Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

by Cory Doctorow

It’s not your imagination. Life online really does get worse by the day, and that is by intent

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Politics, Audiobook, Business, Economics, Sociology

353 pages, ebook

First published October 7, 2025

About the author

Cory 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.

Reviews

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Dona's Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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 & 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.

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Scott Rhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Ginger · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Dessi · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[donna backshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Erik B.K.K. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Surprise surprise, Enshittification is a shit 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.

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

did i finish this book or did this book finish me. brutal. going to scream into the void for a while now

[Danika at The Lesbrary · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like enfurification!

Does a great job at breaking down how (mainly) tech companies eventually end up taking advantage of their positions of power to screw over their employees, business customers, and the rest of us. I especially appreciated that Doctorow didn’t just come with complaints but also ideas for how to address the issue.

[Tara McMullin · Rating 3 out of 5]

[ Disclaimer: This review is based on a digital galley and may not reflect changes that will be made before publication. ]

Overall, Doctorow's argument is spot on. The book expands on his initial writing on enshittification and offers plenty of examples of the process in action. Doctorow makes sense of the nagging frustration that today's tech—from social media, to artificial intelligence, to search, to commerce platforms—engenders.

He also offers fairly concrete ideas for preventing enshittification on a policy level while fighting back on the judicial level. Thinking about practical, if politically risky, solutions is one of Doctorow's strengths.

As with many books in the "books based on blog posts" subgenre of criticism, this book has a lot of filler. I have a pretty high tolerance for padding, but the wordy prose and constant references to previous pages got old.

Finally, the book concludes on an odd note. Doctorow references Audre Lorde and one of her most well-known quotes: "For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." While he acknowledges that "Audre Lorde is far smarter than I am about nearly everything," he goes on to say this idea is "manifestly wrong." This is such an odd and unnecessary inclusion.

First, all of Doctorow's policy proposals can be put in the Not the Master's Tools bucket.

Second, what's the point of even including this paragraph? It adds nothing to his conclusion aside from namedropping a Black lesbian feminist who would have faced brutal online harassment even on Doctorow's "old good internet," no enshittification needed.

Third, just a few paragraphs later, he quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. as a way to set up his punchy ending. This only serves to make the Lorde reference feel more tokenized than it already did. Thus, the conclusion reads as though Doctorow got to the end of the book before realizing he should check some DEI boxes.

This book offers an important framework for rethinking the tech industry and the policies we use to regulate it. It's a shame it ended in such a weird place.

[Wendelle]

We've all noticed this strange paradox wherein the most powerful tech behemoths seem not to produce anything, yet they crushingly hold all the power. Uber doesn't do any of the driving; yet the drivers who do the actual work earn a pittance, engineered to be below statutory minimum wage, while the customers are charged exorbitantly. Amazon didn't use to do its own production of goods; yet it hoovered up a lot of profit as the intermediary between producers and one-click consumers, to the demise of actual small, local stores with physical storefronts. AirBnb doesn't construct any new homes, yet it has succeeded in changing the makeup of several international cities, as temporary AirBnbs have affected housing affordability and long-term rental stock for local residents. Just by virtue of being the middleman providing connectivity between consumer and actual provider, these tech companies have gained a lot of say over our lives and economies.

Cory Doctorow, the phenomenal scifi author and Internet expert and activist, aims to explain this bewildering phenomenon of the rise of power of the middlemen in this book. Mr. Doctorow coined the term enshittification, which has since entered common palaver as a catchphrase encapsulating the general dissatisfaction with our world as influenced by tech or tech products. He aims to go deeper, however, with the term to mean a deep-diving analysis into how tech platforms, these intermediaries of connectivity, aimed to accumulate so much might and profit unto themselves at the expense of both the customers and the providers that they serve to connect with each other. Cory goes into a few examples of these, such as Facebook being a terrible experience for end users and advertisers alike, Amazon locking in and strongarming the prices and offerings for both customers and producers alike, and Uber and Doordash being such miserable experiences with price-gouging fees for both customers and deliverers/drivers alike. In particular, he looks at things like the downfall of antitrust laws and the weakening of the might of regulators against monopolizing industries, as primary contributors to the status of industry behemoths as being too big to fail despite providing unsatisfying services to both consumers and producers. He explains a little why users stay on these platforms despite their accumulation of grievances about the way both customers and producers are treated-- things like network effects and the fact that all of one's friends, social relations, customers and professional contacts are entwined with the gigantic platform.

