Why are internet platforms getting worse and how can we fix them?

What is enshittification and how do tech monopolies ruin your online experience?

Discover the core concepts of Enshittification by Cory Doctorow. Learn why tech monopolies degrade online platforms and the steps needed to restore internet quality.

Continue reading the full article to learn the exact legal and economic steps required to stop platform decay and take back control of your digital life.

Genres

Technology and the Future, Economics, Personal Development, Society, Culture

Discover why the internet feels so shitty these days – and what to do about it.

Enshittification (2025) explains why so many essential online services are deteriorating at the same time. It breaks down the four-stage strategy platforms use to lure users, lock them in, and systematically extract value – ultimately leaving behind a degraded product that primarily serves the platform itself. You’ll discover the specific economic and legal decisions that caused this decay – and the concrete, actionable steps we can take to reverse it.

You’ve probably felt it. That creeping sense that the internet is getting worse, fast. The search engine that used to find exactly what you needed? Now it’s a swamp of sponsored garbage. The social network where you kept up with friends? A wasteland of ads and rage-bait. Every platform you depend on seems to be rotting from the inside out, simultaneously. This feeling has a name: “enshittification.”

And enshittification matters because these platforms have become the infrastructure of modern life. You work through them, organize through them, stay informed through them. Your communities live inside them. When they rot, they rot your ability to coordinate with other human beings. They rot democracy itself. Every fight that matters – against climate collapse, authoritarianism, inequality – depends on digital tools that are failing exactly when we need them most.

This summary reveals how platforms engineer their own decay through a four-stage disease that infects them all. You’ll see the invisible machinery behind your daily frustrations: algorithms that secretly adjust prices every millisecond, laws that criminalize fixing your own devices, and monopolies that devoured competitors before you knew they existed. Once you recognize these patterns, you’ll understand exactly which levers must be pulled to reverse this decay.

The natural history of decay

Let’s start with how the disease of enshittification progresses. Every platform follows the same four-stage life cycle, as predictable as any infection.

Platforms are middlemen, connecting you to other people or businesses. First, they’re good to you. They burn investor cash to make their service irresistible, drawing you in. Once you’ve joined, once your friends are there and leaving means losing your communities, the platform shifts to stage two. Now it degrades your experience to squeeze value from business customers. These businesses pour in for access to you, the captive audience.

When they’re fully dependent on that access, stage three begins. The platform turns on them too, clawing value from both sides for shareholders. Stage four is the endpoint: a rotting carcass with everyone trapped inside.

Facebook illustrates this perfectly. You probably remember when it was genuinely useful – back at stage one. Facebook offered a simple, compelling deal: tell us who your friends are, and we’ll show you what they post, chronologically. To lure you from MySpace, it even offered a tool that would log into MySpace, scrape your messages, and pull them into your Facebook inbox. This made switching painless.

Users piled in, and soon, you were locked in. You were held hostage by your own communities. Even if you hate the platform, you can’t leave. Getting your friends and family to all leave simultaneously is an impossible collective action problem.

Once Facebook sensed this lock-in, stage two began. It started abusing users to serve business customers. It spied on you to sell precision-targeted ads. It crammed posts from publishers you didn’t follow into your feed, luring them with promises of free traffic.

Then stage three arrived: Facebook turned the screws on those business customers. The algorithm was twiddled. Publishers watched their traffic vanish. To get it back, they were forced to post longer excerpts, until entire articles appeared on Facebook. Then Facebook suppressed their posts anyway, unless they paid to “boost” them. They were paying ransom to reach people who had already asked to see their content.

For you, the platform became a void. The things you wanted to see disappeared, replaced by ads and boosted content.

The evolution of Amazon shows the same process in motion. During stage one, it used investor cash to subsidize products, selling below cost. It subsidized shipping with Prime. It locked you in – that Prime membership makes you start all searches on Amazon.

Stage two was good to merchants, offering a clean search engine that rewarded quality. Once merchants were dependent, stage three began. Amazon now clones successful products and crushes merchants with massive fees. This forces merchants to raise prices everywhere.

Your user experience? Amazon’s search is now pay-to-play. The top results are overpriced junk from sellers who paid the biggest bribe.

Why everything got worse

This pattern of decay, this systematic extraction, is happening everywhere at once. A material phenomenon, a disease with a specific cause. If enshittification is so obviously bad for all of us, what changed to allow it?

For decades, companies were always tempted to enshittify their products – to cut quality, raise prices, and squeeze suppliers. Yet they were held in check by four forces. First, competition – if you made your product worse, customers and workers would leave for a rival. Then, regulation – government watchdogs might fine you or break you up. Next up was self-help – users could modify your product to undo enshittification, like installing ad-blockers. And finally, labor – your own workers, with their sense of mission, would refuse to deliberately break products they’d poured their lives into.

The Great Enshittening began when these forces were systematically dismantled. Let’s start with competition.

