01 May 2026 16 min read Book Review

First #18: Enshittification

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow (Verso, 2025)

If you are steeped in internet culture, this is a word that you might have encountered sometime in the last three years. This is a word that represents the motives and actions of an industry dominated by corporations with monopolistic control and captive consumers. This is a word that explains why so many digital products end up saturated with adverts, while surreptitiously monetising your behavioural data.

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025) by technology activist and journalist Cory Doctorow has its origin in a 2022 blog he wrote about the high switching costs and platform capture of social media networks. In the post, Doctorow explains how we are imprisoned by extractive digital services that unashamedly prioritise their commercial priorities while presiding over a worsening user experience, knowing there is no viable alternative where we can flee.

That feeling of not being able to leave a platform despite our rising frustrations due to a platform’s deliberate resistance of interoperability — all our friends and family are here, so we can’t leave without losing our online social status. Our entrapment emboldens corporations to enact two-directional exploitation: first, of their consumers, then of their advertisers, because where else will they both go?

Enshittification is a word that is becoming part of the English language and technocultural discourse. Australia’s Macquarie dictionary named it word of the year in 2024, while Merriam-Webster now lists the word in their dictionary.^[1]

The Playbook

Enshittification is an important book because Doctorow brings together the distant worlds of law and regulatory policy with digital design to tell the story of how the overriding corporate desire for capital has forced the qualitative decline of digital customer experience. Few technologists have had the chance to be an active participant in all of these spaces — Doctorow has a long career campaigning for the protection of digital rights and privacy with EFF, and uses this experience to great effect by recounting gripping (and at times, infuriating) accounts of the machinations that many of the world’s largest consumer digital technology companies have engineered.

It’s the social media feed that used to be so useful for staying in contact with friends and family around the world that is now overtaken by adverts and pumped full of AI slop — losing its users in an infinite scroll of hypnotising content. It’s the online publishing platforms that grew by making it easier for anyone to write, now overrun by AI slop and bots. It’s the food delivery service that used to be cheap, but is now more expensive than the restaurants they service, while undercutting the same restaurants with such ferocity they are trapped selling food at a loss to remain on the platform.

“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.” — Enshittification, pg. 51

Doctorow starts the book by recounting how the process of enshittification has been deployed across four very well known technology companies — from Facebook’s algorithmic feed, surveilling of its users and increasing reliance on adverts for revenue, to the iPhone’s introduction, then eventual monopolisation of its App Store with the associated price gouging levied through processing fees charged to app vendors — the playbook, time and again is as much repetitive as it is predictable. Doctorow neatly sums up the process:

“Here’s the natural history of enshittification: First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.” — Enshittification, pg. 10

As the book progresses, we begin to share the sense of rage that has propelled Doctorow to write Enshittification. Through a combination of regulatory timidity plus the persistent determination to believe the techno-optimist narrative spun by the biggest Silicon Valley corporations and their venture capital investors — that the only path to sociopolitical progress exists through the increasing deployment of, and reliance on, digital technologies and their calculative regimes — we are left with an enshittified technological landscape that many governments lack the insight or will to effectively regulate.

For the extremely online reader who recalls creating their first MySpace account or amassing a collection of console game cartridges or discs, the narrative that Doctorow weaves will feel very familiar and the referenced incidents will make sense — how did we arrive in a technological present where we are surveilled in social media panopticons, where we are exposed to misinformation at scale and left marinading in toxic filter bubbles that threaten to overturn democratic processes?

How are we in possession of the most sophisticated multimedia computing and mobile devices, yet remain imprisoned in digital walled gardens that force us to rent its software, or consume media governed by terms of use limiting the devices on which we can enjoy them?

Doctorow’s Enshittification will make sense to the extremely online reader, but what about everyone else?

Omissions

One of the persistent irritations of reading Enshittification is its lack of organised references — an omission that diminishes any work wishing to be taken seriously as a research document, because the reader cannot make the connection between the writer’s arguments and their sources.

The tone and pacing of the book demonstrates that Doctorow is a writer who thinks, writes, and publishes at pace. The discordant structure is peppered with interjections that refer forward to sections yet to come — a firmer editorial hand is sorely missed at these points.

The text is peppered throughout with mentions of articles and papers informing his account — examples include Veena Dubal’s coining of algorithmic wage discrimination (pg. 114), Lee Vinsel’s coining of the term ‘criti-hype’ (pg. 132), and Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in Yale Law Journal (pg. 240). Doctorow will have undoubtedly amassed these resources to be able to write such prose, but the lack of a reference list might leave some readers wondering where they might be found online. Notable incidents described to support his points are mentioned but not sourced — such as the story about TikTok’s back-end heating tool that manipulates content going viral (pg. 116) or excerpts from the awkward line of questioning used by Vox Media reporter LiQuan Hunt to question Apple CEO Tim Cook about the iPhone’s iMessage security (pg. 291).