And the treatment received from these platforms are severe, to say the least. We are all aware of the common stories of the dehumanizing plight of warehouse workers and drivers who have to pee in bottles. We are similarly aware of ways that platforms aim to circumvent labor laws, such as deputizing their workers/ drivers as 'self-employed independent contractors' to sidestep demands for minimum wage and pledged benefits. Uber and Doordash also do more shady things, such as withholding tips (Doordash) or paying drivers the lowest amount they would take, then enticing them back with stories of other drivers earning the lottery dream(giant teddy bear win) of a much higher amount, thus keeping them always on the edge of staying on (Uber). Cory Doctorow is able to connect all these phenomena cohesively. Worse still, he shows that worse treatment is being trialed out. These include chickenisation, wherein the aspiring producer or worker/deliverer/driver is ordered to buy specific set of tools or training from the employing platform, which sets him to a pathway of debt and lock-in to the platform, which at the same time has autocratic dictatorial control over his or her wages. There's also technofeudalism, wherein services and provisions of the platform that we increasingly depend on for our way of life, can no longer be purchased according to the rules of capitalism but rented without end from the platform, as we are turned on to survival on subscription mode. If these are all things that interest or concern the reader, then I recommend this book because Cory Doctorow has a lot of brilliant things to say and synthesize in this book. If one is wary for future generations of life in subscription mode, where essentials are rented forever not owned, and people create value only for platform corporations to gobble up that value then singlehandedly decide what it's worth-- the littlest amount that could be-- then it's worth reading and sharing this book.

[David Dayen · Rating 4 out of 5]

How can you not like Cory and marvel at his brilliance?

[Stefanos · Rating 4 out of 5]

How has your experience with the internet and digital platforms been in recent years? Are you noticing:
- worse search results from Google?
- social feeds full of ‘brainrot’, ‘slop’, and ‘rage-bait’ instead of posts from people you actually follow?
- software, devices, or appliances locked behind new subscription fees for features you already paid for?
- useless “AI” features you never asked for?
- ever-increasing subscription prices?

For Cory Doctorow, much of the internet and platforms are indeed getting shittier as the result of Big Tech getting “too big to fail → too big to jail → too big to care”.

How does enshittification happen?
Platforms start off being good to their users, providing services that they actually value. For example, Facebook once promised never to spy on users and to only show content posted by their friends; while Amazon initially lured customers by selling below cost and subsidizing free shipping.

Historical context: after the 2008 financial crash, tech companies gained access to massive surpluses of cheap Wall Street money, enabling them to burn cash to attract users, kill competition, and “lock in” their users.

Afterwards, they shifted focus from pleasing users to pleasing paying customers; i.e., advertisers on Facebook, or sellers on Amazon.
Once both users and customers are locked in, the platform can exploit both groups to extract more value for shareholders. For example, Amazon now charges sellers huge fees (up to 45%), while its top search results go to those who spend more on ads -- or from whom Amazon can extract higher fees.

In each case, the platform gets worse for everyone except owners and shareholders, but by then, it is harder to leave. All your friends are on Facebook and it’s to coordinate a move to another platform; Amazon dominates online retail; ebooks and audiobooks are locked into Amazon apps via DRM; and so on. And of course, similar patterns can be observed in Google, Apple, Uber, DoorDash, Airbnb, Netflix, and many other platforms.

Why wasn’t it always this bad?
It’s not like suddenly platform owners got more greedy; or “good” CEOs were replaced by “bad” ones. In the past there were certain forces that kept tech companies from enshittification: (1) market competition, (2) effective regulation (especially anti-trust law), (3) tech workers with enough leverage to push back, and (4) adversarial interoperability.

Doctorow traces how each of these was eroded: weakened and ignored antitrust laws, massive mergers and acquisitions, new rules making interoperability and reverse engineering illegal, layoffs (and now threats of AI replacement) that undermined worker power, etc.

