Enshittification: Cory Doctorow on Why the Internet Is Getting Worse

If you've spent any time online recently, you've likely felt it: a creeping sense that the digital services you once loved are getting demonstrably worse. Your social media feed is no longer filled with friends but with ads and suggested content. Your search engine results are a swamp of low-quality sites. Once-simple apps are now bloated with intrusive features and trackers. This phenomenon is not your imagination; it has a name: "enshittification."

Coined by author and activist Cory Doctorow, enshittification describes the predictable pattern of decay that plagues digital platforms. It's a term that has become a rallying cry for those trying to understand where the internet went so wrong. The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year, with Australia's Macquarie Dictionary following suit for 2024, and both Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com also list enshittification as a word. But more than just a snappy descriptor for "platform decay," it offers a causal narrative—a story of how tech giants, freed from all discipline, methodically degrade their services in the pursuit of profit.

This article delves into Doctorow's theory, exploring the lifecycle of enshittification, its root causes in unchecked monopoly power, and the potential paths toward a better, less shitty internet.

What is Enshittification? The Three-Stage Lifecycle of Platform Decay

At its core, enshittification is a three-stage process that explains how platforms evolve from valuable services into useless digital sludge. The cycle is driven by the platform's relationship with its two key groups: end users and business customers.

Stage One: Attracting Users

In the beginning, a platform is good to its users. It offers a valuable service, often for free or at a low cost, to attract a large user base. The focus is on growth and creating a product people love. During this phase, the platform works to lock users in, making it difficult for them to leave. This lock-in isn't always technical; often, it's social. The "collective action problem"—the difficulty of convincing your entire network of friends or colleagues to switch platforms simultaneously—creates powerful inertia. As long as you value your connection to those people more than you hate the platform, you're stuck.

Stage Two: Abusing Users for Business Customers

Once the users are locked in, the platform's priorities shift. It begins to allocate value away from its users and toward its business customers, such as advertisers and publishers. This is where the user experience begins to degrade. For example, a social media site might introduce more ads, harvest user data for targeting, and tweak algorithms to favor paid content over organic posts from friends. The platform makes things worse for users to make things better for business customers, who are now crucial for monetization.

Stage Three: Abusing Everyone for Shareholders

After the business customers have also become dependent on the platform and are effectively locked in, the final stage begins. The platform starts extracting value from them, too. Ad prices go up, targeting fidelity goes down, and rules become more restrictive. The platform harvests all the available surplus, channeling it to its executives and shareholders. By the end, only the "mingiest kind of most homeopathic residue" of value remains—just enough to keep both users and businesses from abandoning the service entirely. The platform is now officially a pile of shit.

This process, Doctorow argues, is not an inevitability of capitalism but a direct result of policy choices that removed the forces of punishment and discipline that once kept corporations in check.

The Reference Case: How Facebook Was Enshittified

To understand the theory in practice, there is no better "reference case" than Facebook. Its journey is particularly illustrative because it debunks the idea that enshittification only happens when visionary founders are replaced by "bloodless" MBAs. Facebook has had the same leader, Mark Zuckerberg, since its inception, and he presided over every stage of its decay.

Phase 1 (Locking in Users):In its early days, Facebook assured users that it would not invade their privacy and exploit their data as MySpace allegedly did. They provided "a feed of content that users wanted to view, rather than content that businesses paid to promote." Millions piled in, and the network effect created a powerful lock-in; leaving meant isolating yourself from your friends.

Phase 2 (Pivoting to Business):With users trapped, Zuckerberg began providing advertisers with surveillance data and offering publishers a "free traffic funnel." Businesses became dependent on this traffic and access, getting locked into Facebook's ecosystem.

Phase 3 (Squeezing Everyone):Once businesses were locked in, the squeeze began. Advertisers found their costs soaring while ad fraud ran rampant; Facebook rigged the system to extract maximum value from all parties. For users, the feed became a wasteland where posts from friends and family were replaced by paid content from advertisers who were themselves getting ripped off.