It is unclear if these omissions were decisions made by the author, editor, or publisher; or if they were casualties of a rush to get a product to market while the buzz around enshittification occupied so much media space — the resulting text is one that feels compelling but the multitude of references to names, events and literature can feel incomprehensible if you were not old enough to have lived through the described events, or if you have not been closely following what has been going on in the technology industry in recent years.

These omissions also leave me wondering for whom this book has been written. The extremely online, technology industry insider will get it — satisfied that so many familiar incidents, articles, and papers have been mentioned. The readers who I feel need Enshittification the most are the vast numbers of people — of all ages — living their online lives, pleased at having limitless storage from their free email service provider unaware of how their activity is shared with data brokers, who stream all of their music and video without thinking how such a huge media library can be delivered for next to no charge. Enshittification should be read by those whose relationship to e-commerce has been mediated by huge online warehouse companies little knowing that the behavioural profiles amassed by such corporations before being sold to data brokers are the reason their products can be sold at unrealistically low prices.

Do we remember the same internet?

There is a tendency running through some books lamenting the deterioration of the technology industry — whether decrying the poor business ethics, the diminishing attention spans due to social media overuse, or the systematic undercutting of the high streets around the world in a quest for cheap products rapidly delivered at scale (to name a few examples). Even at the book’s conclusion, Doctorow expresses a desire to build “a new, good internet” reminiscent of “the old, good internet” — a time before our communications and digital technologies had been systematically enshittified:

“The new, good internet is like the old, good internet, where lots of intermediaries exist that can help us focus on the business of conversing, arguing, mobilizing, romancing, transacting, buying, and selling.” — Enshittification, pg. 222

In an age of AI slop, rampant dis- and misinformation, of digital walled gardens limiting how we consume media, and software we no longer own but are forced to rent — it is tempting to look back to a time before the internet was dominated by the whims of a few dominant technology corporations. Nostalgia is an appealing but dangerous indulgence — and I am reminded of The DISCO Network writing in Technoskepticism (2025), that “Nostalgia is notoriously slippery, seemingly universal, and transhistorical, yet highly individualized” (pg. 84). We need to take a more critical stance towards netstalgia — a term expounded by Noemi Garay Murcia in essay forming an open call for their upcoming exhibition — who argues:

“Early web cultures are often framed as more open, playful, and participatory, yet access to these spaces is unevenly distributed along lines of geography, race, class, gender, language, and ability. Treating early web practices as inherently emancipatory risks obscuring the power structures that shaped them and that continue to shape platform politics today.” — Netstalgia Not Acceptable: The Internet We Want

The romanticised internet age of the late 1990s and early 2000s viewed 20-30 years later may feel like a lost utopia, but it was an environment formed through systemic gender and linguistic exclusion, marginalisation, and persistent victimisation of women and minorities.

Doctorow makes an important point when he illustrates the historic and contemporary relationships that the computer science and technology industry has had with the military — from IBM in the early twentieth century to Google’s involvement with Project Maven in 2017-18 (pg. 182), but there are many other omissions that ought to have been given equal space so that we have an intersectional understanding of how the modern technology industry both structures and unequally distributes harms.

The early Web 2.0 era technology industry so fondly remembered by some Generation X and Millennial technologists is a place that was, and continues to be, largely hostile to women. Numerous initiatives, plans, strategies, education and vocational pushes have tried with modest success to reverse this problematic situation, but we forget these inequities exist by design. Mar Hicks, Professor of Data Science at University of Virginia, has published important work — most notably in Programmed Inequality (2018) — that traces the post World War II feminisation of computer work in the United Kingdom and the systematic gender reorientation used to install men as dominant actors in the computer industry in the UK and the USA during the 1960s and 1970s. From the Bletchley Park codebreakers to the Black women ‘computers’ whose calculations made the first lunar landings possible — the story of the computer science industry cannot be told without telling the story of the women who laid its foundations.

Exclusion is baked into the coding layer of our digital universe that is almost exclusively expressed in the English language — determining the linguistic limits of how a machine instruction can be described. These discursive constraints were notably challenged in 2014 through the artistic intervention by Ramsey Nasser called قلقلب (’qalb’), or Heart, an Arabic programming language confronting the neocolonial affordances of the code determining what our computational environments can(not) do.

Dr. Halcyon M. Lawrence, late Associate Professor of Technical Communication at Towson University elaborates further on this point:

“Consequently, digital media—and by extension, the language of digital media—is arguably one of the most powerful tools of neo-imperialism. For evidence of this claim one need look no further than the dominance of English as the language of the internet… Software is still written in Latin alphabets because computational technology was never conceived with the ideal of being inclusive of language… the ASCII character code only supports 128 different characters, so as a result, complex script languages like Chinese, which need more characters, are pushed to the margins.” — “Siri Disciplines” by Halcyon M. Lawrence, from Your Computer Is On Fire, pg. 187-8

The technology industry, its resulting products and persistent technocultural tropes emerge from its structurally misogynist values. Many spaces continue to be hostile to people identifying as women, queer, or non-binary. The dawning of the algorithmic age has only accelerated the reach and technocultural impact of existing biases — particularly towards Black women — as scholars such as Safiya Noble were early to alert us to in Algorithms of Oppression (2018), warning us about the equation that Google’s algorithmically constructed search results in the 2010s was making between Black women and pornography.

