Author: Cory Doctorow
_Cory Doctorow_
Reading time: 25 minutes
Synopsis
Enshittification (2025) explains why many important online services are getting worse at the same time. It shows a four-step plan that platforms use. First, they attract users. Then, they make users stay. Finally, they take more and more value from them. In the end, they leave behind a bad product that only helps the platform itself. You will learn about the money and law choices that caused this problem. You will also find clear steps we can take to make things better.
What’s in it for me? Find out why the internet feels so bad these days – and what to do about it.
You have probably felt it. The internet is getting worse, very quickly. The search engine that found what you needed? Now it is full of paid ads and useless results. The social network where you talked to friends? Now it is full of ads and angry posts. Every platform you use seems to be getting worse inside, all at the same time. This feeling has a name: “enshittification.”
Enshittification is important because these platforms are now how we live. You work, plan, and get news through them. Your groups of friends are on them. When platforms get bad, they stop you from working with others. They harm democracy itself. Every important fight – like against climate change, unfair leaders, or inequality – needs these online tools. But these tools are breaking down when we need them most.
This summary shows how platforms make themselves worse. It is like a four-step problem that affects all of them. You will see the hidden reasons for your daily problems: computer rules that secretly change prices very often. You will see laws that make it illegal to fix your own devices. And you will see how big companies bought smaller ones before you even knew. Once you see how these things happen, you will know what we need to do to make things better.
Blink 1 – How things get bad over time
Let’s start by looking at how the problem of enshittification develops. Every platform follows the same four steps. It’s like a sickness you can expect.
Platforms are like links, connecting you to other people or businesses. First, they are good to you. They use money from investors to make their service very good. This makes you want to join. Once you have joined, and your friends are there, leaving means losing your groups. Then the platform moves to the second step. It makes your experience worse to get more from businesses. These businesses join to reach you, because you are already there and cannot easily leave.
When businesses rely completely on that access, the third step begins. The platform starts to take money from them too. It takes money from both users and businesses for its owners. The fourth step is the end. The service becomes bad, and everyone is stuck inside.
Facebook shows this very well. You probably remember when it was really helpful. That was the first step. Facebook made an easy and good offer: tell us who your friends are, and we will show you what they post, in order of time. To attract you from MySpace, it even offered a tool. This tool would log into MySpace, copy your messages, and put them into your Facebook inbox. This made changing easy.
Many users joined quickly. Soon, you were stuck. You were held because your friends and groups were there. Even if you hate the platform, you cannot leave. It is very hard to get all your friends and family to leave at the same time.
Once Facebook knew users were stuck, the second step began. It started treating users badly to help businesses. It watched you to sell ads that were just for you. It put posts from news companies you did not follow into your feed. It attracted these companies by promising them free visitors.
Then the third step arrived. Facebook made things harder for those businesses. The computer rules were changed. News companies saw their visitors disappear. To get visitors back, they had to post longer parts of their articles. Soon, whole articles appeared on Facebook. Then Facebook hid their posts anyway, unless they paid to “boost” them. They were paying money to reach people who had already asked to see their content.
For you, the platform became empty. The things you wanted to see disappeared. Instead, there were ads and paid posts.
The way Amazon grew shows the same thing. In the first step, it used money from investors to make products cheaper. It sold them for less than they cost. It made shipping cheaper with Prime. It made you stuck. That Prime membership makes you start all your searches on Amazon.
The second step was good for sellers. Amazon offered a simple search engine that showed good products first. Once sellers relied on Amazon, the third step began. Amazon now copies popular products. It also charges sellers very high fees. This makes sellers increase prices everywhere.
Your experience as a user? Amazon’s search now means you have to pay to be seen. The top results are expensive, bad products from sellers who paid the most money.
Blink 2 – Why everything got worse
This way things get worse, this taking of value, is happening everywhere at the same time. It is a real problem, like a sickness with a clear reason. If enshittification is so clearly bad for everyone, what changed to let it happen?
For many years, companies always wanted to make their products worse. They wanted to make things less good, charge more, and pay less to their suppliers. But four things stopped them. First, competition. If you made your product worse, customers and workers would go to another company. Second, regulation. The government might give you a fine or split up your company. Third, self-help. Users could change your product to make it better, like using ad-blockers. And fourth, labor. Your own workers, who believed in their work, would not want to purposely break products they had worked hard on.
The “Great Enshittening” began when these things were slowly taken away. Let’s start with competition.
The end of competition was a choice made on purpose. From the 1970s, and faster under President Reagan, the idea behind antitrust laws changed. For almost a hundred years, antitrust laws split up companies just for being too big. The idea was that too much power always leads to bad actions, stops new ideas, and kills smaller companies. This was changed to the “consumer welfare standard.” This new idea said that big companies were good. It said the government should only step in if companies made prices higher for customers. This allowed companies to buy and join with many other companies easily.