The Four Missing Disciplines: Why Enshittification Happens

Enshittification isn't unique to tech, but the digital realm has its own distinct dynamics. According to Doctorow, the phenomenon accelerated because four key sources of discipline—forces that traditionally punish companies for bad behavior—were systematically dismantled.

Competition:The most significant factor is the collapse of a competitive market. For 40 years, antitrust enforcement has been exceptionally weak, allowing tech giants to achieve dominance not by out-innovating but by buying or crushing their rivals. When Facebook bought Instagram, Zuckerberg admitted in an email that the purpose was to "reduce competition". Without the threat of users fleeing to a competitor, platforms have no incentive to treat them well.

Regulation: A concentrated market is an easily regulated one—by the monopolists themselves. With only a few dominant firms, it's easy to coordinate lobbying efforts and capture government agencies. These companies have enormous excess profits that they can spend on shaping the policy environment to their benefit.

Interoperability:Tech once had a unique self-regulating feature: if a company made its product worse, a programmer could write code to fix it. Think of ad blockers or third-party clients. However, the expansion of intellectual property laws, particularly anti-circumvention rules like Section 1201 of the DMCA, has made it a felony to modify a product against its manufacturer's wishes. This is why companies are so "horny to make you stop using the web" and move to apps; an app is effectively a website wrapped in IP law that makes it illegal to block its ads or extract your data.

Worker Power: The final line of defense was tech workers themselves. For years, skilled engineers were scarce and highly productive, giving them immense leverage. Motivated by a "sense of mission," these workers could and did resist orders to enshittify the products they had built. But after a failure to unionize during their ascendancy, mass layoffs have neutralized this power. Now, tech bosses no longer have to worry about what their employees think.

With these four disciplines gone, platforms are free to decay, and the process can happen with startling speed due to the nature of software, where business logic can be changed for every user and every interaction instantly.

Reversing the Rot: Is There a Path to De-shittification?

While the diagnosis is grim, Doctorow insists that the situation is not hopeless. Because enshittification is the result of policy choices, it can be reversed with different choices. He proposes two primary, administrable remedies.

First is mandated interoperability,which would make it easy for users to leave a platform without losing their social connections or data. Much like phone number portability allows you to switch carriers without changing your number, identity portability would let a user move from, say, Twitter to Mastodon, taking their followers and archives with them. This would reintroduce the discipline of competition; if a platform boss did something users hated, they would lose those users instantly.

Second is labor organizing.Rebuilding the power of tech workers through unions would re-establish an internal check against enshittification. Doctorow points to successful models of how workers can gain collective power.

A surprising source of hope comes from a global shift in political will.Against all odds, antitrust action is on the rise worldwide. From the U.S. and Canada to Europe and Asia, governments are challenging the power of tech monopolies with a vigor not seen in decades. This suggests a crack in the foundation of elite consensus that has protected big tech for so long.

As Doctorow puts it, "The law of political gravity has been repealed, and water has started flowing uphill". The internet may be a mess, but it was made a mess by human decisions. That means we have the power to clean it up.

Empowering Users and Countering Enshittification with PKM Tools Like remio

While the fundamental solution to "enshittification" lies in macro-level policy changes reshaping competition, regulation, and labor environments, users are not powerless. Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tools, exemplified by remio, offer a potent weapon for individuals to resist and even reverse this trend on a micro level. By tilting the balance of power back to the user, these tools help construct a digital space that operates on a logic opposite to that of mainstream platforms.

Core Strategy: Reclaiming Digital Autonomy with remio

1. Reclaim Data Sovereignty and Escape Platform Lock-in

The core premise of "enshittification" is the platform's ability to successfully "lock in" its users. By holding user data (social connections, published content, personal preferences) hostage within their walled gardens, they make the cost of leaving prohibitively high.

• remio's Counter-Strategy: remio fundamentally changes this dynamic by adopting "local-first" principles and open formats like Markdown. Your notes, ideas, and data are stored on your own device or a cloud service of your choice, not on the platform's servers. This means:

  • You own your data: Your data becomes your asset, not a liability to be exploited by the platform. You can access, modify, back up, or migrate it at any time.

