A few years ago, Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification’, which kind of describes how a service deteriorates and sells out its users and later its customers, all to make as most money as possible for the people who own most of the company that owns the service.

Merriam-Webster¹ define ‘enshittification’ as follows:

Enshittification is an informal word used to criticize the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms over time, due to an increase in advertisements, costs, or features. It can also refer more generally to any state of deterioration, especially in politics or society. Similar forms include enshittify and enshittified.

Doctorow says enshittification happens in three stages.

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.

To describe the process in detail, Doctorow starts by digging into Facebook.

When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, it allowed you to quickly interact with friends and lesser-known people. That was the stage where everything was peachy keen for users who quickly connected with each other.

Then, the second stage started: Facebook claimed they wouldn’t spy on their users, which was a lie from the start². They made it impossible to leave the platform without taking your friends with you, which means you and your friends keep each other hostage: leave, and you lose your connections.

Meanwhile, Facebook listen to your every move³, read everything you do, and sell your data to the highest bidder⁴, including groups that hate Jews⁵. They’re a monopoly that carelessly perform psychological experiments on users⁶. They should be broken up⁷.

Lastly, the third stage, the one where Facebook started abusing their business customers.

Facebook understood that it could make money from two groups of business customers: advertisers and publishers. There was only one problem: to make the service valuable to them, Facebook would have to reduce the value enjoyed by its users. So Facebook started to claw back the surplus from those end users and began doling it out to advertisers and publishers. Facebook approached its advertisers and made a pitch: “Hey, do you remember when we told these rubes that we wouldn’t ever spy on them? We were lying. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. If you give us a remarkably reasonable sum of money, we will use that surveillance data to do extraordinarily precisely targeted advertising on your behalf. What’s more, we are such upright, good-natured slobs that we have filled a whole building with engineers who labor day and night to fight ad fraud. If you give us a dollar to show an ad to a specific kind of person, you can be sure that ad is going to be shown to the right person.” Then, Facebook approached publishers and made a different pitch: “Hey, do you remember when we told these rubes that we would only show them the things they asked to see? That was a total lie. If you post short excerpts from your own website content to your Facebook account, complete with a link back to that website, we will nonconsensually cram those excerpts into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see them. You will get a free traffic funnel that you can monetize as you see fit.”

For advertisers, this took the form of rising prices and plummeting ad fidelity, along with skyrocketing ad fraud. Gradually, Facebook ramped up the price of targeting an ad to its users, but it also took less care to show ads to the users advertisers had selected.

Meanwhile, ad fraud was going wild. Advertisers were paying billions for ads that no one ever saw. In 2018, Procter & Gamble zeroed out its $200 million annual “programmatic advertising” budget and saw no decline in sales. It seems all of those ads were either: Being shown to random people rather than the people P&G was paying to target; or Not being shown to anyone.

Here’s an amazing fact: Historically, the intermediaries that served the print, display, radio, and TV ad industries accounted for about 15 percent of the total sums generated by advertising—that’s all the ad agencies, media buyers, and other Mad Men middlemen of the golden age of advertising. Today’s ad-tech duopoly captures 51 percent of that total.

One of Doctorow’s powers as a writer is in simplifying and clearly explaining how big dragons are fairly brittle:

Any bobble in Facebook’s growth—let alone a contraction in Facebook’s user numbers—triggers shareholder panics. In the first quarter of 2022, Facebook posted lower-than-projected US user growth, and the stock market responded with a mass sell-off, dumping $250 billion worth of Facebook shares in twenty-four hours, at the time the largest decline in any corporate valuation in the history of the human race.

People may think they’re powerless, but all of our rights are built on rallying together against the huge corporations, nations, and feudal lords. Ursula Le Guin put this well⁸:

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

Doctorow’s good at philosophising:

Google’s narrative switched from claiming to have discovered the mathematical roots of universal truth, to having figured out how to harness mathematics to express its judgment about what a good search results screen looked like. This was an important change, both because it was true and because it established a basis for internal contention about what qualities a good search page should have. When “What is a good search page?” became a question up for grabs at Google, it set the stage for later enshittification.

