, too.
While Enshittification focuses upon internet platforms. A platform basically serves as a middleman between buyers and sellers (think Amazon, Ebay or Uber). Another word for a platform is an intermediary which serves to connect people with one another. Doctorow argues the problem rests with no intermediaries per se, but rather when these intermediaries become too powerful. A quarter into the digitized 21st century and intermediaries have never been so powerful.
Doctorow focuses upon platforms here, but also applies this to broader aspects of the goods and services we consume. So, what explains the Great Enshittening? Doctorow approaches this like a disease investigation, with sections deemed "the Pathology," "the Epidemiology" and so forth. Basically, Doctorow argues that while all companies would like to enshittify their products to gather more value for them at their user's expense, there are features of our economy that historically have held them back. The four 'checks' he depicts in detail are: 1. the Discipline of Competition; 2. The Discipline of Regulation; 3. The Discipline of Self-Help (e.g., policies that allow people or firms to fix their problems by themselves), and 4. The Discipline of (Tech) Workers. Again, while all four apply to most firms, Doctorow focuses upon the tech industry.
With detailed case studies (Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple) Doctorow demonstrates in detail how all four of these 'checks' have been eroded in the last 25 years. In all sectors of our economy firms have been consolidating, becoming larger and with more market share. A large reason behind this concerns how the US basically abandoned anti-trust from the late 70s to know (thanks to Milton Friedman and neoliberalism). No competition, no impetus to improve your product. Regulation? Please. Regulators have been bought off or become part of the revolving door. Regarding self-help, computers have the ability to run any code, making them interoperable, but due to IP laws, firms restrict this, locking in people. Finally, workers with unions had power; today, what unions? Tech workers were scarce so the tech industry 'wooed' them with nice salaries, free gourmet food, etc., but now? Witness the mass tech layoff in the last few years. In all cases, the 'checks' that used to keep firms in check have eroded.
Doctorow's book really hit home for me. Lucid, clear and well argued. I loved the discussion of intellectual property here. Going back to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), firms lobbied for and won a precedent-- digital rights management (DRM). Copyright being perceived as too weak in a digital environment, DRM are another way to control content. You cannot copy DVDs because they are encrypted with DRM for example. Now, what the DMCA did was install HUGE penalties for cracking DRM. If you, say, 'crack' a DVD you bought, say to make a back up copy, you can still be liable for a 500,000 dollar fine and 5 years in jail. Even if you just have the 'tools' to do so, and never even use them, the same penalty applies. Over the years, various firms and industries have widened the use of DRM. When you buy a car today, you cannot turn of the surveillance of you (which is collected and sold to insurance companies for example) because that would mean 'cracking' the code in your car's computer. Ditto with car repairs; try putting a third party part in your Volvo and it may not work. Why? The part did not have the right chip. You can stick a chip on anything and call it smart, and then DRM provisions apply. Why cannot not you use different ink on your printer than from HP? Each HP ink cartridge has a chip with DRM. Ugly!!
All in all, a fantastic book! If you ever wondered why the internet gets worse each year, you really need to read this. Plus, Doctorow, an unrepentant optimist, has many positive things to say on how to rectify the situation. Kudos Cory! 5 unshitty stars!
December 11, 2025
If you've noticed that everything has gotten worse---from basic Internet services, medical costs, automobiles, air travel, the movie industry, appliances, toys, streaming services, the intelligence level of our politicians, etc.---then you are witnessing what Cory Doctorow calls "Enshittification", which happens to be the title of his latest must-read book. It's not just a clever, humorous title. It encapsulates a frightening truth about the world we are currently living in.
Doctorow, in a nutshell, explains how lack of competition, de-regulation, and a universal trend toward valuing shareholders over both labor and consumers have created monopolies in just about every aspect of our world. It's why Google, Amazon, Apple, Uber, Facebook, and a slew of other companies that we once looked up to and revered now suck. It's because they can afford to, and because they don't care about us---the consumer---anymore. They know that we have no choice but to use their products and services because they are the only ones who can provide those products and services, and they continue to price-gouge and offer shittier services as a result.
Doctorow's book is eye-opening, at least in terms of the amount of research and knowledge he has accrued. It's not really eye-opening in the fact that the world is much shittier than it was just 10 years ago. We already knew this. Doctorow just lays out the whys and wherefores. Thankfully, he also offers solutions. But they are going to require most of us to get off our asses, get involved, and work together.
God fucking help us.
Doctorow, in a nutshell, explains how lack of competition, de-regulation, and a universal trend toward valuing shareholders over both labor and consumers have created monopolies in just about every aspect of our world. It's why Google, Amazon, Apple, Uber, Facebook, and a slew of other companies that we once looked up to and revered now suck. It's because they can afford to, and because they don't care about us---the consumer---anymore. They know that we have no choice but to use their products and services because they are the only ones who can provide those products and services, and they continue to price-gouge and offer shittier services as a result.
Doctorow's book is eye-opening, at least in terms of the amount of research and knowledge he has accrued. It's not really eye-opening in the fact that the world is much shittier than it was just 10 years ago. We already knew this. Doctorow just lays out the whys and wherefores. Thankfully, he also offers solutions. But they are going to require most of us to get off our asses, get involved, and work together.
God fucking help us.
May 17, 2026
I can't recommend this enough. In fact, I think it should be required reading for anyone sick and tired of the general enshittification we've all been experiencing.
And while it's a word we all use now, or at least I have been, I should point out that Cory Doctorow, wonderful novelist and even better non-fiction writer, was the one to COIN the word.
That's no small feat. And this is no cash-grab of a book, either. It's an extremely coherent and exhaustive analysis of where we are through the lens of how the technological feudalism began and how it transformed from a value-laden service into the nasty bullshit factory it has become.
Google, Meta/Facebook, Twitter, HP, Microsoft, and we can't forget Elon. It's all part and parcel of a great enshittification that begins with undercutting and driving everyone else out of business by subsidies, graduating to squeezing the end users in favor of the suppliers, then squeezing the suppliers as well because you're officially too big to lose or give a shit about anyone but your shareholders.
Sound familiar?
And because it's becoming such a standard business model, we now have subscription services for our car seats, printer ink that will brick your printer unless you pay a monthly rent, and much darker features across the board, including but not limited to medical devices, fresh drinking water, any DRM enshittified software or books you buy which can go poof at any time, or the fact that the prices you pay for anything can change on the fly to reflect how your software's spy algorithms have determined that it can SQUEEZE you just that little bit more.
Sound familiar?
Well, Cory Doctorow doesn't just give us rage bait in this book. He goes into detail about history, anti-trust laws, regulation, unions, and how each and every one of us can fight back realistically. And I'm not saying we have to get our pitchforks from the pitchfork emporium, either. I'm saying that we've SEEN the changes in a lot of our own lifetimes. And while those changes DID enshittify, there were always brief periods where it DID get better. The point is to codify safeguards DURING those transformative periods to prevent monopolies from taking over.
As they very much have.
So take the early days of the internet with hope, people. Ma Bell seemed monolithic. And then we had a brief spell of freedom. The point is not to go the unregulated path again. Insist on healthy business practices. The current businesses are imploding. We have the know-how, the will to create good things. It is entirely possible--assuming we don't let the predators and the IP litigators (all on the side of the businesses) set such a pace that they will start making us rent the very air we breathe.
Feudalism, indeed. Land owners. Allowing us to produce our own lives on the land THEY own. Sound familiar? All the tech we keep buying. All the smart features. They're preventing us from OWNING anything we buy. It's ALL rented. One way or another.
Public outcry against enshittification WILL happen, whether or not we call it that officially. Too many people are already at the ends of their ropes.
Will change come peacefully? It can. People just need to build something that far outperforms the middlemen who have us all by the balls and then prevent it from being sold out to the enshittifiers.
Doctorow's enthusiasm and optimism is truly a marvel to read.
Again, don't sleep on this.
And while it's a word we all use now, or at least I have been, I should point out that Cory Doctorow, wonderful novelist and even better non-fiction writer, was the one to COIN the word.
That's no small feat. And this is no cash-grab of a book, either. It's an extremely coherent and exhaustive analysis of where we are through the lens of how the technological feudalism began and how it transformed from a value-laden service into the nasty bullshit factory it has become.
Google, Meta/Facebook, Twitter, HP, Microsoft, and we can't forget Elon. It's all part and parcel of a great enshittification that begins with undercutting and driving everyone else out of business by subsidies, graduating to squeezing the end users in favor of the suppliers, then squeezing the suppliers as well because you're officially too big to lose or give a shit about anyone but your shareholders.
Sound familiar?
And because it's becoming such a standard business model, we now have subscription services for our car seats, printer ink that will brick your printer unless you pay a monthly rent, and much darker features across the board, including but not limited to medical devices, fresh drinking water, any DRM enshittified software or books you buy which can go poof at any time, or the fact that the prices you pay for anything can change on the fly to reflect how your software's spy algorithms have determined that it can SQUEEZE you just that little bit more.
Sound familiar?
