Enshittification by Cory Doctorow

You may have also felt that the internet has become worse and worse in the course of the past decade. You’re not just imagining it, but it is actually happening. Cory Doctorow calls it the “Enshittification” and in the book with the same title, he describes it as a kind of illness that has befallen the internet. In the first part, he dissects the pathology of enshittification, then the epidemiology of the enshittification pandemic, and finally he discusses some cures for this illness.

The Pathlology

To describe what exactly happens when a service or platform becomes infected with enshittification, Cory described what happened to Google Search. At first, Google Search was the way to search for web pages on the internet. It was leaps and bounds better than all their competitors due to the use of the PageRank algorithm, invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This algorithm ranked pages purely by the quality and quantity of links to and from a particular page. This surfaced the most relevant sites to a user based on a search query and made it the go-to search platform.

This describes the first stage of Enshittification: platforms are good to their users

Over time, Google wanted to capitalize off their wildly successful search service. To accomplish this, they used the data they collected from their billions of users to personalize the serving of ads on behalf of business customers. This started degrading the user experience of Google Search. Users now needed to scroll past “sponsored” search results, and the search results themselves are not purely ranked by relevance but by which business customer paid the most to surface higher in the search results, pushing down the organic, actually useful links.

This is the second stage of Enshittification: platforms abuse users to make things better for their business costomers

As Google becomes one of the biggest advertisement platforms in the world, businesses start to depend on Google for their success. To capitalize off this dependence, Google slowly increased the number of ad slots and deliberately degraded the targeting of ads, making them less relevant for users. This forces businesses to pay Google higher prices to stay visible on the platform. Google also introduces features like Google Flights and Google Shopping, which bypass third-party services altogether. AI Overview also keeps users from ever visiting the source sites, which rely on Google so much for visibility.

The third stage of Enshittification has begun: platforms abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves

Now the platform has become vile for both users and business customers. Due to Google’s sheer size and influence, it still remains the default search and advertisement platform on the internet, and Google will do anything to ensure it stays that way – except make it less shitty, of course.

The final stage of Enshittification has occurred: the platform becomes a giant pile of shit

The Epidemiology

In this section of the book, Cory moves from showing what enshittification is to why it is happening. The key point he makes is that enshittification isn’t just “capitalism doing capitalism”: capitalism only disciplines companies when competition is real, and platforms can only get away with making their products worse when users and businesses have nowhere else to go. Cory argues that this lack of meaningful competition isn’t an accident – it’s the result of specific policy choices that enabled monopoly power, lock-in, and dependency. Some of the most important policy failures mentioned by Cory I took away were:

• Weak antitrust enforcement – companies are allowed to buy competitors and cemet absolute dominance.
• “IP extremism” – aggressive copyright and patent enforcement blocks interoperability and locks users into platforms.
• The end of tech worker power – tech employess can no longer push back against their employer’s harmful decisions.

The Cure

The “cure”, then, isn’t going to come from everyone making slightly better personal choices – it has to come from fixing the policies that enabled the whole cycle in the first place. That means treating antitrust as something we actually enforce, breaking up monopolies and blocking anti-competitive behavior. It means supporting interoperability by decriminalizing repair and modification of devices and undermining the mechanisms platforms use to keep users stuck. It also means rebuilding real organization among tech workers so there’s internal pressure against harmful product and business decisions instead of just resignation or quiet dissent. Because even if you jump ship to a platform that feels less shitty right now, there’s nothing stopping it from following the same path later once it’s big enough and insulated from competition.

Conclusion

From reading this book, my eyes were really opened to the ubiquity of enshittification. Pretty much any relatively large tech company no longer produces platforms or products to the quality that should be possible with today’s technology. It was also very interesting to read that enshittification is not an inevitability but that there exists a world – with proper policies in place – that ensures platforms are beneficial for both users and business customers. I will try to be more conscious of alternatives to products and platforms that have not been enshittified, but also realize that this is not the solution.