Doctorow is one of few well-known technologists who can lift their head and see the big picture, a person who sees what’s really at stake. For example, when Google bought Nest, a device that allowed you to use an app to track certain metrics in one’s living quarters, they built a surveillance-capitalist device that not only suddenly included a microphone⁹. This is a nefarious thing, but what’s worse, is spotting these many things and see how they create a pattern of surveillance; Google used to wear the tagline ‘Don’t be evil’ as its masthead, which was removed a few years later. Doctorow asks how come these companies aren’t broken up or, at the very least, regulated against to prevent nefarious practices.

Enshittification is a natural stage in modern-day electronic capitalism. Doctorow carefully goes through history and shows how tactics started out and evolved far beyond capitalism into what Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, calls technofeudalism¹⁰, which is a state where tech giants have circumvented capitalism and instead created a society where humans are serfs that are treated like slaves that are owned by Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Adobe, Sonos, etc. We work their lands and get very little in return. In fact, they surveil our every move and use that against us, including the sale of that information to other companies and nation states.

Doctorow has long been involved in digital rights and is apt at linking large swathes of information. The book is filled with examples of what the world could look like if companies weren’t allowed to run wild. There are many stories about how companies have abused their companies throughout the book, paired with what-ifs on the future we could have.

This leads me to what I think is the main problem of the book: it lacks brevity and simplicity. Where some writers, like Shoshana Zuboff¹¹ and Sarah Bakewell¹², have a natural gift for condensing big subjects into mid-sized stories, Doctorow throws everything but the house at us. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because he does it with relevance and a grand sense of humour that suits a true raconteur like himself; just listen to Doctorow when talking in a podcast episode, and you’ll know what I mean: for example, if you’d ask me what subjects Doctorow covered during Ed Zitron’s excellent podcast episode ‘Enshittification’¹³, I wouldn’t know where to start, because so many things were said. His writing is very similar to how he speaks.

The book reads a little like a collection of Wikipedia articles that are tied together by humour and how damaging the tech giants are. Doctorow is jocular but he’s no Puck¹⁴. The book does show many valid concerns for what’s happened to our digital rights.

One of the best things about the book is how Doctorow brings up possible solutions to problems.

For example, Doctorow brings up Mastodon, an open-source social network that is similar to Twitter. What’s the difference? Well, unlike Twitter, Mastodon is not run by someone like Elon Musk and can’t be turned into a fascist hellscape. Mastodon is decentralised, which means that anyone can set up their own instance and completely rule over how that instance communicates with other instances. No big overlord can press a button and destroy your instance, not take you to court to stop you from having your own Mastodon instance. Take down an instance and the other instances keep working. Also, unlike Bluesky, Mastodon isn’t owned by venture capitalists that must make a profit from your data. In other words, Mastodon is like humanity: we all work independently of each other, while we all need each other to function properly. But the key thing, I think, lies in being kind to each other.

It doesn’t matter which Mastodon server you choose, because if you later regret your choice, you can change your mind. By default, Mastodon comes with a link that packages up the list of everyone you follow, everyone who follows you, and all the people you block and mute, and sends it to you in a neat little file. When you want to change Mastodon servers, all you need to do is click the “Export” link in your settings for your old account. Then you sign up for a new account, click the “Import” link, and select that exported file. With just a couple of clicks, you’re set up on that new server. Anyone who followed you in your old digs will continue to see your posts, and you’ll keep seeing the posts of the people you follow. In other words, the switching costs of leaving one Mastodon server for another are damn near zero. If you are on a server you don’t like, find another one!

There’s a point I’m trying to make by mentioning Mastodon: as opposed to Twitter, Facebook, Meta, etc., you can export your data and just continue anywhere else you like.

This is practice that is actively prevented by Facebook, Google, Meta, Amazon, etc. If it weren’t for regulation, for example, GDPR, people wouldn’t be able to get hold of their data, ever.