Well, Cory Doctorow doesn't just give us rage bait in this book. He goes into detail about history, anti-trust laws, regulation, unions, and how each and every one of us can fight back realistically. And I'm not saying we have to get our pitchforks from the pitchfork emporium, either. I'm saying that we've SEEN the changes in a lot of our own lifetimes. And while those changes DID enshittify, there were always brief periods where it DID get better. The point is to codify safeguards DURING those transformative periods to prevent monopolies from taking over.
As they very much have.
So take the early days of the internet with hope, people. Ma Bell seemed monolithic. And then we had a brief spell of freedom. The point is not to go the unregulated path again. Insist on healthy business practices. The current businesses are imploding. We have the know-how, the will to create good things. It is entirely possible--assuming we don't let the predators and the IP litigators (all on the side of the businesses) set such a pace that they will start making us rent the very air we breathe.
Feudalism, indeed. Land owners. Allowing us to produce our own lives on the land THEY own. Sound familiar? All the tech we keep buying. All the smart features. They're preventing us from OWNING anything we buy. It's ALL rented. One way or another.
Public outcry against enshittification WILL happen, whether or not we call it that officially. Too many people are already at the ends of their ropes.
Will change come peacefully? It can. People just need to build something that far outperforms the middlemen who have us all by the balls and then prevent it from being sold out to the enshittifiers.
Doctorow's enthusiasm and optimism is truly a marvel to read.
Again, don't sleep on this.
April 1, 2026
P.216: This is the enshittifier’s credo: “We’re just doing the thing that makes life worse for you so we can make life better for us. The socializing, buying, selling, publishing, driving, riding, working and hiring you do on our platform is less important than the platform itself. Your job is to create as much value on that platform as possible. Our job is to harvest all of that value, leaving behind the smallest quantum of utility that will keep the platform from imploding. That is the deal. We’re owners, you’re users.”
P.310: Throughout labor history, there’s only been one mechanism that working people could use to protect their pay and working conditions, through times of labor scarcity and labor supply: unions.
In the last 70 years or so, often depicted as the “American century”, union membership has fallen from 34% in 1954 to around 10% nowadays. No matter the party of the president or congress, it feels like there has been a continuous shift into less protection for workers and more for the owners. As the owners have acquired more and more wealth, their largesse has not been spent uplifting their employees, the “trickle-down” effect touted by Reaganomics being another falsehood spewed. Even the noblesse oblige or philanthropy of previous “captains of industry” seem quaint compared to the cutthroat tyrants of the tech industry like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who recently criticized “The Giving Pledge,” which advocates for the mega-wealthy to improve society by “giving away” the majority of their wealth in their lifetimes.
It is in this environment that Cory Doctorow has written this eye-opening book that details why so much of modern technology feels well…shitty. It breaks down the gradual process of a platform or site from being effective and beloved by its users to being a corporate driven cesspool that relies on advertising tricks and data capturing to improve their (the mega wealthy purveyors) bottom lines, while the internet gets worse and worse. We learn how the offending company, whether it be Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon is able to control and monopolize their sectors while their competition winnows away. There is analysis of how the 1996 Telecommunications Act signed by Bill Clinton, which sought to make it easier for companies to embrace the internet has in turn made it near impossible for smaller businesses to compete, which has led to more and more media conglomerates and fewer competition. This has led to our current world, dominated by a few, as those in charge of regulating business have largely ignored mergers and consolidations. With minimal competition and little incentive to improve their product, the tech companies stagnate and we the consumer who have become reliant and, in some cases, addicted are left to face the consequences of enshittification.
Overall, this was a mixed bag for me. The concept was strong and I liked the fact that I was not paranoid that platforms seem to plateau and get worse and worse, but in fact not only is this true, but there is a reason behind this shift. The amount of research and making it in terms that a layperson such as myself could understand was appreciated. Ending it on a positive note, after the avalanche of enshittification was a welcomed touch as well. However, for me most of the anecdotes fell a little flat and the constant callbacks to previous section/s became slightly irksome and repetitious. The self-promotion about his previous works, also got tiresome. I am on the 3/4 line, but due to the importance of the subject matter, it gets the benefit of the doubt and the 3.5 can be boosted to 4 stars.
P.310: Throughout labor history, there’s only been one mechanism that working people could use to protect their pay and working conditions, through times of labor scarcity and labor supply: unions.
In the last 70 years or so, often depicted as the “American century”, union membership has fallen from 34% in 1954 to around 10% nowadays. No matter the party of the president or congress, it feels like there has been a continuous shift into less protection for workers and more for the owners. As the owners have acquired more and more wealth, their largesse has not been spent uplifting their employees, the “trickle-down” effect touted by Reaganomics being another falsehood spewed. Even the noblesse oblige or philanthropy of previous “captains of industry” seem quaint compared to the cutthroat tyrants of the tech industry like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who recently criticized “The Giving Pledge,” which advocates for the mega-wealthy to improve society by “giving away” the majority of their wealth in their lifetimes.
It is in this environment that Cory Doctorow has written this eye-opening book that details why so much of modern technology feels well…shitty. It breaks down the gradual process of a platform or site from being effective and beloved by its users to being a corporate driven cesspool that relies on advertising tricks and data capturing to improve their (the mega wealthy purveyors) bottom lines, while the internet gets worse and worse. We learn how the offending company, whether it be Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon is able to control and monopolize their sectors while their competition winnows away. There is analysis of how the 1996 Telecommunications Act signed by Bill Clinton, which sought to make it easier for companies to embrace the internet has in turn made it near impossible for smaller businesses to compete, which has led to more and more media conglomerates and fewer competition. This has led to our current world, dominated by a few, as those in charge of regulating business have largely ignored mergers and consolidations. With minimal competition and little incentive to improve their product, the tech companies stagnate and we the consumer who have become reliant and, in some cases, addicted are left to face the consequences of enshittification.
Overall, this was a mixed bag for me. The concept was strong and I liked the fact that I was not paranoid that platforms seem to plateau and get worse and worse, but in fact not only is this true, but there is a reason behind this shift. The amount of research and making it in terms that a layperson such as myself could understand was appreciated. Ending it on a positive note, after the avalanche of enshittification was a welcomed touch as well. However, for me most of the anecdotes fell a little flat and the constant callbacks to previous section/s became slightly irksome and repetitious. The self-promotion about his previous works, also got tiresome. I am on the 3/4 line, but due to the importance of the subject matter, it gets the benefit of the doubt and the 3.5 can be boosted to 4 stars.
March 7, 2026
F*** Elon Musk and Trump.
Honestly, that should be a review enough for you.
An interrogating and enlightening non-fiction analysing and presenting the decline of online platforms by showing how digital giants (X, TikTok, Amazon, Meta, Apple) have become "hellish dumpster fires" of poor user experience.
Basically, attract, monetise, wring.
Lure, trap, squeeze.
First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.
The writing is a personable and accessible. The author is humorous, realistic, and in-touch with the lay opinion and perspective.
There are an array of examples used, ones that call every consumer out and others that will shock you.
The monopolisation is glaring and this is only making things worse. There is an interweave of policies, money, and power that makes this a gridlocked system.
Amazon makes 38 billion every yearcharging merchants for search placement.
On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you'll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, that best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.
I appreciated that the book acknowledged how difficult it is to break this cycle as we have all invested so much (time, money, contacts, photos, ease, convenience, data).
There is some good news and advice on the emerging dynamos the underdog fight back. I do wish there was more information for what the ordinary person can do. If we have to rely on legislative solutions, it feels hopeless.
Bookstagram
Tiktok
Honestly, that should be a review enough for you.
An interrogating and enlightening non-fiction analysing and presenting the decline of online platforms by showing how digital giants (X, TikTok, Amazon, Meta, Apple) have become "hellish dumpster fires" of poor user experience.
Basically, attract, monetise, wring.
Lure, trap, squeeze.
First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.
The writing is a personable and accessible. The author is humorous, realistic, and in-touch with the lay opinion and perspective.
There are an array of examples used, ones that call every consumer out and others that will shock you.
The monopolisation is glaring and this is only making things worse. There is an interweave of policies, money, and power that makes this a gridlocked system.
Amazon makes 38 billion every yearcharging merchants for search placement.
On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you'll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, that best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.
I appreciated that the book acknowledged how difficult it is to break this cycle as we have all invested so much (time, money, contacts, photos, ease, convenience, data).
There is some good news and advice on the emerging dynamos the underdog fight back. I do wish there was more information for what the ordinary person can do. If we have to rely on legislative solutions, it feels hopeless.
Bookstagram
Tiktok
July 21, 2026
In contrast to James Brindle’s boohoo festival New Dark Age, Doctorow’s witty diagnosis on the regressive state of technology hastening the regressive state of the human mind is a little less bitter. His solutions, alas, depend on the sort of collective action that this technology is hard-coded to suppress, so we are all fucked. A terrific book on the now-undeniable failure of the internet to serve up the utopian ideals we were promised.
November 19, 2025
Enlightening, and depressing. I knew I needed to understand just how deeply we are being screwed by corporations, but man, it was hard to hear it all explained in a way that validated everything I suspected and noticed.
