Bow before your lord and master!
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I never knew my grandfather but I spent nearly sixty years of my life in the company of his son. I am sure that if the elder had lived beyond his forties, he would have spent his last days riffing on the same theme junior did: “The world is crap, and getting worse.”
This is commonly regarded as a thing older people say. And if you wrote such a character, you would redraft him or her, or bend over backwards not to have that fictional being come off like a stereotype.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow, who writes tech articles, bestselling wonky nonfiction and delightful science fiction, we now have a word that nails the moment we’re living in: enshittification. When he coined the word in 2022, Doctorow—a longtime Internet policy wonk—used it to describe what he saw as the gradual if inevitable worsening of Internet-based platforms.
But the word took on a life of its own. American and Australian lexicographers in 2023 and 2024, respectively, named it their word of the year. And when Doctorow published a book on the topic in late 2025, he applied the word broadly to a variety of industries well beyond the web. Why is this happening? He explains:
“[T]he digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck.”
I admit that the chief pleasure I took from this book was realizing a) No, I am not going crazy, and b) I am not turning into my progenitors.
Doctorow describes the process deftly. In its first stages, a company dreams up a great idea and bestows it on the world. The thing works so easily and often satisfies a need people didn’t know they had:
- Google gave us a search engine that was better than, say, Altavista or Ask Jeeves.
- Amazon gave us a frictionless shopping experience with superb customer service.
- Facebook gave us a free way to stay in touch with far-flung friends and relatives.
In Stage I, Doctorow says, these services give themselves wholeheartedly to their users. The firms work hard to attract, please, and keep users. They become indispensable to peoples’ lives. The only platform of their kind worth using.
As soon as they demolish the competition and achieve a monopoly…as soon users feel that they simply cannot live without the service they provide…the firms flip the switch. The end user is no longer king—advertisers are. (In the world of Amazon, the “advertisers” are small or large businesses who have chosen to sell their wares on the platform.)
Companies advertise on these platforms, and when they do, the ads perform insanely well. So well, in fact, that small and big firms alike hire staffs to manage, say, their growing FB ad empire. It doesn’t matter that this is a field of advertising that has existed for three minutes on the Geologic Time Scale. It’s so easy to find customers that you have to be an idiot not to sell via Google, FB, and Amazon ads.
About a decade ago, I met and chatted up a self-published mystery writer who swore by Google Ads. He loved the platform because as ugly as those boxy ads were in the early days, they were easy to craft, fairly inexpensive to run, and they resulted in sales of his fly-fishing mystery series. What’s not to love? Finding new readers was as easy as, ahem, shooting fish in a barrel.
Then, just when advertisers feel that they simply cannot live without this advertising source, the platform embarks upon Stage III: Corporate profits and shareholders are the only thing that matters. End users and advertisers can go pound sand. A single tweak, and ads stop working overnight. Advertisers must spend and spend and spend to figure out how to attract customers with the new algorithm.
As an end user, you know what Stage III enshittification feels like. We’re living in it.
FB users have no idea what’s up with their friends and family because they have to wade through so many ads to see the posts they came for in the first place. You are told that you must pay up if you want anyone to actually see what you have posted.
Amazon buyers can’t figure out which products are cheap, popular, or highly rated (depending on their preferences) because every search they do presents ads for products only tangentially related to the thing they’re looking for.
I’ll let a friend who runs a website aimed at book lovers describe what the current Google environment has done to his business:
“Google has given up on its search engine, stuffed it with even more ads, and shifted to ranking only the largest websites ahead of independent publications. We are better off than most independent websites because of our size, but we have lost 70% of our traffic from Google. And given Google’s monopoly, that is a huge hit. This is affecting every website you can imagine, and one recent report found that 400 independent news publications have lost 50%+ of their traffic from Google. Google is no longer helping people find good content and has destroyed how the web works.”
He notes that the AI-generated answers at the top of Google’s search are “scraped” from the content of other creators, who have no recourse given Google’s power. Some creators are fighting back in lawsuits, but seriously, how likely is it that they will prevail against a behemoth? He, like many creators, is shifting to designing a dedicated app so he can attract and cater directly to his clientele.
Doctorow explains why Google has intentionally enshittified its search engine. The current model forces users to search a second, third, or fourth time, tweaking search terms each time. By design, as users spend more time in Google’s environment, they are obliged to view more ads and gobble up more of advertisers’ precious budgets.
Of course FB, Google, and the ’Zon aren’t the only offenders out there. I have focused on these three because so many of us know what they are like. Doctorow’s book pivots from giants like Apple and Twitter to a slate of other corporations.
In these pages, I learned…
- why Amazon drivers are so miserable and drive so recklessly. They are on such tight delivery schedules, and spied upon by cameras in their vans, that they barely have time to stop and use a restroom. (I’ll spare you the humiliating details of how they manage to relieve themselves.) “For a man with a dick-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos sure has an abiding hatred of our kidneys,” Doctorow quips.
- that the private contractors in China that manufacture Apple phones have installed netting under their high-rise windows to halt worker suicides.
- about car manufacturers who now insist that in order to “unlock” the premium features of your new vehicle, you must pay a monthly subscription fee to access features you enjoyed “for free” when you bought your last car.
This last example illustrates Doctorow’s opening thesis that digital circuitry allows firms to control a product long after it leaves the factory, and long after you supposedly “bought” it. It’s why Hewlett Packard knows when your printer has run out of ink, or how they can program your printer to die when it’s time to have you buy a new one. It is why supermarkets that use digital price tags on their shelves can raise or lower prices on a whim, not unlike Uber’s “surge” pricing. (Such an easy way to raise prices on staples like milk, water, and toilet paper minutes after weather forecasters announce the possibility of a big winter storm!)
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| Digital price tags look like this. |
By now, perhaps you are wondering why you would ever want to read this book. I assure you that there is hope: when Adobe, the design software giant, thought they could steal their subscribers’ work to train AI, designers switched to rival software in such numbers that Adobe backed down. A similar fracas ensued when Unity, a provider of software used by millions of independent digital game developers worldwide to create 3D video effects, demanded a royalty each time these designers’ games—which Unity did not create—was downloaded by the end user. Game designers rebelled, and Unity’s board booted the executives who had created such an embarrassing public spectacle for the firm. Doctorow assures us that, at least in Europe, legislators are fighting monopolies that lead inevitably to such outrageous expressions of capitalism. (US legislators pioneered such laws, but apparently cannot be bothered to enforce them.) Lastly, Doctorow notes with some glee that underground software designers are hard at work creating freeware to circumvent how ’Zon tracks its drivers.
By the time these anecdotes arrive, at the end of the book, each comeuppance feels like sweet, sweet karma. They are a reminder that the digital products, the underlying mechanisms, are not the problem. It’s the cynical human profit motive that perverts them.
While reading Enshittification, I was reminded of the time I ran into a sales clerk taking a smoke break outside her place of employment, the local Best Buy, the US’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer of consumer electronics.
I introduced myself and reminded her that she was the person who had helped us pick out the washer, dryer, and range we bought when we first moved into our new house.
She puffed away and smiled. “How are they holding up?”
Fine, I said, but why did she ask?
“Used to be, you’d buy one of those things and they’d last forever. I knew when they started rolling out washing machines with… motherboards that they wouldn’t last. Fridges too. We never got claims on the old ones.” She paused. “Did you get the extended warranty, hon?”
* * *
See you in three weeks!
— Joe
josephdagnese.com
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