The tech giants want you to be their slave, caught in their net, taking your data.

Speaking of enshittification, while scrolling through notes I took from Doctorow’s book, I saw this little story:

In 2024, Sonos, the leading “smart” speaker company, pushed an update to all of its speakers that took away the majority of their functionality and severely downgraded the functions that remained. I got caught in this, and months later, I’m still waiting for Sonos to make good on its promise to restore functionality to the thousands of dollars’ worth of home audio I unwisely bought from the company. (I foolishly assumed that the biggest risk of owning Sonos products was the fact that they came with microphones that could be hacked, so I bought models that didn’t have mics.) My speakers are all but useless—one pair keeps playing booming music in the middle of the night and takes multiple tries just to set the mute. I ended up unplugging them. I would much prefer to buy a new operating system from some enterprising startup, one that severs my ties with Sonos forever. So would millions of other furious Sonos owners. If we restored the rights of interoperators—repealing or modifying laws like Section 1201 of the DMCA—there’d be a tidy little business for a new company to come in and scoop up.

Sonos is a company that exists to maximise shareholder value, which means to make a few number of people as much money as possible. While not giving a shit about their users, as is proven.

What about when one person lords over a platform?

In late 2024, Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, unilaterally altered the function of the service’s block button, so that the people you block on Twitter would still be able to see your posts, just not “interact” with them. Users and experts on online harassment were furious and appalled. Twitter users who have historically been subjected to dogpiling by trolls have relied on mass-blocking tools to keep their messages away from groups of vicious hatemongers, who are often followed by the kinds of unhinged maniacs who are one viral hate campaign away from doxing their targets, calling them or their employers or spouses, swatting them (sending police to their homes after claiming that there is a firefight or murder underway there, which can lead to death-by-cop), or even showing up themselves. Musk has his own fears about stalkers and violent randos, which have led him to craft extensive policy to address the issue of people who use public records to reveal the movements of billionaires’ private jets. This is an issue for a tiny handful of people, while Twitter’s neutered block button imposes additional risk on millions, perhaps tens of millions, of users.

Suddenly, moving from Twitter to Mastodon isn’t such a big thing. On a personal note, I used Twitter a lot when it came out. I was showered by abuse from racists, homophobes, and other types of gnats. A few years ago I moved away from Twitter and later got my account suspended for linking to my Mastodon account. I’ve been subject to abuse twice on Mastodon. Once, most likely for having been mistaken for someone else. Anyway, I don’t feel particularly afraid that a vengeful fascist and autocrat would sell me out when I’m on Mastodon, particularly because there’s nothing to sell out, really¹⁵. (Naturally, one should always be careful of what one posts online as the data could be stolen or taken.)

Doctorow makes me think. He challenges my perceptions. He puts takes the piss out of himself. But mainly, he’s great at showing how people should care to not take privacy and any of their rights for granted. Rights are taken, not granted. With great electronics and more-than-ever interconnected systems, the bigger the risk. Look at what happens when technology and nefarious practices happen:

Recall, too, that Norwegian grocers, who lead the world in electronic shelf labels, already reprice their goods more than two thousand times per day. They claim that this is done to provide discounts (for example, making milk cheaper as it nears its expiry date), but we all know how this works. Think of your grocery loyalty card (or these days, app), which started off as a way to get a discount when you shopped, but—as competition dwindled—turned into an essential, as the prices of everything in the grocery store went up and the only way to get the regular price was to surrender your privacy and use a store card. The store cards don’t provide a discount anymore (if they ever did)—rather, you have to pay a premium for privacy.

This type of behaviour can be legally prevented. We can have politicians implement laws to prevent this type of automatised theft.

Doctorow’s tearing-down of Amazon should be on display to every manufacturer in the world; if they’d read those lines every morning before going to work, I think it would kickstart Jeff Bezos’s empire of dirt to be on its way where it deserves.