Google is the main example. Google stays in control by making sure you can never use anything else. Google is better at buying companies than making new things. After its first new search idea, almost every successful product was one it bought. For example, YouTube, Android, and all the ad technology used on the internet. These were all competitors Google bought and took over.
Google spends billions of dollars each year to be the main choice by default. This makes it the main search engine on Safari, Firefox, Samsung phones, and almost every device. This sends a bad signal to investors: why give money to a competitor? Even with a better search engine, you will never reach users. Google has bought all the main ways to access the internet and search.
This is how enshittification starts. By getting rid of competition, Google was not afraid of what would happen. With no one to fear, it started to treat you badly.
Papers from inside Google show this. The head of search, Ben Gomes, was replaced by the head of ads, Prabhakar Raghavan. Raghavan’s plan was simple: purposely make search results worse to earn more money. By making you search many times to find what you want, Google could show you more ads. Each time you searched and failed, it meant more money from ads.
The proof? Google’s good search list still exists – but you are stopped from using it. Kagi, a small search engine you pay monthly for, uses Google’s list. It uses its own computer rules to rank results. The result is a clean, useful, ad-free search that feels like magic. The magic is simply what Google keeps from you.
With competition stopped, platforms were free to create clever ways to treat their stuck users badly.
Blink 3 – The ways they treat you badly
So, what are these clever ways? With competition stopped – the first of the four things that once protected us – platforms were free to use their hidden ways to treat people badly. The main way this happens, the key to enshittification, is called twiddling. This is the hidden, constant changing of the platform’s settings. It changes prices, search order, and suggested content. All of this takes money from you and the businesses you want to find. It puts that money into the platform’s own pocket. Twiddling is how the platform, once it has you stuck, starts to trick you.
You can see this taking of money most clearly in apps that offer small jobs, like Uber. You might think Uber pays drivers a normal part of what you pay for the ride. But no. It actually uses computer rules to pay drivers unfairly. When a job offer appears, the Uber computer rule works out a different pay for every single driver nearby. It knows what you usually do. It builds a picture of you.
Are you an “ant”? This means a driver who takes every job the app offers. Or are you a “picker”? This means someone who only chooses jobs that pay well. If you have been picky, the system will offer you a slightly higher pay to make you want to work again. If you have been an ant, it has learned you really need money. It will slowly lower your pay, offering you very low wages. It knows you will probably take them. It is a clever trick, taking money from drivers and giving it to the company owners.
Amazon found an even better way to take money. First, they wrongly call their workers “business owners” or “freelancers.” This takes away all their rights, like minimum pay and sick leave.
Then comes the really bad part. These workers are made to borrow money just to get the job. You have to borrow money to buy your own Amazon van. You have to pay the call-center company Arise for your own background check and your own “training.” You are paying for the chance to work for them. You are now stuck with them. The platform is your only customer. It controls all your work. It can “fire” you at any time by just turning off your account. You are left with a lot of debt and a van you cannot use for anything else.
Now the platform can slowly take away all the money. The Amazon delivery driver peeing in bottles to save time is not unusual. This is how the system is made to work. Computer rules constantly change how many packages drivers must deliver. This makes them work as hard as possible. Each package delivered very fast creates more money for Amazon, not for the workers.
And if you miss those always changing, often impossible goals? The system simply switches your account off. It keeps the money you helped make, while you pay for the problems. You cannot discuss it. You cannot complain. There is no help. At this point, you are no longer part of the system. You are just a tool. You are a replaceable part in a machine that always adjusts itself. It is made to take every bit of value, until you cannot do any more.
These bad ways of doing things are the power behind enshittification. This power works only because of a strong law. This law makes it illegal for anyone to fight back.
Blink 4 – A serious crime against a company’s way of making money
This system of treating people badly, this changing of the rules, works because of a strong law. This law stops the second and third things that once controlled platforms: government rules and fixing things yourself. It makes it illegal for anyone to fight back.
When a company like HP or Apple tells you that your device cannot use another company’s ink or app, they really mean that the law stops you from doing it. This is the main thing keeping this bad system working. Companies used the law to create false rules that stop you from doing things.
The law they use is a 1998 US law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. This law was later used in many countries. It has a rule against getting around locks. It makes it a serious crime, punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine, to get around a “digital lock” that protects something owned by someone else.
