Book Review: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow – Blueprint for Understanding Digital Decay

Cory Doctorow’s “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” opens with a declaration that feels simultaneously obvious and revelatory: “It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast.” For anyone who has watched their favorite platforms decay into algorithmic nightmares filled with ads, scams, and engagement bait, this confirmation arrives like a diagnosis for an illness you’ve been suffering alone.

The services we once loved, Facebook and Twitter and Amazon and Google, have indeed turned into what Doctorow bluntly calls “piles of shit.” But this book isn’t just a cathartic rant about digital decline. It’s a systematic dissection of why platforms rot, how they’re designed to trap us, and what concrete policy changes might reverse the tide.

The Activist Who Named Our Digital Malaise

Cory Doctorow brings a quarter-century of digital rights activism to this project. As a prominent voice at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he has lobbied legislatures across the United States, Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom, observing firsthand how policy decisions enabled the consolidation of tech power. This isn’t armchair criticism. Doctorow has been in the room where antitrust enforcement collapsed, where intellectual property law metastasized into user control, where the regulatory guardrails were systematically dismantled. That lived experience permeates every page of “Enshittification,” lending authority to arguments that might otherwise read as conspiratorial.

The term enshittification emerged from Doctorow’s blog in 2022, and its viral spread reflects how perfectly it captures a shared frustration. It’s profane and funny, which helps, but what made it stick was the precision of the concept it names. Enshittification isn’t just “something got worse.” It describes a specific, multi-stage process by which platforms systematically extract value from users and business customers once network effects and switching costs have locked everyone in place. Understanding this process transforms vague dissatisfaction into legible critique.

The Three-Stage Decline

At its core, enshittification follows a predictable trajectory. Platforms begin by being good to users, subsidizing quality with investor capital to build network effects. Facebook promised never to spy on you and delivered a chronological feed of content you actually requested. Amazon sold books below cost with generous return policies. Google Search returned clean results without surveillance-based advertising. This is stage one, allocating surplus to end users.

Once users are locked in through high switching costs and network effects, platforms move to stage two: abusing users to benefit business customers. Facebook began showing you posts from pages you never followed, cramming ads into your feed, and selling your surveillance data to advertisers who could target you with “extraordinarily precisely targeted advertising.” Amazon charged merchants escalating fees for Prime placement and Fulfillment by Amazon, gradually making it impossible to reach customers without paying tribute. Google started showing ads instead of search results, with paid placement disguised as organic matches.

Stage three completes the cycle. Now platforms abuse their business customers too, clawing back every available penny for shareholders. Facebook raised advertising prices while reducing targeting accuracy and allowing rampant ad fraud. Amazon’s junk fees consumed 45 to 51 cents of every dollar merchants earned, forcing price increases across the entire retail economy through most-favored-nation clauses. The iPhone’s App Store doubled its cut to 30 percent and started charging it on every dollar, forever, while blocking any mention of cheaper payment options outside Apple’s ecosystem.

The result is a giant pile of shit. Everyone, users and business customers alike, gets a worse deal. But they can’t leave because the collective action problem makes coordination nearly impossible. You hate Facebook, but your community is there. Publishers despise Amazon’s fees, but their readers shop there. Developers resent Apple’s tax, but iPhone users won’t download apps from alternative stores.

What Killed the Discipline

The genius of Doctorow’s framework lies not in diagnosing platform rot itself, which anyone can observe, but in identifying why enshittification accelerated simultaneously across every major platform. The answer isn’t zero interest rate policy, though that’s the convenient explanation. Facebook started enshittifying a decade before interest rates rose. Amazon turned predatory years before 2022. The real culprit is the systematic elimination of the four forces that once disciplined tech companies: competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power.