From gender pay disparities in many tech companies, to working cultures biased towards the needs of childless single younger men, to the booth babes and casual sexism deemed permissible at tech industry events, we can trace a throughline from the formation of early online spaces — the video gaming chatrooms, LAN parties, and messaging boards — so fondly remembered by the majority of male writers which will have been experienced very differently by many girls and women who chose to reveal their gender identities online at the time. These early online spaces defined the affordances and shaped the networked cultures that have mutated into some of the most extreme forums and toxic online spaces today.

Did we experience the same internet?

The early Web 2.0 era technology industry so fondly remembered by some Generation X and Millennial technologists is a place that was, and continues to be, hostile to people racialised as Black.

Networked cultures mediated by the internet are not neutral spaces. André Brock, Associate Professor of Black Digital Studies at Georgia Institute of Technology, writing in Distributed Blackness (2020), theorises that Whiteness is synonymous with a universal, raceless, technocultural identity that directs how we determine widely accepted modes of being, relating, and communicating online:

“Despite protestations about color-blindness or neutrality, the internet should be understood as an enactment of whiteness through the interpretative flexibility of whiteness as information. By this, I mean that white folks' communications, letters, and works of art are rarely understood as white; instead they become universal and are understood as ‘communication’, ‘literature’ and ‘art’.” — Distributed Blackness, pg. 6

In a long-form essay on European modernism I wrote in the first iteration of First & Fifteenth in 2023, I argued that the visual standards we associate with good design emerge from early twentieth century modernist movements concerned with establishing colonial expressions of sophistication through designed objects. These artefacts — first of industrial and graphic design, now represented in our digital interfaces — have so effectively monopolised our recollection of where creativity exists and the people who we think are qualified to define its practice, that we have great difficulty recognising centuries-old artefacts, predating expeditionary colonial encounters, that are evidence of transcontinental methods of design emerging from Africa which continue to inform digital creativity today.

Digital Blackness exists in tension with networked cultures and visual design standards emerging from a Eurocentric modernity that is not practised in maintaining dialogue with its disruptive presence. Networked online identities that communicate Blackness fall foul of discourse standards ill-suited for moderation determined by a White Gaze.

To understand an intersectional internet experience means looking beyond visible markers of racial or gender difference. We need to tell these stories by engaging with the theories of how informational identities are constructed, and how the data regimes informed by biased sociotechnical values — subject to what Ruha Benjmain calls “coded exposure” (pg. 47) in Race After Technology (2019) — are used to interpret our Blackness in increasingly calculative and predictive ways, with grave implications for our future selves in this algorithmic age.

Conclusion

Enshittification is a book that will resonate with anyone who closely follows the machinations of the biggest (mostly) American tech companies, or has immersed themselves in the associated congressional and parliamentary hearings, court cases, publications, blogs, and podcasts that have tracked these changes over the last two decades.

But it is because of this expectation of prior knowledge that Doctorow misses an important opportunity for achieving wider impact — particularly for the vast majority of people using free online services who have never stopped to critically consider the machinations and manipulations prosecuted by the corporations providing these services. Many will not have connected how the interplay between the regulatory environment, legal frameworks, and monopolistic business practices have coalesced to allow such enshittifying practices to bloom with far more influence than the digital design teams tasked with building these products — and these are the readers who need a book like Enshittification the most.

Enshittification tells a story anyone interested in the trajectory of technology should read, but it is an account told through a discordant structure with important pieces missing. For the researcher tasked with developing tactics to diminish the domination of rapacious technology corporations grounded in reliable literature, the book partially points the way but mostly leaves the reader stranded. For the critical technologist desiring to strive towards better technological futures, we feel hesitant to proceed on a path that has so many glaring omissions in its recollection of a romanticised technological past we are being encouraged to use as the basis for “a new good internet” of Doctorow’s hoped-for future.

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow. Published in 2025 by Verso, 338 pages.

At the time of writing (1 April 2026) the word has not been admitted to the Oxford English dictionary. ↩︎

More from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is a prolific writer who has published many books about technology, its industry, and digital right. Find his books listed on Pluralistic, his website, where he also maintains a regularly updated blog too.

Explore further

*The Good Robot, 15 August 2023, 33 mins*

*The 404 Media Podcast, 25 January 2024, 1 hours 3 mins*

*The 404 Media Podcast, 28 May 2024, 1 hours 2 mins*

*Better Offline, 12 February 2025, 1 hour 37 mins*

*This Machine Kills, 29 April 2025, 1 hour 23 min*

*Search Engine, 22 August 2025, 58 mins*

*TechTonic with Mark Hurst | WFMU, 14 April 2026, 1 hour 6 mins*

Transcripts are available for Unexpected History of Computing with Mar Hicks and How Sports Gambling Apps Are Rotting Society.

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