Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
by Cory Doctorow
Rating: 4.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2026-07-31
Great idea, but filling up a whole book required padding with tons of gory details about intellectual property legal battles, tech history, etc. Very viral meme because everybody loves hating expensive printer cartridges, sponsored results on Amazon, expensive uber rides, poor treatment of gig workers, etc.
Also, this guy is insufferable sometimes. A whole chapter about how sad he is that Twitter was bought by Elon Musk because he lost his community. Is Twitter really a community? Get off social media and talk to people directly.
Summary:
Enshittification of a company follows these steps:
- first, surplus goes to users (subsidized uber rides or doordash deliveries)
- then, abuse users for benefit of business customers (leverage monopoly to raise prices and attract more drivers, restaurants)
- then, abuse business customers to extract value (leverage monopsony to lower payouts, raise stock price)
Companies don’t start out altruistic and then turn greedy. They will do it whenever they are able to. These things normally stop them:
- Competition - users who are treated badly switch to other companies, deterring bad behavior
- Regulation - laws protect privacy, etc. trustbusting.
- Self help (interoperability) - savvy users reverse engineer products to remove restrictions
- Tech workers - leverage their scarce labor to push back against slimy practices
But all these safeguards have been eroded recently
- Competition - many industries have collapsed down to a handful of giants
- Regulation - powerful companies lobby government to crack down on competitors and treat leaders favorably
- Self help - IP law has been hijacked to criminalize using products in unintended ways
- Tech workers - more layoffs have led to less bargaining power