Doctorow also connects these factors to Yanis Varoufaki’s Technofeudalism (worth reading if you haven’t already, as well as Jodi Dean’s Capital’s Grave, for a deeper theoretical dive).

How can we fix it?
Doctorow calls for a revival of labor unions and strict enforcement of antitrust laws to break up Big Tech monopolies, or, in my view, tackling the problem at its root through the socialization of key platforms: platforms democratically controlled by workers in collaboration with municipalities; but of course, these are long-term fights.

A more immediate lever is interoperability: the ability for different systems, platforms, or devices to work together. Email is an example of interop: you can use any provider and still communicate with anyone who has an email address.
This principle could easily be applied to social platforms as well; because computers are universal by design.
Users could leave Facebook or Twitter without losing their friends, followers, posts, or conversations, and move to a platform that respects privacy and prioritizes content from people they actually follow.

Interop restores power to users by making it easier to leave a platform without losing their digital life. Doctorow also highlights ongoing movements (digital rights, privacy advocacy, the right to repair, etc.) that could form a broader coalition to fight for interop and against Big Tech monopolies.

Why does it matter?
Compared to the climate crisis, rising economic inequality, or growing authoritarianism, digital platforms may not sound like the most pressing issue. But Doctorow argues that building a better internet could also help us tackle those bigger challenges.
Big Tech -- today’s techno-feudal lords -- exercise vast control over the information we see, how we communicate and work, and even, to some extent, what we think, desire, and value.
They shape public discourse, influence elections, and dictate the terms of digital life.
Challenging their dominance isn’t just about getting better apps, platforms, or gadgets -- it’s about reclaiming autonomy, public space online, and democratic power in the digital age.

If you already follow Doctorow’s work, his blog, talks, or earlier nonfiction books (like The Internet Con), much of this will sound familiar. Even so, Enshittification is an important book: timely, engaging, and very readable, with the potential to reach and resonate with a much broader audience.

[Myles · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title of this book reminds me of the new recipe I tried for a Moroccan soup last night and what happened this morning.

As a critic of the techno monopolies Cory Doctorow cannot be underestimated, and the publication of this book is no exception.

Doctorow hammers Meta, amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, and several other monopolists for their questionable, unethical, and sometimes downright illegal business practices in his writings.

The perspective of this book is that the behaviour of the giants has made the Internet and general computing worse over the past twenty or so years.

And I believe he has a point.

But this book may not be the best exposition of his critique as it goes over a lot of old, well-told stories, has some curious sidebars, some tiresome repetition, and confusing technical discussions.

I noticed that some reviewers saw what I saw and blame it on Doctorow tacking together his blog posts.

I raced to the end.

In Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labour Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, authored by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow we get an earlier and — I think — more cogent analysis of similar themes.

One of things I try to do in these situations is read the acknowledgements closely and "follow" (on X or threads or bluesky or mastodon) some of the authorities the author cites. Books often are about old things (sometimes only months old, but still old). If I know some reliable commentators I can follow them on current updates to some of the nagging issues.

In this sense, Doctorow has been helpful.

There is one thing I can add that’s irrefutable: this time of year, when Black Friday is on the horizon, amazon starts sending out millions of notices to customers telling them that Black Friday “specials” are on the way.

This has a stinky impact on business and it goes on for weeks.

As a retailer myself, I really wish they’d cut it out.

One further note: I never thought I’d ever hear the name “Crad Kilodney” again. The fellow used to haunt the street corners of my youth hustling his cornball short stories in Toronto. Upon researching his name I learn that he worked in publishing and once had an affair with Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen.

Apparently Kilodney was one of Doctorow’s inspirations

I also learn that Columbia scholar Tim Wu and Doctorow went to the same alternative school in Toronto.

I learn something new (and strange) every day.

[Lucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this from the publisher. Joke's on you, I preordered his last two books!

Doctorow was the perfect person to write this book. I mean, he did coin the term and all, but the symptoms of Enshittification have been a constant theme in his novels for years. The story Unauthorized Bread in Radicalized is informed by printer makers forcing users to use proprietary, expensive cartridges in the real world.
Doctorow makes the case that Enshittification is not just another word for capitalism, and while I'm still not entirely sure if I entirely agree or find that distinction meaningful, there's a great deal that I enjoyed about this book.