The death of competition was a deliberate policy choice. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating under Reagan, antitrust philosophy was inverted. For nearly a century, antitrust broke up companies simply for being too big – the theory being that concentrated power inevitably leads to abuse, stifles innovation, and destroys smaller competitors. This was replaced by the “consumer welfare standard” – a radical theory arguing monopolies were efficient, and regulators should only intervene if companies raised consumer prices. This gave companies a green light for an orgy of mergers and acquisitions.

Google is the poster child. Google maintains dominance by making sure you can never use anything else. Google is better at buying things than making things. After its initial search innovation, nearly every successful product was an acquisition: YouTube, Android, the entire ad-tech stack running the internet – all were rivals Google bought and absorbed.

Google spends tens of billions yearly in pay-for-default deals – these make it the default search on Safari, Firefox, Samsung phones, nearly every device. This sends a chilling message to investors: why fund a competitor? Even with a superior search engine, you’ll never reach users. Google has bought every doorway and search bar.

This is how enshittification starts. By eliminating competition, Google removed all fear of consequences. With no one to fear, it turned on you.

Internal memos from Google capture this moment. Search head Ben Gomes was sidelined by ads head Prabhakar Raghavan. Raghavan’s plan was simple: deliberately worsen search results to make more money. By forcing you to run multiple queries to find what you’re looking for, Google could show you more ads. Each failed search meant more ad revenue.

The proof? Google’s high-quality search index still exists – but you’re blocked from using it. Kagi, a small subscription search engine, pays to use Google’s index. It applies its own ranking algorithm, and the result is clean, relevant, ad-free search that feels like magic. The magic is simply what Google withholds from you.

With competition neutralized, platforms were free to invent sophisticated mechanisms to abuse their locked-in populations.

The mechanisms of abuse

So, what are these sophisticated mechanisms? With competition neutralized – the first of those four forces that once protected us – platforms were free to deploy their internal machinery of abuse. The core mechanism, the how of enshittification, is a process called twiddling. This is the invisible, continuous adjustment of the platform’s knobs – its prices, search rankings, recommendation weights – all pumping value away from you and the businesses you’re trying to reach, and into the platform’s own pockets. Twiddling is how the platform, once it has you locked in, begins to lie to you.

You can see this value extraction most clearly in the gig economy. Take Uber. You might think Uber pays drivers a standard percentage of what you pay for the ride. But no – it actually engages in algorithmic wage discrimination. When a job offer appears, the Uber algorithm calculates a different wage for every single driver in the area. It knows your habits. It profiles you.

Are you an “ant,” a driver who takes every job the app offers? Or are you a “picker,” someone selective who cherry-picks only the high-paying fares? If you’ve been picky, the system will offer you a slightly higher wage to tempt you back. If you’ve been an ant, it has learned you’re desperate. It will continuously titrate your pay downward, offering you sub-starvation wages knowing you will probably take them. A high-tech shell game, pumping value from drivers to shareholders.

Amazon perfected a different mechanism of value extraction. First, they misclassify their workers as “entrepreneurs” or “independent contractors.” This strips them of all rights, from minimum wage to sick pay.

Then comes the truly insidious part: these workers are forced to go into debt just to get the job. You have to borrow money to buy your own Amazon-branded van. You have to pay the call-center platform Arise for your own background check and your own “training,” paying for the privilege of working for them. You are now their captive. The platform is your only customer, it exerts total control over your work, and it can “fire” you at any time by simply turning off your account. You are left with a mountain of debt and a van you can’t use for anything else.

Now the platform can twiddle away every last cent of value. The Amazon delivery driver urinating in bottles to save seconds isn’t an anomaly – it’s the system working as designed. Algorithms continuously adjust delivery quotas to extract the highest possible output from human bodies, turning each package delivered at breakneck speed into more value flowing upward and outward, away from workers and into Amazon’s balance sheet.

And if you miss those ever-shifting, often impossible targets? The system simply twiddles your account to off – keeping the value you’ve generated while leaving you to absorb the cost. No negotiation. No appeal. No safety net. At this point, you’re no longer a participant in the system, you’re an input. A replaceable part in a machine that constantly recalibrates its grip, engineered to squeeze out every unit of value, right up to the breaking point.

These abusive mechanisms are the engine of enshittification. This engine only runs through protection by a powerful legal weapon – a weapon that makes it illegal for anyone to fight back.

A felony contempt of a business model

This system of abuse, this twiddling of the rules, functions through protection by a powerful legal weapon – a weapon that neutralizes the second and third forces that once constrained platforms: regulation and self-help. It makes it illegal for anyone to fight back.

When a company like HP or Apple tells you that your device can’t use a competitor’s ink or app, what they really mean is they’ve made it illegal for you to do so. This is the lynchpin holding the enshittified world together. Corporations used the law to create artificial impossibilities.

The weapon they use is a 1998 US law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. This law, later exported worldwide, has an “anti-circumvention” rule. It makes it a felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine, to bypass a “digital lock” protecting a “copyrighted work.”

