Enshittification by Cory Doctorow

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

by Cory Doctorow

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025

It isn’t given to many books to sport a title that’s already entered the common parlance, but this is surely true of Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. As Doctorow points out immediately, the term “enshiffication” has now “achieved escape velocity” and taken on a life of its own as a handy one-word summary of how much worse everything technological is compared to what it used to be. 

This requires only a casual moment to confirm, of course. Laptops come equipped with faster and faster chips but glitch in response to a strong sneeze and contain precisely zero ports of any kind. Social media sites in a few months go from having an incredible amount of unskippable ads to having an absolutely freakishly incredible amount of unskippable ads. Frequent tech users have grown accustomed to putting their devices in “airplane” mode specifically to prevent automatic updates — because so many of updates make the updated app work worse than before. This systematic decay is so well-known that it comes as something of a surprise that nobody’s thought of a term for it before now.

Doctorow good-naturedly points out that although he’s amused at the reality of his term getting lodged in the vocabulary, his original intent wasn’t to describe mere deterioration but rather a specific kind of intentional degrading that has four steps: first, platforms are good for their users; then, they abuse their users in order to make more money for their business or customers; then they abuse their customers in order to focus entirely on making money for their business; and finally, because of this, the platform becomes, as Doctorow inimitably puts it, “a giant pile of shit.” 

He gives readers a brief overview of how the ground might have been laid for such a degradation, which essentially seems to go hand-in-hand with the initial proliferation of computers, which got progressively simpler and more capable as research and development tracked alongside the marketplace. “R&D made computers cheaper and faster, and cheaper and faster computers were useful to more industries,” Doctorow writes, “which justified more R&D to make computers cheaper and faster still.”

His discussion of the growth of tech expands naturally to broader social subjects, the most ominous of which touches on the forces behind enshittification, the forces using it for their own ends. These forces, the platforms and the money behind them, have gradually extended their reach deep into society, grabbing on things like “intellectual property,” which Doctorow defines as “any law or regulation that allows a company to reach beyond its own walls and exert control over its competitors, critics, and customers.” 

The end result of these forces, in Doctorow’s view, seems to be a choice of two evils: technofeudalism or technocapitalism (the way to tell the difference, according to our author, is to ask “how conflicts between profits and rents cash out”), but readers are given a slim branch of hope to grab. According to Doctorow, it might be possible, at least in limited ways, to claw back some of the quality measures that have been adulterated through unrelenting waves of enshittification. 

Much of this hope looks like plain old nostalgia. Doctorow claims the Wild West egalitarianism of the old-time Internet was essentially auto-correcting, and that this might contain the germ of how to fix things. “The old, good internet, in other words, was a place where enshittification had consequences,” he writes. “Competition, regulation, interoperability, and the moral sensibilities of tech workers all combined to keep tech honest, and to punish tech that wasn’t.” 

It isn’t much, admittedly, when arrayed against the robber barons who currently run the world and own 60% of its money, resources, drinkable water, arable land, orbiting satellites, and national governments. But at least we all have a name for our future.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News