Cory Doctorow, I both love you and hate you for the brain bomb you set off in my head with Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
Throughout all of the examples given from all areas of the Internet, the bottom line, more or less, is that corporations are going to make things as awful for consumers as they can get away with. As an example, Audible keeps removing features that are inconsequential. It would cost them nothing to continue to offer them, and people like the convenience of certain queries or the way things are displayed. We users complain, but nothing happens. It was baffling why they would pay their programmers to take away popular features, until I read this book. Now I get it. I don't like it, but now I also understand I'm not supposed to like it. As a consumer, I'm being trained to tolerate things getting just a little worse every version, every year.
There isn't much we can do about this, as it's as entrenched in corporate (secret) missions as shinkflation. That was the most disappointing message from the book. The only way to really combat it is to shop locally and support the smaller businesses that are doing things honorably. The corporations will continue to abuse us until we show them we won't put up with it. That takes time and persistence, but we the people do have the power to push back and show them we're not going to take their enshittified nonsense without a fight.
Cory Doctorow, I both love you and hate you for the brain bomb you set off in my head with Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
Throughout all of the examples given from all areas of the Internet, the bottom line, more or less, is that corporations are going to make things as awful for consumers as they can get away with. As an example, Audible keeps removing features that are inconsequential. It would cost them nothing to continue to offer them, and people like the convenience of certain queries or the way things are displayed. We users complain, but nothing happens. It was baffling why they would pay their programmers to take away popular features, until I read this book. Now I get it. I don't like it, but now I also understand I'm not supposed to like it. As a consumer, I'm being trained to tolerate things getting just a little worse every version, every year.
There isn't much we can do about this, as it's as entrenched in corporate (secret) missions as shinkflation. That was the most disappointing message from the book. The only way to really combat it is to shop locally and support the smaller businesses that are doing things honorably. The corporations will continue to abuse us until we show them we won't put up with it. That takes time and persistence, but we the people do have the power to push back and show them we're not going to take their enshittified nonsense without a fight.
November 14, 2025
I liked the first third or so of this book that was more narrowly about enshittification, but it started to get more technical at the end and a bit repetitive. I also don't agree with all of his points, like the idea that Mastodon is the solution to social media or the romanticization of the "old, good internet". Still, I'm glad I listened to it, and there are some chilling facts and anecdotes included.
December 20, 2025
5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Audio format 🎧
I don't typically read a lot of nonfiction but I'm glad I got to this one in 2025. Great information about the digital platforms we're all on, including this one.
Enshittification goes into how the tech companies have completely exploited users and the decline of their platforms.
We're f'ing cooked unless there isn't more regulation for these platforms and the predatory behaviors of the tech oligarchs!
Audio format 🎧
I don't typically read a lot of nonfiction but I'm glad I got to this one in 2025. Great information about the digital platforms we're all on, including this one.
Enshittification goes into how the tech companies have completely exploited users and the decline of their platforms.
We're f'ing cooked unless there isn't more regulation for these platforms and the predatory behaviors of the tech oligarchs!
November 30, 2025
I'm gonna call it at 5, although it's probably more of a 4.5, but like Careless People -- ratings matter and we need people to fucking get on board with fixing this shit.
Distilled, Doctorow's argument is elegant and simple: things (the internet & digital products specifically, in this case) get worse because they're allowed to. If you want things to get better, you have to stop allowing them to get worse.
His "Cure" section (or the "What to Do About It" part of the book) can effectively be boiled down to: regulate, unionize, and strike fear into the hearts of the overlords. There's obviously more to it than that, but know that they're all excellent points and things we should do. However, if you're looking for a solution that gives you some sense of individual power, this isn't the book for that. Doctorow spares us the '3 Rs!' bullshit; any one of us recycling didn't stop the climate crisis. So it's a bit depressing, but it's also at least real, and he gives clear examples of where -- even in the new Trump administration -- positive direction is cropping up. There is hope (and it seems like a lot of it is based in Europe, quite frankly).
But reading all of this is a reminder of how far we've fallen and how easy it is to find yourself spun into the wheel of enshittification and technofeudalism (which, Doctorow argues, is the prioritization of "rent" over "profit", and baby are we ever there already). We subscribe to the rhetoric for a variety of reasons -- we like the supposed benefits we get from our shiny new gadgets, we want to keep our salaries to support ourselves and our families, we are too fucking tired to disentangle ourselves from the system. All of these are fair, and all of these are handcuffs that we're all going to need to reckon with sooner rather than later.
Doctorow doesn't say anything particularly new here, I don't think, but he organizes his thoughts brilliantly, writes compellingly, and brings the whole spiralling nightmare into the spotlight in a way that makes it just impossible to ignore. You can delude yourself, but we're in it, and we have to vote, rally, and fight for the right people and things to avoid what looks like a pretty damning future.
But humans are cockroaches, baby -- we've toppled empires before, we'll do it again. Elbows up.
Distilled, Doctorow's argument is elegant and simple: things (the internet & digital products specifically, in this case) get worse because they're allowed to. If you want things to get better, you have to stop allowing them to get worse.
His "Cure" section (or the "What to Do About It" part of the book) can effectively be boiled down to: regulate, unionize, and strike fear into the hearts of the overlords. There's obviously more to it than that, but know that they're all excellent points and things we should do. However, if you're looking for a solution that gives you some sense of individual power, this isn't the book for that. Doctorow spares us the '3 Rs!' bullshit; any one of us recycling didn't stop the climate crisis. So it's a bit depressing, but it's also at least real, and he gives clear examples of where -- even in the new Trump administration -- positive direction is cropping up. There is hope (and it seems like a lot of it is based in Europe, quite frankly).
But reading all of this is a reminder of how far we've fallen and how easy it is to find yourself spun into the wheel of enshittification and technofeudalism (which, Doctorow argues, is the prioritization of "rent" over "profit", and baby are we ever there already). We subscribe to the rhetoric for a variety of reasons -- we like the supposed benefits we get from our shiny new gadgets, we want to keep our salaries to support ourselves and our families, we are too fucking tired to disentangle ourselves from the system. All of these are fair, and all of these are handcuffs that we're all going to need to reckon with sooner rather than later.
Doctorow doesn't say anything particularly new here, I don't think, but he organizes his thoughts brilliantly, writes compellingly, and brings the whole spiralling nightmare into the spotlight in a way that makes it just impossible to ignore. You can delude yourself, but we're in it, and we have to vote, rally, and fight for the right people and things to avoid what looks like a pretty damning future.
But humans are cockroaches, baby -- we've toppled empires before, we'll do it again. Elbows up.
July 22, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review!
I wasn't familiar with Cory Doctorow's work, but I had heard of the concept of "enshittification" and, as someone who is old enough to remember what the internet was like, I jumped at the chance to understand how and why things had changed, and the thesis that we users *can* do something about it (well...). My impressions are those of someone who read this book and not any previous articles that the author might have based it on - if you have, maybe the book won't have anything new to tell you, I don't know.
It presented the information in a very clear and accesible way for those of us with just a passing knowledge of tech, using concrete case studies and examples (which abound) and a writing style that felt friendly but not annoying. The structure was fun, too: the author treats enshittification as a disease, so it's divided in four parts that explore its history, its pathology, its epidemiology, and its cure.
Like Code Dependent: Living in the shadow of AI, reading this filled me with rage at the fact that a bunch of greedy millionaires with a fragile ego get to decide the worst ways to ruin our lives, our economies, our planet, and the very ways in which we take part of society in an endless pursuit of profit, aided by our own governments, which should be looking after *us*.
While the final part ("The cure") gave me some hope, it was mostly in a "this is all bound to fall apart eventually" way. And there are governments doing something, to be sure, but... there really isn't much that we, as users, can do. Not to mention that the legislation that gets passed under the argument of doing something often ends up doing something worse, like the current thing the EU is doing of asking for facial recognition in order to "protect" users (the author doesn't mention this case specifically, but does talk about this issue, particularly when it comes to the EU).
I will also say that I learned many things that made me glad to be living in the Global South, because to some extent I am able to screw over so much of this bullshit when I'm not able to pay for any of these services anyway. There were some things that made me want to ask my USAmerican friends if they're okay, because it's just... how. How. do y'all live like that. How does it get to a point where not only there are no free health care but also a company gets to rent out rooms and staff and charge you MORE? Insane, despairing.
As a final note, I did find the book quite repetitive in places, not in a reiterative way that was useful, but actually repeating the exact same thing in different places, so I hope it gets a final revision. Other than that, I'd really recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.
I wasn't familiar with Cory Doctorow's work, but I had heard of the concept of "enshittification" and, as someone who is old enough to remember what the internet was like, I jumped at the chance to understand how and why things had changed, and the thesis that we users *can* do something about it (well...). My impressions are those of someone who read this book and not any previous articles that the author might have based it on - if you have, maybe the book won't have anything new to tell you, I don't know.
It presented the information in a very clear and accesible way for those of us with just a passing knowledge of tech, using concrete case studies and examples (which abound) and a writing style that felt friendly but not annoying. The structure was fun, too: the author treats enshittification as a disease, so it's divided in four parts that explore its history, its pathology, its epidemiology, and its cure.
