Review: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow has been warning us about the perils of lock-in and abusive market power for years. But it wasn’t until he coined the term enshittification that his message exploded into a worldwide phenomenon, proving, once again, that marketing matters. This is an instantly understandable term describing the decay of the online platforms we rely on as their makers lock in customers, eliminate competition, and then destroy what made those platforms popular in the first place by extracting more value for themselves.

Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It is a collection of everything the author has written on this topic since he coined the term, but expanded and organized. And he addresses one of my pet peeves upfront, as many use this word in an overly simplistic and incorrect way to describe things they just don’t like. But Doctorow is sanguine about this reality, correctly noting that trying to correct people would be a fool’s errand. The world may do with it what it will.

That said, enshittification describes a very specific process by which once-delightful platforms are purposefully ruined for their users. And in the book, he sticks to that definition, as I do here on Thurrott.com and elsewhere.

Enshittification isn’t a way to say “something got worse,” he explains. “It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how the worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once. Like a disease, it has symptoms, a mechanism, and an epidemiology.”

The natural history of enshittification unfolds like this, Doctorow explains. First, platforms are good to their users. Then, they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they become a giant pile of shit.

“This pattern is everywhere,” Doctorow writes. “Once you learn about it, you’ll start seeing it, too.”

These may be the truest words ever written. As Doctorow wryly observes, we’re living in what he calls the Enshittocene, an age of sick, collapsing, abusive, and outsized platforms, a Great Enshittening in which platforms are no longer valuable because they bring together buyers and sellers but because they betray them both. Middlemen are fine until they’re not, he says. Mergers and acquisitions led to just a handful of very powerful platform makers, and as they grow ever more powerful they can act as gatekeepers who usurp the relationship between businesses and end users. Disintermediation is the process of cutting out a middleman. But perhaps what we really need is an exorcism.

Doctorow focuses on some obvious targets like Amazon, Facebook/Meta, and Apple for further analysis, describing how each followed the same playbook with very different platforms to screw over their own customers in entirely predictable ways. He debunks myths like “if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product” and the fallacy of commonly held beliefs like voting with your wallet, which won’t impact Big Tech in the slightest.

And that’s the problem with enshittification: The enshittifiers have gotten too big. So the “what to do about it” part requires governmental intervention in the form of regulation enforcement, it’s not something we can fix as individuals. The good news? It’s happening right now. After two decades of being asleep at the switch, the world’s regulators have finally turned their attention to the biggest abusers and are making inroads.

“Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then it becomes too big to care,” Doctorow writes in what is now a familiar quip. “Antitrust exists to prevent this apathy and force companies to care.”

Enshittification isn’t isolated to the tech market, of course. There are five major book publishers, Doctorow notes, four major movie studios, and three major music labels, too. But there are also only two mobile app platforms and just a single seller of e-books and audiobooks. And these are inarguably the biggest abusers of all. The power of middlemen has never been greater than it is today, and it’s never been concentrated in so few companies.

Enshittification is the defining term of this age and Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It is the best industry book that’s been published this year. I strongly recommend it to everyone.