The world — most of us feel — is becoming progressively worse. As the climate crisis and ecological collapse accelerate, authoritarians of every sort beat back the gains of the liberal-democratic consensus. Political instability and social disharmony deepen. While genocide unfolds in Gaza, humanitarian catastrophes proceed unhindered in Myanmar, Congo and elsewhere. In the West, where life expectancy has stagnated if not declined and rising costs of living have hollowed out the middle-class, it can seem as though we are on the other side of some ineffable bell curve: post-GFC, post-Covid, post-everything.

We may have noticed, too, that the internet — an abstract but no less real “place” we no longer dial up but experience as a sort of second, parallel life — is getting inexorably crappier. Having seen Web 1.0’s utopian, disintermediated idyll laid waste by corporate tech, we are now left with its successor — a second phase in which monopolisation, regulatory capture, and the exploitation of workers and end users alike, have been thoroughly normalised. The British-Canadian-American blogger, journalist, activist, and science fiction author Cory Doctorow has coined a name for this dismal state of affairs: enshittification.

If you’re the kind of logophile who pays attention to “word of the year” announcements, you may recall enshittification taking out Macquarie Dictionary’s gong in 2024, two years after it first went viral. It is now the departure point, as well as title, of the prolific Doctorow’s latest book, whose cover is adorned with the chocolate-coloured swirl of the poo emoji. For Doctorow, enshittification captures something more nuanced than the idea that companies, as they once did, degenerate over time and ultimately fail. Rather, the word refers to the zombie-like habit of twenty-first century corporations — including, but not limited to, those in the tech world — of enduring long after their rot has set in. It is not, as Doctorow notes, that these companies are “too big to fail” but rather “too big to care”. Few, it seems, can resist the pull towards worsening their products, services, and labour practices — not to mention the push, from executives, shareholders, and board members — given the rich rewards on offer.

Doctorow describes enshittification in pathological terms (the book is divided into sections premised on diagnosis, treatment, and cure) and opens, appropriately enough, with a natural history of the disease:

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 turn into giant piles of shit.

To illustrate his thesis, Doctorow presents four case studies: Facebook, Amazon, iPhone, and Twitter. (The reader may, just as I did, mentally add a dozen more the book could have surveyed given enough space.) Each follows a similar trajectory. Users are onboarded by a novel platform promising utility and enjoyment. An ever-greater price is extracted from those users — more money, more information, and so on — in order to appease the real customers, namely advertisers and data-miners. These customers are then, like the rest of us, screwed over to maximise profits and appease the platforms’ shareholder-gods. What distinguishes enshittification from good old-fashioned entropy, Doctorow argues, is that, rather than destroying them outright, it renders companies undead and traps us, as he puts it, “in their rotting carcasses, unable to escape”.

Anyone who has tried and failed to leave an enshittified social media platform will know this feeling of ensnarement intimately. (As will anyone, as exemplified by the Twitter account “Internet of Shit”, who has experienced firsthand the depredations of internet-connected smart home devices.) We cannot leave because nobody wants to go it alone — the “collective action problem” — and, moreover, because the “switching costs” are too high — the loss of friends, professional networks, and so on. For Doctorow, it’s not that anybody likes platforms such as Twitter, but that they like each other. (Given that Twitter has been transformed under Elon Musk’s ownership into a rancid, Nazi-infested swamp called X, I’m more inclined to agree with the Australian science journalist Ketan Joshi than Doctorow on this point: “If you are still contributing to X, you are the energy-dense fuel that Musk is pouring into his hate machine. This is true no matter how complex your post-hoc rationalisations.”)

Examples of enshittification, large and small, trivial and significant, abound. Think of Adobe’s threat to remove colours from customers’ existing projects unless they pay a subscription fee. Or Bluetooth speaker manufacturer Sonos’ infamous 2024 “update” that stuffed up almost every useful element of its mobile app. Or the flagrantly anticompetitive efforts of just about every tech giant — whether HP, Amazon, or Apple — to hoover up rival businesses and prevent the repair or interoperability of their products.

On social media platforms such as Facebook, X, and Instagram, enshittification’s most notable effect has been the inundation of our feeds with content — ads, suggested posts, and, increasingly, fake pages and “AI slop” — that we have zero interest in.

The situation is similarly grim for those employed in the tech sector. As Doctorow witheringly puts it:

Get a $300,000 engineering degree, get an $80,000-a-year job at a tech company, and pay off as much student loan debt as you can before they fire your ass in the same year you hit every one of your metrics while they’re making record profits.

Once feted for their employee benefits — onsite gyms, creches, foosball tables, and the like — these companies are now collectively laying off workers in the hundreds of thousands. Those who remain employed, especially in a gig economy beholden to apps that allow companies to get away with brazenly anti-worker practices, see their pay and conditions collapse by the day. (Doctorow pointedly reminds us that it is usually among various underclasses that enshittification begins, whether that’s within the precarious workforce and the carceral system, or among subprime mortgagors.)

Across the book, acronyms and tech jargon pile up — a glossary would have been a welcome addition — but the author has a rare knack for recasting complex ideas for a lay readership. As in Chokepoint Capitalism (2022), co-written with Australian Rebecca Giblin, Doctorow’s anger at the bastardry of big tech is consistently leavened with humour and bloggish snark. Ultimately, he proposes a simple-sounding remedy to enshittification: making platforms not less terrible — clearly that horse bolted years ago — but less powerful. For instance, Doctorow criticises Australia’s news media bargaining code, which compels platforms to negotiate with news companies over payment for content that appears on their services, for treating tech as the solution to the news’s problem rather than the cause.

While, as Doctorow writes, “disenshittification can be a union demand”, a regulatory environment intolerant of monopolisation, price-fixing, and other anti-competitive practices will also need to flourish. The right-to-repair will need to be enshrined in law. Crucial to all of this, Doctorow argues, is the formation of coalitions able to win small victories that chip away at the formidable edifice of the tech monopolists. Enshittification is neither natural nor inevitable. It is the culmination of policy choices that have enfeebled antitrust and labour laws, and facilitated widespread regulatory capture.

To the question of whether enshittification is merely another word for capitalism, Doctorow answers by borrowing another memorable neologism: Yanis Varoufakis’ “technofeudalism”, a term the Greek economist uses to describe the replacement of capitalism with an economic system in which big tech hordes power in a manner comparable to the feudal lords of the past, with virtual commodities — data, digital platforms, and online markets — the new land. Marx could have been describing today’s enshittified landscape when he wrote:

Striving to increase their income, the feudal lords imposed every sort of exaction on the peasant. In many cases they had monopolistic possession of mills, smithies and other enterprises. The peasant was compelled to use them for exceedingly high payments in kind or money.

But we would do well to remember what broke the power of the original feudalists: peasant uprisings yoked to the workers’ movement. Together we can disenshittify the internet, which means, as Doctorow asserts, retooling it to organise the battle against forces — fascism, global heating, and all the rest — that imperil not only cyberspace, but our species itself.

Image: a detail from the cover of the book