Like Code Dependent: Living in the shadow of AI, reading this filled me with rage at the fact that a bunch of greedy millionaires with a fragile ego get to decide the worst ways to ruin our lives, our economies, our planet, and the very ways in which we take part of society in an endless pursuit of profit, aided by our own governments, which should be looking after *us*.
While the final part ("The cure") gave me some hope, it was mostly in a "this is all bound to fall apart eventually" way. And there are governments doing something, to be sure, but... there really isn't much that we, as users, can do. Not to mention that the legislation that gets passed under the argument of doing something often ends up doing something worse, like the current thing the EU is doing of asking for facial recognition in order to "protect" users (the author doesn't mention this case specifically, but does talk about this issue, particularly when it comes to the EU).
I will also say that I learned many things that made me glad to be living in the Global South, because to some extent I am able to screw over so much of this bullshit when I'm not able to pay for any of these services anyway. There were some things that made me want to ask my USAmerican friends if they're okay, because it's just... how. How. do y'all live like that. How does it get to a point where not only there are no free health care but also a company gets to rent out rooms and staff and charge you MORE? Insane, despairing.
As a final note, I did find the book quite repetitive in places, not in a reiterative way that was useful, but actually repeating the exact same thing in different places, so I hope it gets a final revision. Other than that, I'd really recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.
March 8, 2026
I've heard Doctorow interviewed on radio and I could hear his voice and intonations while reading this. (Incidentally, he did read the audiobook version, so you can hear his voice too.) If the title offends you, I would recommend that you pass on the book, as the author adjusts a LOT of words in similar fashion. He admits that it was a complaint of his which got a lot of attention that solidified his use of “enshittification” since it seemed to amuse people and attract attention. I feel that he overuses the conceit, but it serves its purpose. Doctorow uses the metaphor of a disease to structure the book. We read about the Natural History, the Pathology, the Epidemiology, and finally the Cure. It divides up his arguments neatly.
I couldn't help but think about Goodreads in relation to Doctorow's observations. He talks about members of Facebook feeling unable to abandon the platform because they don't want to lose the friend group that they have established there. There are other options, but it's impossible to get all your friends to change with you to the same new service because they also feel connected to their friends. I have witnessed this firsthand as I belong to a GR group debating the options to GR. Many members of this group would move, except they mourn the loss of reading friends. I'm in that camp.
Also as described by the author, Goodreads has become big enough to be able to ignore its members. Its algorithm is unfathomable, serving up less of what I want to see, indeed what I have asked to see (my Top Friends), and flaunting more obscure members of my friend list. We all know that GR is owned by Am@zon, which Doctorow does discuss. If we are having to spend more time on GR to find the people we prefer to interact with, we are exposed to more advertising and increase the likelihood of our spending money on their service. (If only they knew that I work diligently to avoid using it! I am willing to pay more and wait longer to order through my local independent bookstore. This book only reinforces my determination.) If it is any comfort to reviewers, GR is almost certainly abusing advertisers too.
I was grateful for the final section (the Cure) which offered a bit of hope. Ironically, the current administration in the US may estrange their trading partners enough that they will no longer even attempt to get along with the Americans and will pursue tech companies with legislation and punishing fines. It's already beginning and I wish them Godspeed.
I couldn't help but think about Goodreads in relation to Doctorow's observations. He talks about members of Facebook feeling unable to abandon the platform because they don't want to lose the friend group that they have established there. There are other options, but it's impossible to get all your friends to change with you to the same new service because they also feel connected to their friends. I have witnessed this firsthand as I belong to a GR group debating the options to GR. Many members of this group would move, except they mourn the loss of reading friends. I'm in that camp.
Also as described by the author, Goodreads has become big enough to be able to ignore its members. Its algorithm is unfathomable, serving up less of what I want to see, indeed what I have asked to see (my Top Friends), and flaunting more obscure members of my friend list. We all know that GR is owned by Am@zon, which Doctorow does discuss. If we are having to spend more time on GR to find the people we prefer to interact with, we are exposed to more advertising and increase the likelihood of our spending money on their service. (If only they knew that I work diligently to avoid using it! I am willing to pay more and wait longer to order through my local independent bookstore. This book only reinforces my determination.) If it is any comfort to reviewers, GR is almost certainly abusing advertisers too.
I was grateful for the final section (the Cure) which offered a bit of hope. Ironically, the current administration in the US may estrange their trading partners enough that they will no longer even attempt to get along with the Americans and will pursue tech companies with legislation and punishing fines. It's already beginning and I wish them Godspeed.
February 16, 2026
Diagnoses the decline of the promise of the Internet, from social media platforms to online shopping to the Internet of things, and offers what the author describes as a cure.
Doctorow first briefly surveys a number of the key players, like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, asserting that they have all gone through 3 stages - the first, in which they’re good to their users, allocating surplus to them; the second, in which they’re good to their business customers, who again benefit from the surplus; and the third, when everything goes to hell in a hand basket, and the platform rips off and exploits both sides of the equation, allocating the surplus to itself. This was a persuasive, helpful model.
He then explores what he calls the epidemiology of this phenomenon, including algorithmic wage theft (interesting that if Uber drivers are picky about only picking up higher value rides, Uber will offer them some higher value rides to train them into being less picky, then reduce the value of what they’re offered over time), representing both buyers and sellers in a closed system where only the platform can see/control what’s going on, locking in users and business customers with switching costs, and shutting down competitors. Not new news, but helpfully set out.
The cure Doctorow offers is systemic rather than personal: more and different regulation to make the right to repair widespread and meaningful and antitrust law effective, and unionization.
So, it was a reasonably useful and informative read overall. I didn’t love the joky, know-it-all tone and repetitiveness. Doctorow is a gleeful, sarcastic campaigner on these issues, whereas I am not, and so mostly just felt worn out in response. There were aspects of what he describes nostalgically as the good, old Internet that I can relate to, but the prospect of grappling with tech overlords to get anything to function reliably as billed doesn’t excite me. At the end, he was explaining that rather than a world of better content moderation so that people can’t spread hate online, we should have better access to our data to switch readily among interchangeable servers of choice. This made some sense, I acknowledged through my fatigue, but was relieved that we recently managed to rehook up up our old VCR. 3.5.
Doctorow first briefly surveys a number of the key players, like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, asserting that they have all gone through 3 stages - the first, in which they’re good to their users, allocating surplus to them; the second, in which they’re good to their business customers, who again benefit from the surplus; and the third, when everything goes to hell in a hand basket, and the platform rips off and exploits both sides of the equation, allocating the surplus to itself. This was a persuasive, helpful model.
He then explores what he calls the epidemiology of this phenomenon, including algorithmic wage theft (interesting that if Uber drivers are picky about only picking up higher value rides, Uber will offer them some higher value rides to train them into being less picky, then reduce the value of what they’re offered over time), representing both buyers and sellers in a closed system where only the platform can see/control what’s going on, locking in users and business customers with switching costs, and shutting down competitors. Not new news, but helpfully set out.
The cure Doctorow offers is systemic rather than personal: more and different regulation to make the right to repair widespread and meaningful and antitrust law effective, and unionization.
So, it was a reasonably useful and informative read overall. I didn’t love the joky, know-it-all tone and repetitiveness. Doctorow is a gleeful, sarcastic campaigner on these issues, whereas I am not, and so mostly just felt worn out in response. There were aspects of what he describes nostalgically as the good, old Internet that I can relate to, but the prospect of grappling with tech overlords to get anything to function reliably as billed doesn’t excite me. At the end, he was explaining that rather than a world of better content moderation so that people can’t spread hate online, we should have better access to our data to switch readily among interchangeable servers of choice. This made some sense, I acknowledged through my fatigue, but was relieved that we recently managed to rehook up up our old VCR. 3.5.
September 12, 2026
Really excellent; notes to come soon.
Enshittification's critique of DMCA 1201’s weaponization against creatives is easily one of its strongest sections. I don't think I understood the extent to which US copyright laws actually end up protecting huge corporations, rather than small creatives:
Enshittification's critique of DMCA 1201’s weaponization against creatives is easily one of its strongest sections. I don't think I understood the extent to which US copyright laws actually end up protecting huge corporations, rather than small creatives:
An app is a website wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to install an ad blocker or any other modification that makes the product work better for you at the expense of the company's shareholders.... If I, as the author, narrator, and Investor in an audiobook, allow Amazon to sell you that book and later want to provide you with a tool so you can take your book to a rival platform, I will be committing a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. To put this in perspective: If you were to simply locate this book on a pirate torrent site and download it without paying for it, your penalty under copyright law is substantially less punitive than the penalty I would face for helping you remove the audiobook I made from Amazon's walled garden.
I also thought that “Rent Seeking and Technofeudalism”’s explanation of technofeudalism, or the idea that tech has turned from a profit-seeking enterprise to a landlord of production factors — in other words, a rent-seeking enterprise — was excellent. This also introduced me to the term monopsony, for an economic system dominated by a few buyers, and to patent trolls, who buy up junk patents to extract money and to whom certain courts, including the Eastern District of Texas, are remarkably sympathetic. Generally, I really agree with the idea that many capitalists are actually feudalists, wanting money for rent over money for innovation.