In the first part, we have a few case studies, and he comes with *receipts*. One thing that he brought up with twitter that really stuck out to me is that Twitter basically just used to be an API that anyone could build a client for before they enshittified it and completely locked it down. In the earlier days of Twitter, one of my favorite ways to look at tweets wasn't on the website at all, but a Firefox extension!
Another one of the case studies that resonated with me is Amazon. It used to be an extremely convenient way to purchase nearly anything. Now, it's an active struggle for both users and vendors - we users have an incredibly hard time finding what we want and are being steered to more expensive products, and vendors are not getting their items served to people looking for them unless they pay Amazon a bribe. It's a far cry from the place that so many people, myself included, made our first stop for shopping because of the ease and price. Amazon gets to reap the benefits of making it worse for everyone because who's going to compete?

In the second section of the book, Doctorow goes into the pathology for enshittification. The Zero Interest Rate Policy that the United States underwent is discounted somewhat quickly here. One could also kind of quibble as to whether ZIRP ended in 2022, or if it ended in 2015 and started again after the pandemic started. Personally, I'm still inclined to think that ZIRP was important to set the stage for enshitiffication to take place, whereas Doctorow thinks that may just be *accelerating* it. I do agree that it is just as much a labor, competition, and regulation issue as he makes his case about in the book. That is a big reason I enjoyed reading this - when you're in the sphere of podcasts and blogs and forums that are discussing this phenomenon, the labor and competition components are frequently overlooked.

The third part is the "epidemiology". You're likely already familiar with the consequences of enshittification - in my case, I can't use a Firefox extension or any other third party client to look at Twitter anymore. Uber gets to break labor laws and circumvented cab regulations worldwide because they did it with an app (for more on this, I'd recommend checking out Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac). You can't repair tractor because John Deere's computer said no. You can maybe get your phone fixed now because of the lobbying work of activists for right to repair laws. There are some more grisly examples that I've left out.

The last part is "The Cure" which is in part the least satisfying part of the book. It's unclear how much the FTC is going to work its antitrust powers under Trump's regime, though there are some glimmers of hope as they've kept cases against Google going. People are increasingly open to platforms that are at least somewhat decentralized (Mastodon has a decent following of users, though one might find it a lackluster replacement for Twitter. Bluesky promises to be decentralized like Mastodon but isn't in a meaningful way yet.). The EU is putting into place regulations against platforms and going after big tech - except in cases where they're easing off it to dance with Trump's tariff demands. There's kind of just a Trump-shaped problem at this end of the book, really. There was a decent amount of momentum under Biden and now it's unclear where any of this is going to go. It's a mixed bag for labor too - seems like there's never been more energy in the labor movement in recent memory, but membership is still declining.

On the whole, I recommend this book. I certainly have my nitpicks, but the case studies are great and it helps establish how we got here and what might be our way through.

[Halina]

Fun read. Very American-centric but fair enough considering most tech companies are indeed American! It's basically about all the stuff you suspect - and it's true. Trash companies doing trash things. I hate them all!

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hate these tech loser CEOs. Imagine how great the world could be if people who had power acted for the good of humanity, instead of their own greed and fragile egos? I also wish policy makers would stop letting us down. It is exhausting and infuriating.

This is a timely book about how all the major tech giants roped us in and screwed us over. There are actionable items for policy makers at the end, as well as stuff "regular folk" can do by making platforms less important (which he explained how they have made it so hard to do... Mastedon servers seem to be the answer and I will look into that).

It did give me an extra push into my already existing desire to give as little as possible to these tech giants.

The case studies about Uber, Google, Facebook, and Apple are not going to be entirely new for most people who grew up with it happening in real time, such as myself. However, there are details that I was not aware of. It really upset me to know that people paying for Adobe subscriptions that were stored in the cloud then faced an additional, stupidly large monthly fee charged for use of certain colours and if not, their previous work using the colour would be black instead. We truly don't own anything anymore and are entirely at the mercy of these tech giants.