  • Immunity to platform death: Even if the remio software were to cease service, all your knowledge assets would remain in a readable, universal format, easily accessible by other tools. This completely eliminates the risk of being held captive by a single platform.

2. Curate Your Information Feed and Reject Algorithmic Feeding

Mainstream platforms use algorithms to decide what you see, with the goal of maximizing platform profit (e.g., ad revenue or user engagement), not your well-being. This leads to information feeds cluttered with outrage-bait, advertisements, and low-quality content.

• remio's Counter-Strategy: remio transforms you from a "passive information consumer" into an "active knowledge curator." You can:

  • Actively curate: Using features like a web clipper and notes, you collect only the information that is truly valuable to you, building your own high signal-to-noise knowledge base.

  • Create deep connections: Utilize features like backlinks to establish meaningful relationships between different pieces of information, forming your own knowledge network instead of being led by an algorithm. Your focus shifts to the intrinsic value of information, not its superficial appeal.

3. Practice Interoperability and Build an Open Personal Hub

Doctorow emphasizes that mandating interoperability is key to breaking up monopolies. While an individual cannot force a platform to open up, they can use remio to create a de facto "information interoperability hub" for themselves.

• remio's Counter-Strategy: remio can act as the central hub of your digital world, connecting and integrating information from various closed platforms. You can gather your thoughts from Twitter, notes from YouTube videos, and article summaries from newsletters into remio for processing and connection. This achieves "personal-level data interoperability," reducing your dependency on any single platform. When a platform begins to "enshittify," you lose only an information source, while your true knowledge repository and network of thought remain intact and secure in remio.

In summary, while tools like remio cannot replace antitrust legislation, they empower individuals to build a healthier, more autonomous digital environment that is resistant to the corrosion of "enshittification." It is a pragmatic, bottom-up form of resistance.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. How does Cory Doctorow define the three stages of enshittification?

Cory Doctorow defines enshittification as a three-stage process. First, platforms are good to their end users to lock them in. Second, they abuse their users to make the platform better for business customers. Finally, they abuse the business customers to extract all remaining value for shareholders, leaving a dysfunctional platform behind.

2. Is enshittification just another term for unchecked capitalism?

While related, enshittification is a specific outcome of what Doctorow calls "unchecked capitalism". The key is the word "unchecked." Doctorow argues that tech platforms became enshittified because specific sources of discipline—competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power—were systematically removed, allowing firms to act in undisciplined ways without fear of punishment.

3. Why is Facebook considered a prime example of enshittification?

Facebook is the "reference case" because its decay occurred under the continuous leadership of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, debunking the myth that enshittification only happens after founders leave. The platform perfectly followed the three-stage process: it attracted users with promises of privacy and connection, then abused them for advertisers, and finally squeezed both users and advertisers to maximize profit.

4. According to Doctorow, what is the most effective way to fight enshittification?

Doctorow proposes several solutions, but highlights mandated interoperability as a highly effective remedy. By allowing users to easily leave a platform and take their data and social graph with them (similar to phone number portability), it would immediately reintroduce competition and force platforms to treat their users better or risk them leaving.

5. How did the loss of tech worker power contribute to enshittification?

Previously, scarce and highly valued tech workers felt a "sense of mission" and had the power to refuse orders to degrade products they built. After mass layoffs and a failure to unionize when they had leverage, that power evaporated. Without this internal check, executives faced less resistance to implementing enshittifying strategies.

6. What role does interoperability play in preventing platform decay?

Interoperability acts as a key source of discipline. It is the ability for third-party tools and services to connect with or modify a platform, allowing users to fix problems or add features the platform owner won't (like an ad blocker). Laws like the DMCA have made this illegal, removing this discipline and allowing companies to abuse users in walled gardens like mobile apps without fear of user-led fixes.

7. What is Doctorow's latest book about enshittification?

In October 2025, Doctorow released a book titled "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It". The book expands on his theory about platform decay and offers a prescription for reversing the trends that have made digital services worse.