Cory Doctorow Explains The Internet’s Enshittification

Cory Doctorow’s viral term “enshittification” explains the systemic degradation of online platforms. His new book explores how big tech prioritizes profit over user experience, offering solutions to reclaim a more humane internet.

The digital landscape, once hailed as a boundless frontier of connection and innovation, now feels less like a vibrant ecosystem and more like a vast, decaying theme park.

Rides are breaking down, prices are soaring, and the magic has long since faded, replaced by a pervasive sense of grime.

If you’ve felt this creeping malaise, this inescapable feeling that everything online has just… gotten worse, then you’re not alone.

And Cory Doctorow, the prolific science fiction author, internet activist, and self-proclaimed didacticist, has a word for it: “Enshittification.”

It’s a cheeky coinage, perhaps even a crude one, but its power lies in its blunt accuracy.

Doctorow, at 54, has spent a career spanning nearly four decades chronicling the interplay between technology and humanity, penning 15 novels, dozens of short stories, and countless essays.

Yet, it is this single, evocative term, popularized in his essays of 2022 and 2023, that has become his most resonant contribution to the public discourse.

It describes, with unnerving precision, the systemic degradation of online platforms as their corporate owners prioritize profit over user experience.

On Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release Doctorow’s book-length elaboration, “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.”

It arrives at a moment when the term has transcended its original, specific definition, expanding into a general cultural “vibe.”

From the relentless stream of SEO spam clogging Google searches to Facebook’s transformation from a social connector to a data-mining behemoth, from Netflix’s ever-increasing prices to the A.I.-generated “slop video” polluting Instagram feeds, the feeling of enshittification is ubiquitous.

It’s even being applied to broader societal structures, from video games to American democracy itself.

“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying,” Doctorow declared in a 2024 speech, capturing the collective exasperation.

But why, one might ask, does a writer as prolific as Doctorow, who has already published thousands of words on this very topic, need a book?

Over poached eggs and an avocado malted in a Lower Manhattan diner, Doctorow offered a characteristically nerdy analogy from Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” series.

“The articles are like the individual missions,” he explained, “but the books are where I crystallize everything up to that point.”

This book, then, is a save point, a moment to consolidate his arguments, present case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop), and lay out his prescriptions: breaking up big tech companies and regulating them with renewed vigor.

As his friend and eminent science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson notes, Doctorow’s seemingly disparate endeavors are all part of a “coherent plan — his push to make a more humane and democratic, user-friendly, non-capitalist, non-exploitative internet.”

Doctorow’s philosophy, evident across his vast body of work, centers on a fundamental dichotomy: technology as a tool for human empowerment and creativity, or as an instrument of repression and control wielded by states or corporations.

For him, tinkering, customization, and individuality are virtues; conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption are vices.

This isn’t just about grand ideological battles; it’s about the small, everyday acts of digital autonomy.

Arriving at the diner with custom-printed poop emoji stickers (a nod to his book cover), he endeared himself to the owners by explaining how to modify their seltzer maker to use larger, non-proprietary CO2 tanks.

It’s a microcosm of his broader vision: control over our tools, however humble, matters.

“I am simultaneously extremely excited and hopeful and energized about the possibilities of what technology can do for us as people trying to thrive,” Doctorow mused, “and terrified of how bad technology will be for that project if we get it wrong.”

The current state of digital affairs, he argues, unequivocally represents “getting it wrong.”

To understand Doctorow’s vision, one must look to his origins, a kind of digital “Paradise Lost.”

The son of two Marxist schoolteachers, he grew up in 1970s Toronto, steeped in early computing.

His father brought home a Teletype terminal, and his mother repurposed kindergarten paper towels for printing code, then had her students wipe their hands on the used sheets.

At an alternative elementary school, Doctorow, alongside his friend Tim Wu (who would later serve as a special assistant to President Biden for competition and tech policy), spent countless hours on an Apple II.

“To us, they were machines of liberation and personal development,” Wu recalled.

“We saw them in the most optimistic possible terms.”

This era, before the sleek, monetized surfaces of today, forged a belief in technology’s inherent potential for good, a prelapsarian ideal that fuels their current advocacy.

Wu aptly summarizes this shared nostalgia: “The ‘Paradise Lost’ motive is big with Cory and with me too.”

Doctorow’s early life was marked by a spirit of defiance and intellectual curiosity.