Forty years of pro-monopoly policy, starting with Jimmy Carter and accelerating through Ronald Reagan, dismantled antitrust enforcement. The consumer welfare standard replaced the older approach that treated corporate concentration as inherently dangerous. Companies were allowed to merge, acquire competitors, and establish market dominance as long as consumer prices didn’t immediately rise. Tech platforms exploited this framework ruthlessly. They predatorily priced rivals out of existence while operating at a loss. They acquired nascent competitors before those startups could threaten incumbent power. They erected moats through proprietary data, algorithmic opacity, and deliberate incompatibility.

Interoperability, the ability to make your tools work with someone else’s systems, was strangled by the aggressive expansion of IP law. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalized bypassing digital locks, even for legal purposes. That meant you couldn’t escape platform surveillance by installing an ad blocker in your iPhone’s browser, because doing so required circumventing Apple’s technical restrictions. You couldn’t extract your Facebook data to migrate to Mastodon, because that would violate Meta’s terms of service backed by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Every tool we once used to improve our digital experience, from interoperable calendar formats to third-party app stores, was foreclosed by IP maximalism.

Tech worker power eroded as employee mobility decreased. Non-compete agreements prevented engineers from leaving for competitors or starting their own companies. Stock compensation created golden handcuffs that punished departure. The collapse of antitrust enforcement meant fewer employers to defect to. Workers who might once have blown the whistle on abusive practices stayed silent, calculating that their economic security depended on their employer’s continued dominance.

Case Studies in Corporate Decline

Doctorow’s case studies of Facebook, Amazon, the iPhone, and Twitter bring the enshittification framework to life. The Facebook chapter chronicles how Mark Zuckerberg’s platform evolved from a refuge from MySpace’s Rupert Murdoch-owned surveillance into a surveillance machine that makes MySpace look quaint. The story of how Facebook lured MySpace users with a bot that scraped their messages and friends list, enabling seamless migration without abandoning their social graph, reads like evidence in an antitrust trial. It demonstrates that interoperability was once Facebook’s competitive advantage, before it became the threat Facebook spent billions preventing.

The Amazon analysis is particularly damning. Doctorow reveals how the company’s celebrated “flywheel” is actually an extraction mechanism that forces merchants to pay escalating junk fees while simultaneously raising consumer prices across the entire economy. The most-favored-nation requirement, which forbids merchants from charging less on their own websites than on Amazon, means everyone pays the “Amazon tax” whether they shop at Amazon or not. The revelation that Amazon’s search results rank products by how much merchants pay for placement, with the best match buried seventeen positions down, reframes the entire shopping experience as a rigged casino.

The iPhone chapter exposes how Apple’s “walled garden” operates less as user protection and more as a prison. When Apple can unilaterally decide that you cannot install a dictionary app because it contains swear words, or block an app tracking civilian casualties from drone strikes, or prohibit you from seeing which apps are surveilling you, the elegance of iOS starts looking like control. The hypocrisy of Apple’s privacy marketing becomes clear when Doctorow reveals that the company now operates its own surveillance advertising business, collecting the same data it blocked Facebook from gathering.

Twitter’s enshittification under Elon Musk plays out as a speedrun that should have killed the platform but hasn’t. Musk fired the content moderation team, sold verification to scammers, suppressed posts from users who wouldn’t pay, blocked links to competitors, and made the algorithmic feed actively hostile to publishers. The platform became demonstrably worse for everyone: users saw more fraud and harassment, advertisers found their messages next to extremist content, publishers lost traffic, journalists faced suspension for criticism. And yet people stayed, trapped by the collective action problem that makes coordinating an exodus nearly impossible.

Solutions That Might Actually Work

Unlike many tech critics who diagnose problems without proposing remedies, Doctorow devotes substantial space to policy solutions. His recommendations center on restoring the four forces that once disciplined platforms: competition through revived antitrust enforcement, regulation through agencies empowered to impose meaningful penalties, interoperability through mandatory APIs and data portability, and worker power through labor organizing and whistleblower protection.

The antitrust revival happening under the Biden administration gets extensive treatment. Doctorow documents how Lina Khan’s FTC and Jonathan Kanter’s DOJ Antitrust Division have challenged decades of pro-monopoly precedent, filing cases against Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta that actually seek structural remedies rather than token fines. The recent decision in DOJ v. Google, finding the company maintained an illegal search monopoly, represents the first major antitrust victory against a tech platform in a generation.