Doctorow argues that the way to return to a time before enshittification is to restore the four forces disciplining tech firms: (1) Competition; (2) Regulation; (3) Interoperability; and (4) Tech worker power. Doctorow notes here that trying to police hate speech on platforms gives platforms themselves more power (a point I have also considered), and suggests instead several other solutions:
➽Break up the monopolies and continue antitrust law to enforce competition
➽Force platforms to federate with other servers and provide users with files to leave for other platforms
➽Enforce the end to end principle – that when you search something you get best results, and that social media feeds must have a feed that shows you what you follow
➽Restore the rights of interoperators by killing laws such as DMCA section 1201, which prohibits bypassing access controls
➽Right to Repair laws
➽Tech worker unionization, and a refanging of union power (see: Shawn Fain)
➽Follow me on Substack at ellexamines.substack.com
TikTok | Goodreads | Letterboxd | Instagram | Youtube | Spotify | About |
November 12, 2025
I’m done what I want to read of the book, it’s a dark book don’t let the cover fool you as cute… said another reviewer,
it’s an evil book
could use them," which was also good news for them, he mill owners had taken to kidnapping Napoleonic War ans from London and indenturing them to a decades ser-Xtile workers who operated the older machines.
These children were used to displace the organized guilds of Those workers were unable to get help from Parliament, so they formed guerrilla armies and propagated the half-joking myth that they were led by a giant called Ned Ludd (or sometimes King or General Ludd). They called themselves Luddites. Never let anyone tell you that the Luddites were afraid of technology or angry about "progress." That's a lie propagated by historys win-ners, whose great fortunes required oceans of blood from child laborers, murdered protesters, and enslaved Africans in the "New World" who provided the cotton for their machines.
The transition of millions of workers from peasant to proletariat was a bloody one, and it rightly attracts most ot our notice when we think about the Industrial Revolution. But just as important was the transition from a society built on rents to a society built on profits. For the capitalists of the "dark Satanic Mill" to make their fortune, their right to profit
Page 196
it’s an evil book
could use them," which was also good news for them, he mill owners had taken to kidnapping Napoleonic War ans from London and indenturing them to a decades ser-Xtile workers who operated the older machines.
These children were used to displace the organized guilds of Those workers were unable to get help from Parliament, so they formed guerrilla armies and propagated the half-joking myth that they were led by a giant called Ned Ludd (or sometimes King or General Ludd). They called themselves Luddites. Never let anyone tell you that the Luddites were afraid of technology or angry about "progress." That's a lie propagated by historys win-ners, whose great fortunes required oceans of blood from child laborers, murdered protesters, and enslaved Africans in the "New World" who provided the cotton for their machines.
The transition of millions of workers from peasant to proletariat was a bloody one, and it rightly attracts most ot our notice when we think about the Industrial Revolution. But just as important was the transition from a society built on rents to a society built on profits. For the capitalists of the "dark Satanic Mill" to make their fortune, their right to profit
Page 196
November 21, 2025
Listened on audio. The smug and self-righteous tone was so off-putting and really overshadowed the content.
February 19, 2026
Confession: I bought this on Amazon. I am writing a review on an Amazon owned app. I’m sure a lot of other users feel the same numb dread every time they order something from Amazon, because regardless of how much we’ve chosen to learn about the company and its general shittiness, almost everyone knows that at the very least they are not the good guys. I expected to feel even more guilty after reading this and learning in even more specific detail exactly how shitty they are.
But the author actually helped me feel a bit less guilty. By showing their true level of ubiquity, and that even if I wanted to severely inconvenience myself by switching to other lesser known platforms, most other platforms to some degree use technology or borrow in some way from something Amazon owns, so even if it’s significantly less profit, there is a good chance they are still in some way profiting in some way from wherever you go. I am in a unique position, because somewhere around 2018-2019 I got rid of Facebook and Instagram. I have never had any other social media apps, and still only have Goodreads. But I have friends who do, and as I’ve been reading this I’ve been asking them if the specific forms of “enshittification” the author is describing matched their particular experiences on said apps. They all said they matched perfectly with what they were seeing every day. And I have DoorDash and Uber and everything he says about them lines up with what I’ve observed.
However, just cause I feel less guilty doesn’t mean it’s not enraging every time I read about even more ways these corporations have fucked over their own users and business partners, and exploited labor in terrible ways all over the world. Doctorow did a great job with his writing to ease the tension, cracking jokes and hurling insults throughout. Anyone who wants to subject themselves to what I’ve described, I’d add that I think it’s important to at the very least be aware of this stuff, even if it looks like the future is even grimmer and not much is going to really change.
But the author actually helped me feel a bit less guilty. By showing their true level of ubiquity, and that even if I wanted to severely inconvenience myself by switching to other lesser known platforms, most other platforms to some degree use technology or borrow in some way from something Amazon owns, so even if it’s significantly less profit, there is a good chance they are still in some way profiting in some way from wherever you go. I am in a unique position, because somewhere around 2018-2019 I got rid of Facebook and Instagram. I have never had any other social media apps, and still only have Goodreads. But I have friends who do, and as I’ve been reading this I’ve been asking them if the specific forms of “enshittification” the author is describing matched their particular experiences on said apps. They all said they matched perfectly with what they were seeing every day. And I have DoorDash and Uber and everything he says about them lines up with what I’ve observed.
However, just cause I feel less guilty doesn’t mean it’s not enraging every time I read about even more ways these corporations have fucked over their own users and business partners, and exploited labor in terrible ways all over the world. Doctorow did a great job with his writing to ease the tension, cracking jokes and hurling insults throughout. Anyone who wants to subject themselves to what I’ve described, I’d add that I think it’s important to at the very least be aware of this stuff, even if it looks like the future is even grimmer and not much is going to really change.
May 13, 2026
Doctorow is a good at taking complex stuff and simplifying it for normies like myself. His Enshittification concept is extremely interesting and useful: certain tech companies (and other monopolies) get big by allocating surplus resources into making the experience as good as possible for users. After a certain point the user-base grows to such a degree, and they become so entrenched in the platforms these tech companies provide, that it becomes nearly impossible for users to stop using these platforms without suffering negative repercussions (ex: stop using Facebook and you lose contact with friends, specialized groups you joined, and customers; stop using Apple and you can’t access the stuff you downloaded on your Apple products; stop using Amazon and other doesn’t matter because they have become powerful enough to generally inflate the prices of all companies). This results in tech companies making their platforms worse for their users in favor of advertisers. However, eventually these advertisers also begin to rely heavily on the users only available on platforms like Google or Facebook. This leads to the final process: the tech companies squeeze the advertisers as well, turning their products into complete shit for everyone involved except the shareholders of the tech conglomerations. When these monopolies have no competition, face weak and easily captured regulatory systems, and don’t have to worry about organized labor, there are no disincentives to prevent Enshittification.
The issue I have with this book is that it gets too bogged down in minutiae. My eyes glaze over after a while of reading tangents on “reverse-chickened centaurs”, obscure legal codes, and the intricacies of how Google modeled its website ranking algorithms based on academia citation analysis. I can ignore some of the author’s questionable political leanings, like his wholehearted acceptance of Yanis Varoufakis’ own interpretation of the already extremely sketchy and poorly defined “techno-feudalism” mode of production. However, when all of Doctorow’s solutions boil down to technocratic state management of these firms, with the end goal being to completely break them apart in order to reinvigorate competition, which will then have a positive effect on further regulations, I have to roll my eyes. Capital has a tendency to concentrate. All of the Googles, Apples, and Amazons of the world started out as smaller companies that were subdued via regulation. In the end these conglomerates still became monopolies, still overthrew regulatory shackles, and did so all based on the underlying profit motive intrinsic to capitalism. To think that breaking them apart will not restart the same cycle eventually is a failure to interpret history.
Notes:
Enshittification is the process where companies, usually Internet-mediated middle men, first provide a service tailored to draw in users/customers by allocating surplus funds towards ends that ensure the customers have a good experience. Next, after enough customers have been brought in and the experience has been tailored in such a way that they find it hard to leave, pro-customer features are stripped back and replaced with pro-business/advertising features. The customers usually have social and financial incentives to remain on these platforms despite the worsening experience. Finally, these Internet middlemen conglomerates begin putting the squeeze on the businesses that use their platforms, turning the product into utter shit. Yet, because platforms like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and even the iPhone have such large market shares and user bases, it becomes harder for businesses and customers to exit these services despite the increasingly shitty experience.
