Name: ENSHITTIFICATION
Rating: 4.454545454545454 (11 reviews)
ISBN: 9781836743750

CORY. DOCTOROW

Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and what to Do about it

ENSHITTIFICATION

Karolina

The platform has emerged as the endemic form of online enterprise, which is weird, because another word for platform is middleman.

Enshittification is when you combine the banality of evil with an internet-connected device and a federal law that criminalizes doing anything with that device that the manufacturer dislikes.

Cory Doctorow

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

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

Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution.

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

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

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

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

Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

Enshittification

Gabe Cortez

Greg Talbot

Vocabulary changes but the forces are the same. Regulatory chapture, IP trolls, garden walls, twiddling, technofeudalsm, feel appropriate to our time, but stem from the reverberations of class struggle. Casting wider nets into our lives, and controlling our experiences with algorithmically pushed content and extractive behaviors, the online environments can feel controlled and trollishly rage baiting. Using case studies in the first four chapters on the leading tech firms (Meta, X(twitter), Google, Amazon), the parasitic role that tech firms inact, by luring users and courting advertisers, Doctorow explains the rottenness of enshittification. Summing it up, enshittiication, pushes the value from the user or the business partners to the shareholder. It's visible in the algorithmic wage suppression of uber drivers, spread of conspiratorial data on Facebook, the rampant antisemitissm and groyper content on Twitteer, and the network capture with Amazon subscriptions and posting fees. These may just seems like the outgrowth of market forces, but consolidation of market players and elimination of meaningful regulation, builds monopolistic cartels. One of the most harrowing aspects of the "too big to fail" era of tech giants is their collusion with authoritative governments. Content moderation, to support regimes hostile to human rights, is a reminder that these firms mission statements - to connect everyone, to not do evil - are really smokescreens for unchecked control. Technofeudalism, a environment of monopolistic dominance of tech, that we buy-into, but never own, aligns to their own self-interest and arrogance. Listening to a tech firm leader like Peter Thiel or Alex Karp, they openly are hostile toward democracy or any regulatory powers on their powers. Firms like Google and Meta continue to accrete, by acquisition and operational improvements, but are ultimately rentiers rather than centers for innovation. The realignment of tech bro billionares with the authoritarian Trump administration is a reminder that these leaders are not capable of solving the problems they create. Pushbacks to data centers, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-investment-in-defense-startup-helsing.html" rel="nofollow noopener">streaming services supporting AI weapons research</a>, or a messaging platform bemirsched by an antisemetic drug-addled sociopath, are only just beginning, as individuals find way to weld power. We can opt-out - and achieve things social progress by being offline. The social problems, often exasperated by technology, such as social isolation , political violence, social media brain rot and general ennui are not going to be solved by Silicon Valley, and many of us have given up pretending they every tried.

A bit all over the place with some repetition. Still a good, interesting and necessary book.

Azrael Montana

a great explainer for how we got here. it’s given me lots to pay attention to in the world.

jacq bridge

A harrowing read about the modern enshittified world we live in. I'm rating it higher than I might, it's hard to like the subject and the book when it's explaining a problem of the modern day. The author took great pains to also not enshittify his own work, which I appreciate. Worth a read. 

BC Hark

Milly Schmidt

Patrick Arminio

*** Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025 *** Misogyny, conspiratorialism, surveillance, manipulation, fraud, and AI slop are drowning the internet. For the monopolists who dominate online - X, TikTok, Amazon, Meta, Apple - this is all part of the playbook. The process is what leading tech critic Cory Doctorow has dubbed 'enshittification'. First, the platform attracts users with some bait, such as free access; then the activity is monetized, bringing in the business customers and degrading the user experience; then, once everyone is trapped and competitors eradicated, the platform wrings out all the value and transfers it to their executives and shareholders. As a result, online public squares have become places of torment, and online retailers are hellish dumpster fires. The virtual gathering places where we once imagined the world's problems might be resolved are now a sewer of hatred and abuse - thoroughly enshittified. Doctorow enumerates the symptoms, lays out the diagnosis, and identifies the best responses to these diseased platforms: the monopolies online must be shattered. Companies too big to fail or to jail - and much too big to care - must be cut down to size. Only an attack on corporate power will permit effective regulation and real privacy. Tech unions must protect the workers who should, in turn, defend us against their bosses' sadism and greed. Praise for The Internet Con: "One of the Internet's most interesting writers." -- Edward Snowden "This book fills me with hope that a radical yet plausible alternative to computational tyranny can be developed and deployed." -- Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Fittest "This book is the instruction manual Big Tech doesn't want you to read. It deconstructs their crummy products, undemocratic business models, rigged legal regimes, and lies. Crack this book and help build something better." -- Astra Taylor "A brilliant barn burner of a book. Cory is one of the sharpest tech critics, and he shows with fierce clarity how our computational future could be otherwise." -- Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI

ENSHITTIFICATION Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and what to Do about it

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