Interoperability mandates, like those in the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, could let users leave platforms without losing access to their communities. If Facebook had to provide an API that let you see your friends’ posts in a third-party client, or if iMessage had to work with other messaging apps, the switching costs that trap users would collapse. Doctorow is particularly enthusiastic about “adversarial interoperability,” the right to modify products you own to make them work better for you, even if manufacturers object.

The worker power recommendations feel less developed, though Doctorow correctly identifies that tech workers are often best positioned to resist enshittification from within. When Para built a tool to help DoorDash drivers see hidden tip amounts, it gave gig workers the information they needed to avoid money-losing jobs. When workers organize unions or blow the whistle on illegal practices, they can impose costs on companies that exceed the profits from exploitation.

Where the Book Loses Momentum

For all its analytical strengths, “Enshittification” suffers from structural problems that multiple reviewers have identified. The repetition is excessive, with concepts explained multiple times across chapters and constant callbacks to earlier sections. The book originated as a series of blog posts and speeches, and the seams show. Material that worked as discrete essays becomes exhausting when compiled into a single volume. Doctorow acknowledges this somewhat in introducing case studies, noting they’re a “representative sample” rather than exhaustive, but the problem persists throughout.

The tone oscillates between activist polemic and policy wonkery in ways that serve neither audience fully. The profanity and snark, while occasionally effective, can undercut serious arguments about regulatory capture and antitrust law. Passages that explain technical concepts with admirable clarity are interrupted by sarcastic asides that feel more suited to a blog rant than a book arguing for systemic reform. Readers seeking either a rigorous academic treatment or a accessible popular account will find elements of both without a full commitment to either approach.

The dismissal of Audre Lorde, where Doctorow calls her “far smarter than I am about nearly everything” before insisting her famous observation about the master’s tools is “manifestly wrong,” strikes a particularly discordant note. The argument he’s making, that we can use regulation and antitrust law (the master’s tools) to dismantle tech monopolies (the master’s house), is defensible. But the framing as a direct rebuttal to Lorde reads as unnecessarily confrontational, particularly when the targets of his critique are tech platforms, not frameworks of racial and gender oppression that Lorde was addressing.

A Framework Worth Wrestling With

Despite these flaws, “Enshittification” succeeds in its primary ambition: providing a replicable framework for understanding why platforms decay and what policy changes might reverse that trajectory. Doctorow is at his best connecting individual corporate decisions to broader patterns of regulatory failure. When he traces how the elimination of antitrust enforcement enabled the rise of surveillance capitalism, or explains how IP maximalism foreclosed user modification and competitive entry, the analysis is genuinely illuminating.

The book is less successful as a reading experience. At 352 pages, it’s bloated with material that could have been condensed. The case studies, while individually compelling, repeat the same three-stage framework so many times that the pattern becomes tedious rather than enlightening. Readers who want the core argument would be better served by Doctorow’s original essays and talks, freely available online, than by working through the entire volume.

But for anyone trying to understand the systemic forces that turned the internet into a increasingly hostile environment, particularly those interested in the policy dimensions, “Enshittification” offers valuable analysis. Doctorow has spent decades in the trenches of tech policy fights, and that experience yields insights unavailable to observers who haven’t watched regulatory capture happen in real time. His proposed solutions, while politically challenging, are at least grounded in actual legislative and judicial processes rather than wishful thinking about corporate social responsibility.

The term enshittification has already entered common usage, and this book cements Doctorow’s diagnosis of platform decay as a central framework for tech criticism. Whether the book itself succeeds as a piece of long-form writing is a separate question, one that readers will answer differently depending on their tolerance for repetition and their interest in granular policy detail. But the framework it articulates, connecting user experience to market structure to regulatory failure, represents a genuine intellectual contribution to understanding why everything online suddenly got worse.