The explanation of how Amazon has resulted in ALL prices going higher really wowed me. I should have known, I guess.

I think this audiobook is still worth listening to, but just skimming through some sections that get too technical or repetitive.

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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"

There is some power in giving a name (and maybe especially a silly name?) to something that creeps into all aspects of our lives, an issue so present that once you have a term for it you want to call it out everywhere you see it. During the week or so that I was reading this book I ran into myriad examples of enshittification, a process in which companies that have become so powerful that they are no longer subject to being checked by competition, antitrust enforcement, worker power, etc., and thus powerful enough to abuse their users and customers alike without fear of retribution. Doctorow sets out a convincing argument that tech in particular escalates this, and the most interesting parts of this book are probably the his breakdowns of Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. as case studies in nasty work.

Admittedly I was hoping the "and What to Do About It" section would be more robust in terms of what I as a single American worker can do, but the book does have a hopeful tone that doesn't feel unrealistic. As enshittification progresses it's useful to have the knowledge of why and how it's happening and channel our anger and disgust through that knowledge to collectively pursue justice, so for that alone I'd recommend checking out this book.

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to this one BASICALLY in one sitting. I love non-fiction, especially business/tech related and this one just pulled me in. If you’ve ever wondered why Amazon seems to suck harder even though they’ve killed the competition, mastered the algorithm and more, this book will have some of the answers.

Thank you Net Galley and Macmillan Audio for an advanced copy of this audiobook.

[Jamie Barringer (Ravenmount) · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the advice section- the what we can do to reverse the enshittification of our technology - is very heavily policy oriented and probably not all that helpful for most readers who might otherwise be interested in this book, the rest of it is great. I got to read this e-arc on a rickety Netgalley reader, an app within their site, because the annoying and barely adequate work-around to make the Netgalley files work on a Chromebook using some variation on an Adobe product suddenly no longer works with whatever new formatting accompanied the changes that made the new reader app an option. I have been reading arcs off and on for many years now, and it is almost funny and really sad how hard it is for modern companies to put timed e-arc files into arc-readers' virtual hands in a simple, easy to use format that actually works. Having to reload the page every few hours does not count as 'easy to use'.
So, this was a perfect book to be reading while grumbling over the tech changes to reading Netgalley arcs, and of course I am reading and posting feedback using a crappy computer, only a few years old, but with one of those stupid batteries in it that expands after a while, just like the one in the computer before this one actually, so the companies involved in making Chromebooks either cannot figure out how to make computers with batteries that don't expand and threaten to crack their computer's casing after a year or so, or they don't see that issue as a problem worth fixing. And of course, we have a nifty new internet service, using modern tech, that almost brings our internet to a speed and reliability equal to what it seems like we had ten years ago. Ok, maybe on a good day the speed is better, but only on a good day. Surely modern technology should be far better than this. Doctorow's book explains pretty convincingly what is going on, and that yes, our tech could be, and should be better, but is not because companies benefit from not providing better services and products.
I was disappointed that the last section really was more abstract and policy oriented, so that aside from joining a union and maybe making use of any laws that get passed to fix your own tech devices, it is hard to come out of this book with much of a game plan for what to do about any of this. The book also gets a bit repetitive, again especially noticeable in the last third of the book, so perhaps this last section was really not as inspired as the rest. Still, overall this is a good book, and one I have been recommending to all my friends. No doubt I'll be hearing about it from them once this book is published, and at least some of them can make more use of the politics and policy aspects of the last part, maybe.

[Camisado · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been following Cory Doctorow online for quite some time and read a lot of his fiction, so I was very excited and grateful to receive an ARC from Farrar, Straus and Giroux via NetGalley!

This is a very important topic to me. I also yearn for the days of “the old, good internet”, not to mention constantly watching aghast as social media companies and other platform owners squeeze every last penny and second of attention out of their end users, employees, business customers and advertisers. I've seen a few other ARC reviews mention the snarky tone of the writing - I think actually it's exactly the right tone for this subject and we should all be at least as mad about it as Doctorow is.