Facebook originally provided lots of unique features and a compelling narrative (“we don’t spy on you, unlike MySpace!”) in order to woo customers off of MySpace onto its platform. It even had a bot that would copy and paste your Facebook posts onto MySpace, then read back other peoples’ MySpace posts onto your Facebook account; this feature has subsequently been banned. After enough people began to join Facebook, a positive feedback loop began: people joining led to more people joining and making connections on Facebook, locking them into the platform and bringing in more people in order to network with the existing and ever-growing userbase. It became hard for people and businesses to leave; friend groups, individualized and specific support groups (for example, I am part of many special education teaching groups on Facebook unavailable elsewhere), and customers for businesses were only available on Facebook. If you wanted to leave, it became extremely difficult to bring all these people with you. Once a critical mass of users was reached, phase 2 began: Facebook made the experience worse for users in order to make it better for advertisers. They sold secretly collected user data to advertisers, then crammed everyone’s feeds with tailored advertisements. Advertisers soon became locked in to the existing userbase on Facebook as well, and Facebook held them hostage much like they had done to the users. Facebook gradually ramped up the price of targeted advertisements and decreased the number of people ads would go to. People’s feeds slowly devolved from content they wanted to see into content advertisers and other users paid premiums to force onto feeds. This is phase 3: the platform becomes a complete pile of shit.
Amazon originally provided very cheap products to consumers and directly delivered them to their homes. It subsidized these goods in order to keep the costs low for users. In return, it locked them in by providing them cheap Prime memberships, which incentivized people to do all their shopping through Amazon for the duration of their membership. As the platform grew, it also locked people in by ensuring that they could only access digital media products purchased on Amazon (ex: audiobooks, movies, ebooks, television seasons) through Amazon’s media platforms. After years of subsidizing cheap deliveries, Amazon began to swallow up smaller retailers and businesses. This meant that shopping anywhere other than Amazon became inconvenient. It thus locked its customers in. Amazon brought in customers, and merchants began to rely on Amazon in order to sell to these customers. It began squeezing its merchants through different mechanisms. If the merchants didn’t like the squeeze, they really had nowhere else to go to reliably sell to the customer base Amazon provided. Amazon began to essentially steal merchant’s products and clone cheaper ‘Amazon’ version of them. On its search engine, Amazon would then put its clones first and relegate the merchants’ products back to pages 17-30. It’s similar to Amazon’s Prime feature: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results that they lose all their sales. Amazon’s policy of “most favored nation status” also requires that merchants who raise their prices on Amazon in order to recoup the losses incurred due to Amazon’s predatory fees must ALSO raise prices everywhere else! This is why you don’t pay more on Amazon than at other retailers, because they have essentially forced everyone to raise their prices. No matter where you shop, you are basically paying an Amazon monopoly tax. Amazon has turned its search feature to shit by making merchants essential bid for their search position. Amazon’s top matches and “our pick”/“top choice” products are just the products whose merchants bribed Amazon the most to put at the top of search queries. As such, it is no surprise that products higher up on Amazon’s search bar are much more expensive than similar products many pages down the search bar. Amazon brings in $38 billion a year just on search bribes! Its service, which once provided cheap goods, has now turned in to complete shit.
Most companies would like to enshittify, since it is extremely profitable, but cannot. Workers would balk at low pay, suppliers would ship through someone else, and customers would look for cheaper and superior alternatives. Competition forces companies to make better products at cheaper prices, while government regulations prevent companies from cheating customers, suppliers, and the communities they are embedded in through fines and legal action. Competition and regulation are disciplinary processes which prevent Enshittification, and companies can only enshittify when it is profitable enough to do so despite competition and regulations. Concentration of capital is a fundamental feature of capitalism. Under neoliberalism, economic and legal theories which de-emphasized the regulation and containment of monopolies were widely accepted and propagated. Starting in the 1970s, Anti-Trust laws were no longer enforced to any meaningful degree. The result was an increase in large scale mergers and acquisitions that were actively encouraged by the American state.
Today, most industries are cartels dominated by 5 or so conglomerates. When smaller companies refuse to sell to cartels, they are starved by corporate giants who actively put a middle finger up to any supposed legal regulations intended to prevent this. For example, companies like Amazon use predatory pricing to starve and then consume potential competitors they see as vulnerable, much like a lion will stalk then hunt an old or sickly gazelle rather than attack the most athletic member of the herd. When Amazon saw online diaper seller Diapers.com as a weak link vulnerable to predation, it went into hunt mode and sold diapers at a $200 million loss over the course of 1 month (nothing in the grand scheme of Amazon, but fatal for Diapers.com). By doing this, it starved Diapers.com of profits until it went bankrupt, then purchased it for pennies on the dollar. To Amazon, burning $200 million to capture and ransack a competitor was a steal. It was also a mafia-style message to all other competitors: when Amazon makes you an offer, it is one that you cannot refuse.
Google is another master of predatory monopolistic practices. After Google made the greatest search engine in the history of the internet, it went about simply acquiring other inventions rather than producing its own (because it often failed when it tried). Android, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Maps, satellite imagery, marketing services, and other “inventions” have all been the result of Google hunting down and purchasing competitors, then integrating the competition into the company’s massive infrastructure. When giants like Google and Amazon suffocate and defeat all competition in a certain market, there is no one left to provide a superior competing service or product when these giants enshittify.
With no competitor search engines taking up its market share, Google has been able to enshittify its product: it consciously has made its search engine worse, forcing people to spend longer searching and enter more searches into the search bar. This results in people seeing more ads. Google ensured for years that every browser, whether chrome, safari, or Firefox, used Google as its default search engine (as would any smartphone, be it an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy). This cost the company billions of dollars but, much like the $200 million Amazon burned to pillage and raid Diapers.com, this was worth it in the long run in order to cement its monopoly over competitors like Bing. Anti-trust laws were historically designed to fight such anti-competitive practices, but none were enforced until Biden’s DOJ sued Google well after its market stranglehold had been firmly established. As part of the Enshittification process, Google also squeezes advertisers through invisibly attaching the names of products to certain search results; for example, if you google “soda”, whichever company bids the highest will be invisibly attached to your search (ex: “Coca-Cola” will be added to “soda” to make it seem as if you googled “Coca-Cola Soda”). This process, called semantic-matching, leads to bidding wars between advertisers for every word you search.
Google (alphabet), Facebook (Meta), and Apple all collude despite the fact that they are ostensibly competitors. For example, in a secret deal called “Jedi Blue” that was uncovered during Google’s anti-trust trial, Google and Facebook colluded to raise the price of ads while keeping higher shares of the revenue from those ads. Likewise, Google and Apple collude to keep Google as the default search engine on all Apple products. The death of competition allows money once spent improving products to be funneled into legal fees intended to fight anti-trust court cases. For example, both IBM in the 1970s and Microsoft in the 1990s spent a decade fighting Anti-trust court cases until favorable administrations were in place who would dismiss the cases and let them off lightly.
Regulation by neutral third party experts saves humans time and energy. Nobody has the time necessary to independently learn what houses in your area are safe to live in, what foods you can buy and not expect to die of food postponing, what cars have brake systems that actually work, etc. Neutral third-party specialists are needed in complex societies to ensure things run relatively safely and smoothly because no individual has have enough time or energy to do so. Regulations tend to be successful when the regulators enforcing them are truly neutral and can gather and review evidence, hold hearings, and perform other acts of investigation towards any problems that have arisen in society, whether it be safely manufacturing medicine to ensuring that your local diner is sanitary enough to make sure you won’t die from eating its food. When there are lots of companies in a given sector, they struggle to band together to fight regulations. While some might attempt to cut corners, others will continue to follow the rules and tattle tale on those that don’t. Once a sector consolidates from a few hundred competing companies who are small into a handful of powerful conglomerates, “regulatory capture” takes place. The few companies collude and agree which regulations they want to stop following, and they now have more money to fight the regulatory institutions. Often, like in the IBM and Microsoft cases, these companies spend far more on armies of lawyers than the DOJ can. Once the institutions needing regulation become too powerful for the regulatory institutions, they begin to capture the regulators.
Regulatory capture has 2 sides: a company who has captured regulators is able to find, create, and exploit loopholes to existing regulations intended to protect the general public. At the same time, it is also able to enforce harsh regulations against competitors or foreign rivals. The easiest way to circumvent regulation is to break laws with an app. For example, when uber entered the taxi market without securing taxi licenses or extending workforce protections to its drivers, it was able to claim that it could do this because Uber drivers were not employees and Uber was not an employer. It was a middle man app that connected customers to people willing to drive them in their own personal vehicles. Amazon does something similar with its drivers (DSPs). Delivery Service Providers are outsourced third parties who Amazon hires out to do most of its deliveries. DSPs must ensure their fleet of vans meet Amazon’s stringent and expensive standards (from the logo to the surveillance equipment on board) and pay for this out of their own pockets. The DSPs then hire drivers who are technically employed by the DSP and not Amazon, despite the fact that Amazon literally tracks their eye and hand movements and provides them with their impossibly taxing delivery routes. Although Amazon’s software tells the drivers what route to drive, sets their delivery quotas, and demands the dismissal of drivers who don’t live up to the standards it sets, the DSP is the one who has the drivers on their payroll. Despite the fact that DSP’s like to think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaire entrepreneurs, the fact is that they are Amazon’s bitch. They often borrow money to buy Amazon vans that can’t be readily repurposed for any other kind of service, they hire workers and buy Amazon uniforms to dress them in, and they sign long-term leases on lots to park their vans in, and long-term maintenance contracts to keep those vans running. All the while, they only have 1 customer: Amazon. Amazon uses their unequal relationship with middle-men DSPs to prevent labor organizing. If any drivers working under a DSP attempt to organize, Amazon can fire them all. This should be illegal, but because Amazon technically does not consider these drivers to be employees of Amazon, it isn’t. Amazon argues it is just an app (one which magically exerts control over those workers through DSPs). This is regulatory capture in practice.