Here’s how the racket works. A company embeds a sliver of copyrighted software into an otherwise ordinary product – a micro-program on a printer cartridge chip, a bit of code in a tractor’s engine, the operating system on a smartphone. Then it wraps that code in a digital lock. That’s the crucial move, because now the law steps in. Bypass that lock — to refill your own ink, install independent parts, or download an app from a competing store — and suddenly it’s not just unauthorized. It’s legally treated like breaking and entering. It’s the legal force that criminalizes competition and prevents self-help, allowing platforms to enshittify their products without fear that you’ll be able to fix them.

There’s no clearer example than the strange tale of Beeper Mini and Apple. It started with iMessage, a key tool of lock-in. It provides high-security, end-to-end encrypted messaging, unless you try talking to someone on Android. If you add even one Android user to a group chat, Apple deliberately downgrades the entire conversation for everyone – including its own paying customers – to the ancient, insecure, unencrypted SMS system.

Why would Apple knowingly expose its own users to massive security risks? For a simple, cynical reason: to make the green text bubbles on your screen seem annoying and broken. A high-pressure sales tactic, turning you into an agent to harass your friends until they “buy your mom an iPhone.”

Then, in 2024, teenager James Gill reverse-engineered iMessage. Beeper used this discovery to launch Beeper Mini, letting Android users participate in iMessage chats with full encryption. Beeper Mini fixed the security flaw Apple had deliberately created. It protected Apple’s own customers.

Apple’s response? It declared war, pushing update after update to break Beeper Mini and re-expose its own customers to SMS risks. Apple proved it would rather your messages be insecure than its business model be challenged.

This is the enshittification endgame. Competition eliminated. Abuse mechanisms running full tilt. The law weaponized to make fighting back a felony. With the first three forces neutralized – competition crushed by monopolies, regulation and self-help criminalized by the DMCA – only one defense remained: the tech workers themselves. What happened to them?

The final collapse

So what happened to those tech workers? For decades, they were the bulwark against enshittification. They held a unique power, born from two things: they were scarce, and they possessed a “vocational awe.” They believed in their mission to “organize the world’s information” or “connect the world,” and they would refuse to break the products they had poured their lives into.

This power reached its zenith in 2018. At Google, workers discovered projects that violated the company’s “Don’t Be Evil” ethos. There was Project Dragonfly, a censored search engine for China, and Project Maven, an AI built to guide military drones. When it was revealed that executive Andy Rubin was paid $90 million to leave after sexual abuse claims, the workforce exploded. Tens of thousands of Googlers walked off the job in a protest. And they won. They forced management to cancel both projects and end arbitration policies that had silenced victims.

The bosses learned a lesson: that their own workforce was a direct threat to their quarterly earnings. The retaliation was at first, firing leaders like the AI ethicist Timnit Gebru. Then, in 2023 and 2024, the tech sector fired 360,000 workers. These layoffs were a “disciplinary force.” They were a way to break labor’s power and put those mission-driven workers in their place.

As a venture capitalist texted Elon Musk about mass firings: “sharpen your blades, boys.” The scarce, “hardcore” worker was replaced by the terrified, precarious worker. The final bulwark against enshittification had fallen.

With all four constraints neutralized, the enshittification lever is now free to be pulled, hard. This is the world we live in.

The cure is to restore all four forces that once gummed up the lever: competition, regulation, self-help, and labor power. We must restore competition with muscular antitrust. We must restore labor power with unions. Most critically, we must restore regulation and self-help with administrable rules. “Administrable” means they are simple to check and easy to enforce.

For example, we should mandate a “Right to Exit.” This would force platforms like Facebook to be interoperable – compatible with other networks. If you could leave Facebook for a better-run competitor without losing contact with your friends and family, the collective action problem would vanish. Your switching costs would drop to zero, and the fear of competition would be restored.

We need an administrable rule like the “End-to-End Principle.” This mandates that an intermediary’s job is to connect willing senders and willing recipients as faithfully as possible. This one rule bans the fraud at the heart of enshittification. It makes it illegal for Amazon to hide the product you searched for and show you a paid-for fake instead. It makes it illegal for Facebook to hide posts from your friends and show you boosted ads.

This fight is about more than just better tech. The internet is the terrain upon which all our other struggles will be waged. We cannot win those fights on a digital nervous system that frustrates our very attempts to organize within it.

Conclusion

In this summary to Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, you’ve learned that the decay of online platforms is a deliberate, predictable process called enshittification, caused by the collapse of the forces that once held corporations in check.

Platforms inevitably progress from being good to users, to abusing users for business customers, to finally abusing those businesses for themselves. This is possible since competition was neutralized by monopolies, and self-help was criminalized by IP laws like the DMCA, which created “felony contempt of business model.” Platforms use mechanisms like “twiddling” to algorithmically cut workers’ wages. The final line of defense, tech’s own workforce, was broken by mass layoffs. The cure is to restore all four forces: breaking up monopolies, restoring the right to repair and interoperate, and empowering labor.

Because the only alternative isn’t just worse platforms – it’s a world where extraction isn’t a phase, but the permanent business model.