The history and explanations of each topic are really helpful, and most people who are comfortable using technology as a consumer will understand the implications and analogies. I like the mix of very cautionary tales and the potential for hopefulness. As a UK reader, it was great to have US policies and laws explained, and still have plenty of content about Europe and the UK included (plenty of big tech companies are headquartered in the US, but this is a global issue, after all).

As an avid blog/Mastodon follower, I've encountered portions of this book in blog posts before, but the familiar material is brilliantly tied together, cross-referenced, and expanded upon.

Do yourself a favour and read this book and follow Cory's blog. Get mad about enshittification. Take your privacy and security seriously. Start using decentralised services and pushing back on big tech while we wait for watchdogs and legislators to do their work.

[Jediam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Listened on audio. The smug and self-righteous tone was so off-putting and really overshadowed the content.

[Mark Danowsky · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think Doctorow has a habit of repeating himself, but otherwise this was a solid if depressing read.

It's a nice change to see someone else writing the exact things I've been saying for years. I feel vindicated. I've been saying since I was laid off in 2023 (announced via email at 5am) that a primary motivation of that shift was to put the fear of god back into devs. They instantly save on payroll, but they also get to threaten the survivors with the same fate unless they stop getting uppity and asking for things like basic respect and human decency.

That said, it's....depressing. While the "what to do about it" is included, I disagree with the realism of that plan, which is very much predicated upon the (very unrealistic) assumptions of a sane, functioning government and an electorate that gives a shit.

It's vindicating to see an uptick in people with a wide reach talking about things like a concentration of wealth enabling all of this, correctly labeling tech workers as "temporarily embarrassed founders" (I've been screaming this since 2012) to explain why they gleefully participate in all of this, and especially pointing out the absolute absurdity that is copyright and IP law and their weaponization to do the exact opposite of what it is claimed they exist to do.

But it makes me want to set all of my electronics on fire and move to a cabin deep in a forest somewhere and never touch the internet again. I want out of this industry, and I want to opt out of so much of what modern life has become.

Go back to about 2007 and tell past-me that there would come a day where I'd be sick of Star Wars and never want to touch a computer again and watch my head explode.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t believe how much I learned from this book. Based on the silly cover and the title (which reminds me of Mr. Lahey in Trailer Park Boys: “The internet, Randy: It’s become enshittified!”), I just assumed this would be a light pop culture read on nostalgia for “the old, weird internet” (with apologies to Greil Marcus). Instead, Doctorow clearly defines a very specific term for the ways in which corporations have purposely wrecked tech to squeeze as much money as possible out of both consumers and advertisers. And not just on apps or “platforms,” but in our own lives outside the internet, due to “smart” devices that act like scummy landlords jacking up the rent. Doctorow takes us on a journey from Silicon Valley to discussions of feudalism and capitalism to make his point – and it’s a solid one.

The major players are Google, Apple, Facebook/Meta, Amazon, and Twitter/X. The steps are simple: make a great product that actually fulfills its promises for users, then lure advertisers, and once you’ve got everyone hooked, squeeze the lifeblood out of both for profit by doing to both users and advertisers exactly what you said you would never do to them. This involves either giving up on all protection/improvements on an app or purposely making it worse (the more clicks due to incorrect searches or crummy feeds, the more ad revenue!). In short: degrade the quality to maximize the profits. Since users are hooked and advertisers have no other options, everyone is stuck in an enshittified hell.

In fact, I had an app “enshittify” the very week I was reading this book: Music League, a fun app for sharing songs and playlists with friends in a competition format. It was working beautifully the last year-plus, but suddenly the entire app froze for all users this week. The reason? They just started running advertising! Naturally, the more panicked users constantly clicking “update,” the more ad revenue from clicks. The enshittification of Music League has arrived!

Doctorow does offer some solutions: support unions, especially for tech; push for legislation that prevents the criminalization of users for merely finding ways to use their devices with other programs; foster interoperability (compatibility of products across brands); and choose platforms that offer easy ways to leave, if need be.

There’s far more to the book, but that's the basic idea. I found it useful to understand why the web feels like a trap compared to 20+ years ago, why tech products and smart devices are objectively worse than previous iterations not connected to the internet, and why everything from Microsoft Word to Amazon Prime wants us to pay to “rent” access to products instead of selling them to you.