The second aspect of regulatory capture, the selective enforcement of regulations against competitors, is exemplified by IP law. Computers are universal: you cannot make a computer that can only run good programs and no viruses, for instance. When Apple says it’s impossible for you to run an app on your phone it purchased through the App Store (where Apple gets a massive cut of each sale), or when a car company says it’s impossible to download a program into your car which prevents it from sending your biometric data to the car company, what they’re actually saying is that it is “illegal” to do those things. Doing so infringes on their intellectual property rights, which can result in massive fines or jail time. IP law effectively allows massive companies to cordon off and monopolize their universal computers. Intellectual property laws like DMCA 1201 regulate the “bypassing” of the “access of control” for “copyrighted works”; simply put, regulations like that put locks on digital products that are illegal to break. Many companies use this to control physical commodities through digital loopholes. For example, HP puts a program in their printers which is protected by intellectual copyright. The program allows the printer to print only if you buy HP’s ink cartridges which are insanely overpriced ($10,000 per gallon of ink). If you buy another much cheaper brand of ink, you must bypass the code in order for it to work with the printer. Bypassing this program is illegal due to DMCA 1201 and punishable with a felony. “Thus we see the rapid proliferation of “smart” devices whose additional silicon primarily or significantly performs the function of making it illegal to use the device in ways that are good for you and bad for the manufacturer’s bottom line. From insulin pumps to dishwashers, cars to thermostats, wheelchairs to tractors, manufacturers of every description are scrambling to find ways to infuse “IP” into their products in order to allow them to mobilize the courts and federal law enforcement to turn their shareholders’ financial interest into legal obligations.”
The issue I have with this book is that it gets too bogged down in minutiae. My eyes glaze over after a while of reading tangents on “reverse-chickened centaurs”, obscure legal codes, and the intricacies of how Google modeled its website ranking algorithms based on academia citation analysis. I can ignore some of the author’s questionable political leanings, like his wholehearted acceptance of Yanis Varoufakis’ own interpretation of the already extremely sketchy and poorly defined “techno-feudalism” mode of production. However, when all of Doctorow’s solutions boil down to technocratic state management of these firms, with the end goal being to completely break them apart in order to reinvigorate competition, which will then have a positive effect on further regulations, I have to roll my eyes. Capital has a tendency to concentrate. All of the Googles, Apples, and Amazons of the world started out as smaller companies that were subdued via regulation. In the end these conglomerates still became monopolies, still overthrew regulatory shackles, and did so all based on the underlying profit motive intrinsic to capitalism. To think that breaking them apart will not restart the same cycle eventually is a failure to interpret history.
Notes:
Enshittification is the process where companies, usually Internet-mediated middle men, first provide a service tailored to draw in users/customers by allocating surplus funds towards ends that ensure the customers have a good experience. Next, after enough customers have been brought in and the experience has been tailored in such a way that they find it hard to leave, pro-customer features are stripped back and replaced with pro-business/advertising features. The customers usually have social and financial incentives to remain on these platforms despite the worsening experience. Finally, these Internet middlemen conglomerates begin putting the squeeze on the businesses that use their platforms, turning the product into utter shit. Yet, because platforms like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and even the iPhone have such large market shares and user bases, it becomes harder for businesses and customers to exit these services despite the increasingly shitty experience.
Facebook originally provided lots of unique features and a compelling narrative (“we don’t spy on you, unlike MySpace!”) in order to woo customers off of MySpace onto its platform. It even had a bot that would copy and paste your Facebook posts onto MySpace, then read back other peoples’ MySpace posts onto your Facebook account; this feature has subsequently been banned. After enough people began to join Facebook, a positive feedback loop began: people joining led to more people joining and making connections on Facebook, locking them into the platform and bringing in more people in order to network with the existing and ever-growing userbase. It became hard for people and businesses to leave; friend groups, individualized and specific support groups (for example, I am part of many special education teaching groups on Facebook unavailable elsewhere), and customers for businesses were only available on Facebook. If you wanted to leave, it became extremely difficult to bring all these people with you. Once a critical mass of users was reached, phase 2 began: Facebook made the experience worse for users in order to make it better for advertisers. They sold secretly collected user data to advertisers, then crammed everyone’s feeds with tailored advertisements. Advertisers soon became locked in to the existing userbase on Facebook as well, and Facebook held them hostage much like they had done to the users. Facebook gradually ramped up the price of targeted advertisements and decreased the number of people ads would go to. People’s feeds slowly devolved from content they wanted to see into content advertisers and other users paid premiums to force onto feeds. This is phase 3: the platform becomes a complete pile of shit.
Amazon originally provided very cheap products to consumers and directly delivered them to their homes. It subsidized these goods in order to keep the costs low for users. In return, it locked them in by providing them cheap Prime memberships, which incentivized people to do all their shopping through Amazon for the duration of their membership. As the platform grew, it also locked people in by ensuring that they could only access digital media products purchased on Amazon (ex: audiobooks, movies, ebooks, television seasons) through Amazon’s media platforms. After years of subsidizing cheap deliveries, Amazon began to swallow up smaller retailers and businesses. This meant that shopping anywhere other than Amazon became inconvenient. It thus locked its customers in. Amazon brought in customers, and merchants began to rely on Amazon in order to sell to these customers. It began squeezing its merchants through different mechanisms. If the merchants didn’t like the squeeze, they really had nowhere else to go to reliably sell to the customer base Amazon provided. Amazon began to essentially steal merchant’s products and clone cheaper ‘Amazon’ version of them. On its search engine, Amazon would then put its clones first and relegate the merchants’ products back to pages 17-30. It’s similar to Amazon’s Prime feature: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results that they lose all their sales. Amazon’s policy of “most favored nation status” also requires that merchants who raise their prices on Amazon in order to recoup the losses incurred due to Amazon’s predatory fees must ALSO raise prices everywhere else! This is why you don’t pay more on Amazon than at other retailers, because they have essentially forced everyone to raise their prices. No matter where you shop, you are basically paying an Amazon monopoly tax. Amazon has turned its search feature to shit by making merchants essential bid for their search position. Amazon’s top matches and “our pick”/“top choice” products are just the products whose merchants bribed Amazon the most to put at the top of search queries. As such, it is no surprise that products higher up on Amazon’s search bar are much more expensive than similar products many pages down the search bar. Amazon brings in $38 billion a year just on search bribes! Its service, which once provided cheap goods, has now turned in to complete shit.
Most companies would like to enshittify, since it is extremely profitable, but cannot. Workers would balk at low pay, suppliers would ship through someone else, and customers would look for cheaper and superior alternatives. Competition forces companies to make better products at cheaper prices, while government regulations prevent companies from cheating customers, suppliers, and the communities they are embedded in through fines and legal action. Competition and regulation are disciplinary processes which prevent Enshittification, and companies can only enshittify when it is profitable enough to do so despite competition and regulations. Concentration of capital is a fundamental feature of capitalism. Under neoliberalism, economic and legal theories which de-emphasized the regulation and containment of monopolies were widely accepted and propagated. Starting in the 1970s, Anti-Trust laws were no longer enforced to any meaningful degree. The result was an increase in large scale mergers and acquisitions that were actively encouraged by the American state.
Today, most industries are cartels dominated by 5 or so conglomerates. When smaller companies refuse to sell to cartels, they are starved by corporate giants who actively put a middle finger up to any supposed legal regulations intended to prevent this. For example, companies like Amazon use predatory pricing to starve and then consume potential competitors they see as vulnerable, much like a lion will stalk then hunt an old or sickly gazelle rather than attack the most athletic member of the herd. When Amazon saw online diaper seller Diapers.com as a weak link vulnerable to predation, it went into hunt mode and sold diapers at a $200 million loss over the course of 1 month (nothing in the grand scheme of Amazon, but fatal for Diapers.com). By doing this, it starved Diapers.com of profits until it went bankrupt, then purchased it for pennies on the dollar. To Amazon, burning $200 million to capture and ransack a competitor was a steal. It was also a mafia-style message to all other competitors: when Amazon makes you an offer, it is one that you cannot refuse.
Google is another master of predatory monopolistic practices. After Google made the greatest search engine in the history of the internet, it went about simply acquiring other inventions rather than producing its own (because it often failed when it tried). Android, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Maps, satellite imagery, marketing services, and other “inventions” have all been the result of Google hunting down and purchasing competitors, then integrating the competition into the company’s massive infrastructure. When giants like Google and Amazon suffocate and defeat all competition in a certain market, there is no one left to provide a superior competing service or product when these giants enshittify.