Amazon has a myriad of tactics at its disposal for shifting value from business customers to itself, some of which also involve shifting value away from end users, no matter what the cute flywheel pitch says. Amazon uses its overview of merchants’ sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants’ contracting factories, to cream off its merchants’ bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results.

Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees that are pitched as optional but are actually effectively mandatory. Take Prime: 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 might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfillment by Amazon, a “service” in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings. All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that Amazon’s own shipping is fully subsidized. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods.

Here’s where Amazon’s attacks on its merchants’ bottom lines turn into higher prices for its customers. A merchant that pays Amazon through the nose needs to make up the money somewhere. Hypothetically, merchants could eat Amazon’s fees themselves—in other words, if Amazon wants a 10 percent fee on an item with a 20 percent margin, the seller could split the difference, and settle for a 10 percent profit. But Amazon’s fee isn’t 10 percent. Add all the junk fees together, and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45 to 51 cents on every dollar it earns on the platform. Even if a merchant wanted to absorb the “Amazon tax” on your behalf, it couldn’t. Merchants just don’t make 51 percent margins. So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot. Now, you may have noticed that Amazon’s prices aren’t any higher than the prices that you pay elsewhere. There’s a good reason for that: when merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most favored nation status, and it’s key to the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. Let the implications of most favored nation settle in for a moment. If Amazon is taxing merchants 41 to 51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows that you’re paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop. Amazon has made prices go up at Target. At Walmart. At the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. At the manufacturer’s own website.

Doctorow’s book carries heft, a lot of facts, and incentive in the extreme. Hell, he probably wants you to defy him and think for yourself.

The tech giants don’t want you to think: they want you to use and buy.

What’s your definition of a true friend? Someone you can trust, laugh with, laugh at, and to be sure they’d call you out when you do something bad. That’s a true friend, right?

Remember, the tech-giant leaders genuflect to fascists like Donald Trump:

These men intervened in many ways on Trump’s behalf. Bezos ordered the editorial board at The Washington Post (which he owns) not to endorse Kamala Harris. [Tim] Cook [CEO of Apple, Niklas’s edit] personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Both TikTok and Twitter changed their algorithms to favor Trump-oriented news in the run-up to the election.

Try applying the ‘friend’ label to any kind of enshittified platform. Try. We don’t like the taste of Meta, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, nor any of the other places that make software from your data to fly AI drones into Palestinians while constantly changing the price of an apple as you wander the halls of an Amazon supermarket that’s just scanned your face ‘to increase payment ease’, while a Bezos bot sifts through your latest Amazon searches to know what you’ve bought and searched for, to lure you in to buy more shit you don’t need, shit that’s giving you a false sense of contentment, just like eating KFC while humming a MacDonalds tune while some bot calculates how much time you’ve spent in their ‘restaurant’ so that they can calculate how to get you out of there sooner the next time you’re unlucky to enter.

Remember, when the number of enshittifiers are fewer than the digits on your hands and feet, you know the game is rigged.

Apple can pick winners and losers, for example, by exempting Uber from its 30 percent app tax, while charging smaller competitors the full amount. Like Amazon, Apple can clone its best customers’ businesses and directly compete with them. When Apple sells you an audiobook via its Apple Books app (which comes preinstalled on your iPhone), it doesn’t charge itself a 30 percent fee for every book sold. But other companies do pay the fee, which is onerous indeed, since the wholesale discount for audiobooks is only 20 percent. That means that when Apple sells you a Random House audiobook for $25, it sends $20 to Penguin Random House and keeps $5 for itself. But if an indie audiobook store like (the excellent) Libro.fm sells you that audiobook through Apple’s platform, it pays Random House $20 and owes Apple a further $7.50. In other words, if Libro.fm tries to sell audiobooks through an iPhone app, it loses money on every sale. Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone: Uber and Lyft are exempt from these fees. Enshittifiers stick together.

Read the book and feel empowered. You’re not alone. The book is definitely worth its money.

Enshittification is published on 2025-10-07.