As an adolescent, he organized protests against the Persian Gulf war, and later, while living in Mexico, composed stories on a Sears word processor.

He found conventional college computer programming curricula tedious, ultimately finding his intellectual home at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 2002.

There, he plunged into the battle against digital rights management (DRM), a concept anathema to the early internet activists who believed digital information, once purchased, should be freely controlled by the consumer.

Cindy Cohn, EFF’s executive director, describes him as an “idea machine,” a relentless fount of insights into the intersection of technology and human interaction.

He masterminded attention-grabbing stunts, like a parody of the “Mickey Mouse Club” theme song skewering Disney’s intellectual property rapacity.

His writing career blossomed concurrently.

In 2001, he joined Boing Boing as an editor, helping shape it into one of the world’s most popular blogs with its unique blend of tech news, retrofuturist aesthetics, and left-leaning commentary.

His 2008 novel, “Little Brother,” a New York Times bestseller about teenagers using technology to fight an oppressive Department of Homeland Security, solidified his reputation as a storyteller with a powerful message.

True to his principles, he made “Little Brother,” like all his books until 2017, freely available under a Creative Commons license.

Doctorow, a proud didacticist, sees his fiction and activism as two sides of the same coin, expressions of a singular concern for technology’s role in human freedom.

He speaks with a rapid, confident cadence, his Canadian accent a faint echo, giving the impression of a mind that has tirelessly mapped every argumentative byway.

Rob Beschizza, managing editor of Boing Boing, notes how Doctorow’s mind moves “from agreement to skepticism,” a process that is “very fortifying if you’re someone who enjoys that kind of back and forth.”

It was from this prominent perch, recognized in 2010 by Forbes as a top “web celeb,” that Doctorow observed the public’s relationship with computing undergo a profound shift, becoming increasingly mediated and passive.

He railed against Apple’s iPad as wasteful and infantilizing upon its release and quit Facebook years ago over privacy concerns, predicting its eventual demise through scandals, ad fraud, and generational shifts.

Then, in the fall of 2023, he articulated his theory of enshittification with a clarity that resonated globally.

The process, in Doctorow’s telling, is a specific, almost scientific progression, akin to a disease with distinct stages:

1. Paradise: A platform is initially good to its users. Think early Facebook connecting friends, or Amazon providing a vast, reliable marketplace.

2. Exploitation of Users: Once enough users are trapped (due to network effects and lack of alternatives), the platform begins to exploit them to attract and retain businesses. This manifests as Facebook selling user data to advertisers or Google prioritizing paid ads over organic search results.

3. Exploitation of Businesses: With businesses also locked into the dominant platform, the screws tighten further. Ad rates skyrocket on Facebook, even amid reports of ad fraud, and Amazon sellers are forced to pay for Prime features just to appear high in search results.

The end result, Doctorow argues, is a zero-sum game where no one is truly happy except the shareholders of these colossal platforms.

“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” he writes in the book.

“And they’re not dying.

We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”

Managing the anxiety born from this grim assessment, Doctorow admits, involves writing – no surprise there – and consuming “too much brown liquor” in his custom-built “pirate” bar in the backyard of his Burbank, California home.

This period has been one of “extreme fecundity,” even for him, buoyed by the intellectual momentum of a new wave of thinkers concerned with breaking up big tech.

Chief among these “neo-Brandeisians,” inspired by early 20th-century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, is Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) under the Biden Administration – herself a Doctorow fan.

“He’s making real intellectual contributions in presenting a framework for how to think about what we experience as consumers,” Khan stated, praising his lucidity and ability to synthesize complex experiences.

While the FTC under Khan has pursued aggressive suits against tech giants, and even the second Trump Administration has taken a rhetorically aggressive stance, a recent settlement with Amazon suggests the fight to rein in the industry faces considerable limits.

Ultimately, Doctorow, ever the pragmatist, isn’t overly concerned with the precise semantics of his viral word.

He knows it has entered the cultural lexicon, taking on a broader meaning than his original, more technical definition.

And, as befits a longtime foe of overly aggressive copyright enforcement, he is entirely comfortable with the concept of the remix.

As he writes in his new book, a testament to his enduring belief in user agency, “I am giving you explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense.”

It’s an invitation to join the conversation, to name the problem, and perhaps, to begin the long, arduous work of finding a way out of the digital carcass.