With no competitor search engines taking up its market share, Google has been able to enshittify its product: it consciously has made its search engine worse, forcing people to spend longer searching and enter more searches into the search bar. This results in people seeing more ads. Google ensured for years that every browser, whether chrome, safari, or Firefox, used Google as its default search engine (as would any smartphone, be it an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy). This cost the company billions of dollars but, much like the $200 million Amazon burned to pillage and raid Diapers.com, this was worth it in the long run in order to cement its monopoly over competitors like Bing. Anti-trust laws were historically designed to fight such anti-competitive practices, but none were enforced until Biden’s DOJ sued Google well after its market stranglehold had been firmly established. As part of the Enshittification process, Google also squeezes advertisers through invisibly attaching the names of products to certain search results; for example, if you google “soda”, whichever company bids the highest will be invisibly attached to your search (ex: “Coca-Cola” will be added to “soda” to make it seem as if you googled “Coca-Cola Soda”). This process, called semantic-matching, leads to bidding wars between advertisers for every word you search.
Google (alphabet), Facebook (Meta), and Apple all collude despite the fact that they are ostensibly competitors. For example, in a secret deal called “Jedi Blue” that was uncovered during Google’s anti-trust trial, Google and Facebook colluded to raise the price of ads while keeping higher shares of the revenue from those ads. Likewise, Google and Apple collude to keep Google as the default search engine on all Apple products. The death of competition allows money once spent improving products to be funneled into legal fees intended to fight anti-trust court cases. For example, both IBM in the 1970s and Microsoft in the 1990s spent a decade fighting Anti-trust court cases until favorable administrations were in place who would dismiss the cases and let them off lightly.
Regulation by neutral third party experts saves humans time and energy. Nobody has the time necessary to independently learn what houses in your area are safe to live in, what foods you can buy and not expect to die of food postponing, what cars have brake systems that actually work, etc. Neutral third-party specialists are needed in complex societies to ensure things run relatively safely and smoothly because no individual has have enough time or energy to do so. Regulations tend to be successful when the regulators enforcing them are truly neutral and can gather and review evidence, hold hearings, and perform other acts of investigation towards any problems that have arisen in society, whether it be safely manufacturing medicine to ensuring that your local diner is sanitary enough to make sure you won’t die from eating its food. When there are lots of companies in a given sector, they struggle to band together to fight regulations. While some might attempt to cut corners, others will continue to follow the rules and tattle tale on those that don’t. Once a sector consolidates from a few hundred competing companies who are small into a handful of powerful conglomerates, “regulatory capture” takes place. The few companies collude and agree which regulations they want to stop following, and they now have more money to fight the regulatory institutions. Often, like in the IBM and Microsoft cases, these companies spend far more on armies of lawyers than the DOJ can. Once the institutions needing regulation become too powerful for the regulatory institutions, they begin to capture the regulators.
Regulatory capture has 2 sides: a company who has captured regulators is able to find, create, and exploit loopholes to existing regulations intended to protect the general public. At the same time, it is also able to enforce harsh regulations against competitors or foreign rivals. The easiest way to circumvent regulation is to break laws with an app. For example, when uber entered the taxi market without securing taxi licenses or extending workforce protections to its drivers, it was able to claim that it could do this because Uber drivers were not employees and Uber was not an employer. It was a middle man app that connected customers to people willing to drive them in their own personal vehicles. Amazon does something similar with its drivers (DSPs). Delivery Service Providers are outsourced third parties who Amazon hires out to do most of its deliveries. DSPs must ensure their fleet of vans meet Amazon’s stringent and expensive standards (from the logo to the surveillance equipment on board) and pay for this out of their own pockets. The DSPs then hire drivers who are technically employed by the DSP and not Amazon, despite the fact that Amazon literally tracks their eye and hand movements and provides them with their impossibly taxing delivery routes. Although Amazon’s software tells the drivers what route to drive, sets their delivery quotas, and demands the dismissal of drivers who don’t live up to the standards it sets, the DSP is the one who has the drivers on their payroll. Despite the fact that DSP’s like to think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaire entrepreneurs, the fact is that they are Amazon’s bitch. They often borrow money to buy Amazon vans that can’t be readily repurposed for any other kind of service, they hire workers and buy Amazon uniforms to dress them in, and they sign long-term leases on lots to park their vans in, and long-term maintenance contracts to keep those vans running. All the while, they only have 1 customer: Amazon. Amazon uses their unequal relationship with middle-men DSPs to prevent labor organizing. If any drivers working under a DSP attempt to organize, Amazon can fire them all. This should be illegal, but because Amazon technically does not consider these drivers to be employees of Amazon, it isn’t. Amazon argues it is just an app (one which magically exerts control over those workers through DSPs). This is regulatory capture in practice.
The second aspect of regulatory capture, the selective enforcement of regulations against competitors, is exemplified by IP law. Computers are universal: you cannot make a computer that can only run good programs and no viruses, for instance. When Apple says it’s impossible for you to run an app on your phone it purchased through the App Store (where Apple gets a massive cut of each sale), or when a car company says it’s impossible to download a program into your car which prevents it from sending your biometric data to the car company, what they’re actually saying is that it is “illegal” to do those things. Doing so infringes on their intellectual property rights, which can result in massive fines or jail time. IP law effectively allows massive companies to cordon off and monopolize their universal computers. Intellectual property laws like DMCA 1201 regulate the “bypassing” of the “access of control” for “copyrighted works”; simply put, regulations like that put locks on digital products that are illegal to break. Many companies use this to control physical commodities through digital loopholes. For example, HP puts a program in their printers which is protected by intellectual copyright. The program allows the printer to print only if you buy HP’s ink cartridges which are insanely overpriced ($10,000 per gallon of ink). If you buy another much cheaper brand of ink, you must bypass the code in order for it to work with the printer. Bypassing this program is illegal due to DMCA 1201 and punishable with a felony. “Thus we see the rapid proliferation of “smart” devices whose additional silicon primarily or significantly performs the function of making it illegal to use the device in ways that are good for you and bad for the manufacturer’s bottom line. From insulin pumps to dishwashers, cars to thermostats, wheelchairs to tractors, manufacturers of every description are scrambling to find ways to infuse “IP” into their products in order to allow them to mobilize the courts and federal law enforcement to turn their shareholders’ financial interest into legal obligations.”
October 11, 2025
If you live in our time, then you are already well-aware of what this covers without it being presented to you in a condescending manner.
January 20, 2026
Cory Doctorow has such a sassy, fun, engaging writing voice (and a literal one, since he's reading the audiobook), that this was a total pleasure, even if I'd already heard a lot about enshittification from his pluralism.net blog, podcasts / interviews and even his Berlin event that happened two years ago, in January, too.
I still found a bunch of new info that made me absolutely MAD and also some inspiration for the worldbuilding of a short story I'm working on, set in the near future. I actually was at a party last Saturday where someone said that something was enshittified and I found it hilarious to discover it in the wild. I also really appreciated that he brings a hopeful bent to the book and there's a lot of 'call to action', 'here's what you / we can do' sort of stuff, because this type of non-fiction can just drive you MAD with anger and make you (me) feel hopeless. Happy I read this!
19/31 reads in January.
I still found a bunch of new info that made me absolutely MAD and also some inspiration for the worldbuilding of a short story I'm working on, set in the near future. I actually was at a party last Saturday where someone said that something was enshittified and I found it hilarious to discover it in the wild. I also really appreciated that he brings a hopeful bent to the book and there's a lot of 'call to action', 'here's what you / we can do' sort of stuff, because this type of non-fiction can just drive you MAD with anger and make you (me) feel hopeless. Happy I read this!
19/31 reads in January.
November 25, 2025
did i finish this book or did this book finish me. brutal. going to scream into the void for a while now
![Profile Image for laurel [the suspected bibliophile].](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1645808644i/7494844._UX200_CR0,6,200,200_.jpg)
February 7, 2026
A really fascinating read into the internet and the enshittification of well...everything.
The only thing enshittification benefits is stakeholders, and turning everything from something you own and can repair into things that you subscribe to and are legally banned from messing with is not good, to put it mildly.
It's how I went from the free to paid version of Pandora ten years ago. It went from 5-6 songs in a row, then an ad, to one song then two ads, the same ads over and over. But I wanted music and the monthly price wasn't bad.
Anywho, I can definitely see why people are turning toward analog things. Things that aren't just physical but are "dumb" in the technological sense that they don't have computer chips. They can't be turned off by the corporation at a whim. They are owned, pure and simple, by you. Or borrowed in physical, simple form and returned to the owner/system, like a friend or library, because owning that much shit is ANOTHER problem in consumerism.
The only thing enshittification benefits is stakeholders, and turning everything from something you own and can repair into things that you subscribe to and are legally banned from messing with is not good, to put it mildly.
It's how I went from the free to paid version of Pandora ten years ago. It went from 5-6 songs in a row, then an ad, to one song then two ads, the same ads over and over. But I wanted music and the monthly price wasn't bad.
Anywho, I can definitely see why people are turning toward analog things. Things that aren't just physical but are "dumb" in the technological sense that they don't have computer chips. They can't be turned off by the corporation at a whim. They are owned, pure and simple, by you. Or borrowed in physical, simple form and returned to the owner/system, like a friend or library, because owning that much shit is ANOTHER problem in consumerism.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,540 reviews