Here’s how the trick works. A company puts a small piece of owned software into a normal product. For example, a tiny program on a printer ink chip, some code in a tractor’s engine, or the main software on a smartphone. Then it adds a digital lock around that code. That’s the important step, because now the law gets involved. If you get around that lock – to refill your own ink, install other parts, or download an app from another store – it is suddenly not just wrong. It is treated like you broke into a building. It is the law that makes competition illegal and stops you from fixing things yourself. This allows platforms to make their products worse without worrying that you can fix them.
There is no better example than the strange story of Beeper Mini and Apple. It started with iMessage, a main way to make you stuck. It offers very safe, private messaging. But this is not true if you talk to someone on Android. If you add even one Android user to a group chat, Apple purposely makes the whole conversation worse for everyone. This includes its own paying customers. It changes it to the old, unsafe, non-private SMS system.
Why would Apple purposely put its own users at great risk? For a simple, selfish reason. To make the green text bubbles on your screen seem bad and not working right. This is a strong sales trick. It makes you bother your friends until they “buy your mom an iPhone.”
Then, in 2024, teenager James Gill figured out how iMessage worked. Beeper used this to launch Beeper Mini. This let Android users join iMessage chats with full privacy. Beeper Mini fixed the safety problem Apple had purposely made. It protected Apple’s own customers.
Apple’s answer? It started a fight. It sent out many updates to break Beeper Mini. This was to make its own customers face SMS risks again. Apple showed it would rather your messages be unsafe than its way of making money be questioned.
This is the final stage of enshittification. Competition is gone. Bad ways of doing things are fully active. The law is used as a weapon to make fighting back a serious crime. The first three things were stopped: competition was destroyed by big companies. Government rules and fixing things yourself were made illegal by the DMCA. Only one way to fight back was left: the tech workers themselves. What happened to them?
Blink 5 – The final breakdown
So what happened to those tech workers? For many years, they were a strong defense against enshittification. They had a special power, from two reasons. They were hard to find. And they had a strong belief in their work. They believed in their goal to “organize the world’s information” or “connect the world.” They would not purposely break products they had worked so hard on.
This power was at its strongest in 2018. At Google, workers found projects that went against the company’s “Don’t Be Evil” promise. There was Project Dragonfly, a search engine for China that hid some information. There was also Project Maven, an AI made to control army drones. When it was known that manager Andy Rubin was paid $90 million to leave after claims of sexual abuse, the workers became very angry. Many thousands of Google workers stopped working to protest. And they won. They made the leaders stop both projects and end rules that had stopped victims from speaking.
The bosses learned a lesson: their own workers were a real danger to their profits every three months. First, they got back at the workers by firing leaders like the AI expert Timnit Gebru. Then, in 2023 and 2024, tech companies fired 360,000 workers. These job cuts were a way to control workers. They were a way to weaken the workers’ power and make those workers, who believed in their work, less important.
An investor texted Elon Musk about many job cuts: “sharpen your blades, boys.” The hard-to-find, strong worker was replaced by the scared worker who might lose their job. The last strong defense against enshittification was gone.
With all four limits stopped, the enshittification control can now be used fully. This is the world we live in.
The cure is to bring back the four things that once stopped the problem: competition, government rules, self-help, and worker power. We must bring back competition with strong antitrust laws. We must bring back worker power with unions. Most importantly, we must bring back government rules and fixing things yourself with clear rules. “Clear” means they are simple to check and easy to make sure they are followed.
For example, we should make a law for a “Right to Exit.” This would make platforms like Facebook work with other networks. If you could leave Facebook for a better competitor without losing contact with your friends and family, the problem of getting everyone to move would disappear. The cost of changing would be nothing. And the fear of losing to competitors would come back.
We need a clear rule like the “End-to-End Principle.” This rule says that a platform’s job is to connect people who want to send and receive information as well as possible. This one rule stops the trickery that is central to enshittification. It makes it illegal for Amazon to hide the product you looked for and show you a paid fake one instead. It makes it illegal for Facebook to hide posts from your friends and show you paid ads.
This fight is about more than just better technology. The internet is the place where all our other battles will happen. We cannot win those fights on an online system that stops us from trying to organize within it.
Final summary
In this summary of Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, you have learned that online platforms getting worse is a planned and expected process called enshittification. This happens because the things that once controlled companies are gone.
Platforms always move from being good to users, to treating users badly to help businesses, to finally treating those businesses badly for their own gain. This is possible because big companies stopped competition. And fixing things yourself was made illegal by laws like the DMCA. This made it a serious crime to go against a company’s way of making money. Platforms use methods like “twiddling” to use computer rules to lower workers’ pay. The last defense, tech workers, was broken by many job cuts. The cure is to bring back all four things: breaking up big companies, bringing back the right to fix things and use different networks, and giving power back to workers.
Because the only other choice is not just worse platforms. It is a world where taking money isn’t just a step, but the main way they always do business.
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