You’re not imagining it. Facebook got worse. Amazon’s search results became unusable. Twitter turned into a dumpster fire. The apps on your phone, the services you depend on, the platforms you built your business around—they’re all degrading at once, and it’s happening faster than ever before.
This isn’t bad luck. This isn’t the inevitable march of progress. This is enshittification, and once you understand it, you’ll see it everywhere.
The Three-Stage Death Spiral of Digital Platforms
In his book Enshittification, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow names and explains the predictable pattern killing every major platform. It’s not a mystery or a force of nature. It’s a deliberate business strategy enabled by specific policy failures.
The pattern unfolds in three stages:
Stage One: Good to Users
A platform launches and it’s genuinely useful. Facebook lets you connect with friends without ads cluttering your feed. Amazon helps you find products at competitive prices with honest reviews. Google gives you relevant search results without sponsored garbage at the top.
The platform works hard to attract users because users are everything. Without users, there’s no platform. So early on, the service delivers real value. You tell your friends. Your friends join. The network grows.
Stage Two: Abusing Users to Serve Business Customers
Once the platform has locked in enough users, the game changes. Your attention becomes the product sold to business customers—advertisers, sellers, data brokers. The platform starts degrading your experience to extract value for these paying customers.
Your Facebook feed fills with ads and suggested content from pages you never followed. Amazon’s search results prioritize products that pay for placement over products that match your search. Google’s first page becomes a wall of ads before you see any actual results.
You’re frustrated, but you stay. Why? Because everyone you know is on Facebook. Because Amazon has the fastest shipping. Because Google is synonymous with search. The platform has achieved “lock-in”—you’re trapped by the switching costs and network effects.
Stage Three: Abusing Business Customers to Claw Back Everything
The final stage arrives when the platform starts squeezing its business customers. Amazon forces sellers to use its expensive fulfillment services and raises fees until sellers pay nearly 50% of their revenue to Amazon. Facebook charges businesses to reach the very followers who explicitly chose to follow them. Google makes advertisers compete in increasingly expensive auctions.
Business customers hate this, but they can’t leave either. Amazon controls access to online shoppers. Facebook owns the social graph. Google dominates search traffic. The platforms have become gatekeepers—intermediaries so powerful they can extract monopoly rents from everyone within reach.
Stage Four: A Giant Pile of Shit
The platform is now optimized entirely for itself. Users see degraded search results, endless ads, and algorithmic feeds designed to maximize engagement (read: rage and compulsion) rather than deliver value. Business customers pay exorbitant fees for declining reach and effectiveness.
But the platform doesn’t care. It’s achieved monopoly power. Where else are you going to go?
Why Enshittification Is Happening Now—All at Once
Doctorow argues that enshittification isn’t just about greedy companies. Greedy companies have always existed. What changed is the policy environment that previously constrained them.
Three critical changes created the conditions for mass enshittification:
The Death of Antitrust Enforcement
Starting in the Reagan era, antitrust enforcement in the United States shifted from protecting competition to protecting “consumer welfare,” narrowly defined as keeping prices low in the short term. As long as a company wasn’t obviously raising prices, regulators looked the other way at consolidation, market dominance, and anticompetitive behavior.
This allowed platforms to grow through acquisition rather than innovation, to crush competitors through predatory pricing and exclusive deals, and to establish themselves as unavoidable gatekeepers across entire sectors of the economy.
The End of Privacy Protections
Platforms collect staggering amounts of data about you—your location, your purchases, your relationships, your interests, your health, your reading habits, your sexual preferences. This surveillance is the foundation of the modern internet business model.
Weak privacy laws in the United States mean platforms can harvest this data with minimal consent, use it to manipulate your behavior, and sell it to third parties. This data asymmetry gives platforms immense power over users and creates barriers to competition—how can a startup compete when established platforms already know everything about potential customers?
Aggressive Restrictions on User Agency
Platforms use law and technology to prevent users and competitors from modifying products, reversing engineer services, or building interoperable tools. Copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and terms of service agreements make it illegal to fix your own devices, block ads, export your data, or build bridges between platforms.
This means users can’t help themselves when platforms enshittify. You can’t build a better Facebook feed because Facebook controls access to the social graph. You can’t make Amazon’s search results honest because Amazon owns the marketplace. You’re locked in, and the law prevents you from picking the lock.
The Real Cost: More Than Just Annoyance
Enshittification isn’t merely inconvenient. It represents a fundamental shift in power—from users and workers to platforms, from creators and sellers to intermediaries, from the public to a tiny number of corporate executives.
When platforms decay, small businesses lose access to customers. Independent creators get demonetized while platforms profit from their work. Workers get trapped in exploitative gig economy arrangements with algorithmic management and no labor protections. Consumers pay more for worse products buried in manipulative interfaces.
The problem compounds because platforms increasingly control not just our screens but our physical world. Your car is a computer you put your body into. Your home is filled with “smart” devices that report your activities to corporate servers. Your workplace is mediated by apps that track your every movement.
As Doctorow writes, we’re creating “computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies.” When these enshittify, the consequences extend far beyond a degraded user experience—they threaten our autonomy, our privacy, our economic survival, and our democratic participation.
Breaking the Pattern: Enshittification Is Not Inevitable
Here’s the crucial insight: enshittification is not the natural endpoint of digital platforms. It’s the result of specific policy choices made by named individuals. Once we identify those choices and those individuals, we can act.
Doctorow outlines a comprehensive cure:
Restore Antitrust Enforcement: Break up monopolies, block anticompetitive mergers, prevent platforms from competing with their own business customers, and enforce existing laws against predatory pricing and exclusive dealing.
Implement Real Privacy Protections: Ban surveillance advertising, require genuine informed consent for data collection, enable meaningful data portability, and create legal liability for companies that misuse personal information.
Bring Back Self-Help: Legalize reverse engineering, interoperability, and adversarial compatibility. Let users modify their devices, block unwanted content, export their data, and build tools that make platforms work better.
Strengthen Labor Power: Recognize gig workers as employees entitled to labor protections, ban algorithmic wage discrimination, require transparency in automated management systems, and support worker organizing in tech industries.
None of these solutions require revolutionary change or unprecedented interventions. They require returning to the policy framework that previously prevented monopolies from consolidating power—the framework we abandoned over the past forty years.
What You Need to Know Right Now
If you take away one thing from understanding enshittification, it should be this: the degradation of platforms is not your fault, and it’s not inevitable.
You’re not imagining that things got worse. They did get worse. The platforms you depend on are actively working against your interests because the policy environment allows them to.
But policy can change. In fact, it’s already starting to change. The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan has filed major antitrust suits against Amazon, Google, and Facebook. The European Union has passed the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, creating new constraints on platform power. States are passing privacy laws and right-to-repair legislation.
The question isn’t whether we can fix enshittification. We can. The question is whether we’ll make the political choices necessary to do it—and whether we’ll do it in time to prevent platforms from gaining even more control over our lives, our economy, and our democracy.
As Doctorow argues, we can create “enshittification-resistant infrastructure for a new, good world.” We can make an internet fit for human thriving. But only if we understand what’s happening, name it clearly, and demand that policymakers act.
The platforms won’t fix themselves. They’re working exactly as designed—designed to transfer wealth and power from you to them. Changing that requires changing the rules of the game. And that requires you to understand what game is being played.
Based on “Enshittification” by Cory Doctorow