Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification"

I grew into adulthood during the golden years of the internet. When I started college, I received a literal "face book" with headshots of everyone in my class and short blurbs about who they were. A few short years later, Facebook was dominant on my campus and an exciting way to stay connected with friends. Google's motto was still "Don't be evil," and companies like Amazon and Apple were seen as innovative disrupters shaping the technological landscape for the benefit of all. It was a heady, optimistic time for tech platforms. Twenty years later, the Facebook feed is crammed with ads and boosted content. Amazon makes $38 billion annually selling product placement in its search algorithm, and Apple charges a 30% fee on every dollar transacted through apps in its marketplace.

The degradation of digital platforms over time was first labeled "enshittification" by Cory Doctorow in a blog post. The term was named the 2024 Word of the Year by Australia's Macquarie Dictionary. In his book Doctorow explains the process of enshittification in three stages. In the first stage, platforms use money from private investors to provide exceptional value to users. Platforms build a broad user base and with it, powerful network effects that make it difficult to leave. I remember this phase of Facebook, when my feed was chronological and full of posts and pictures from people I had chosen to follow. Everyone I knew had joined by 2010. I also recall the early pricing of Uber rides (outrageously cheap), and Amazon's magical ability to make a package appear at my doorstep in two days. In this first stage, none of these companies were making a profit, but they were consolidating market power.

In the second stage, companies begin to exploit users in favor of business customers. For example, Facebook gradually became one of the biggest advertising engines on the planet, serving ads and sponsored content to locked-in customers who had previously been seeing posts from their contacts. Likewise, Amazon slowly became the primary marketplace through which merchants could reach their customers.

In the final stage, the platforms use their power over fully captured consumers and business customers to extract maximum value. Facebook penalizes publishers for posting links that would take users away from Facebook. Amazon sells placement in search results to the highest bidder and "clones" well-performing products, eventually outcompeting them with lower-priced Amazon versions. Apple charges merchants exorbitant fees on transactions in its app store. Uber calculates different wages for the same job depending on a driver's recent history. Both customers and businesses become trapped by network effects and high switching costs—or because there is no longer any alternative.

Graphics generated by Google's Notebook LM, whose AI service is good, free, and probably not profitable (definitely in stage 1!)

Beyond defining enshittification and providing examples, Doctorow spends the middle part of his book digging into some of the particular behaviors of tech platforms. This section includes some of the most unnerving anecdotes in the book. Doctorow explains how companies skirt existing workforce protections, price-fixing rules, and short-term rental laws by using apps (Uber, RealPage, Airbnb, respectively). Companies also "twiddle the knobs" remotely to manipulate business partners and customers who rely on their apps. Using data from continuous surveillance, a company like Uber can elevate the cost of a ride for someone whose phone is about to run out of battery. At the same time, they can adjust the wages paid to a driver based on their past behavior. Platforms that rely on content creators can temporarily "heat" a user or business customer (artificially boosting them in the algorithm) just to keep people guessing.

Stage 3 of the enshittification process should lead to company death as users and business customers become fed up with a terrible product. Doctorow explains that there are several factors allowing modern digital platforms to avoid this fate. A major one is lack of competition. The drop in antitrust actions by the U.S. government since the 1970s and 1980s has allowed monopolies to proliferate. Digital platforms like Facebook and Amazon became adept at simply acquiring any company that threatened to compete with them. For Facebook, the list is over 90 companies long and includes Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR. Amazon's acquisitions include Audible, Diapers.com, Twitch, Whole Foods Market, and Ring. Doctorow explains that market dominance leads to regulatory capture. Companies no longer have to deal with market competition, so they can focus fully on lobbying and manipulating the government for favorable treatment. In this way, even customers who may want to leave an enshittifying platform may have nowhere to go.

The early history of tech is replete with examples of "adversarial interoperability," where a person or company developed a tool that connected with an existing platform to create a new product or service without the consent or cooperation of the target platform, thus spurring healthy competition. The classic example is Apple's software that could edit and save Microsoft Office files. It is reasonable to wonder why modern upstart companies don't try to capitalize on consumer dissatisfaction by developing digital tools to help consumers manage the shittier aspects of the major platforms (for example, "hacking" Uber's wage manipulation schemes or facilitating user-exit from a digital platform with all their data and contacts). Doctorow explains that the major barrier to this is Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This federal law makes it illegal to bypass digital rights management (DRM) or to provide tools to allow users to do so on their own. The punishment is an incredible five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. This law has placed an understandable chill on the sort of innovation that could give consumers better options.

A major part of the book is devoted to solutions. Doctorow has long advocated for several fixes that he believes would protect consumer rights and restore competition. He is critical of some European regulations that try to force platforms to moderate content, arguing that such strictures actually empower platforms to expand their surveillance powers. Instead, he advocates for policies that weaken platforms and encourage competition. Rolling back Section 1201 of the DMCA is at the top of his wish list.

Another step would be strengthening antitrust actions and changing our approach to antitrust generally. In the past, antitrust has mainly operated under a "consumer welfare price standard." Typically, the U.S. government only considers an antitrust action when a company becomes so powerful that its outsize control of prices harms consumers. But modern platforms cause harm to consumers in other ways, including reduced choice, algorithmic manipulation, data mining, and monetization of our attention. Doctorow uses Amazon as an example here, explaining that the first Amazon search result has an 80% chance of being a paid ad, while the best-priced option typically appears about 20 spots down in the search results. While traditional economic theory assumes consumers are rational actors when it comes to price, consumers actually demonstrate a more "bounded rationality" when dealing with digital platforms. When faced with almost unlimited choices and algorithmic manipulation, consumers do not behave in the purely price-driven way that old-school economists assumed they would (for example, the "Amazon's Choice" label alone boosts sales by 25% regardless of the price). A typical Amazon Prime member doesn't spend time comparison shopping across the web, thus forcing merchants to participate in the Amazon marketplace where they are squeezed with fees from Amazon and required to pay to be shown in the top search results. This actually inflates prices throughout the marketplace and limits options, indirectly harming consumers.

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I personally stopped using Facebook years ago because the service had become degraded and the company was behaving so badly. We also dropped Amazon Prime this year. But simply leaving services doesn't seem like an option in other cases. For example, I wish I weren't so tied to Google services. I love the idea of more consumer choice and easier exit options from large platforms. My recent quest to find a better cellular carrier gave me a glimpse of how frictionless switching could be.

Although it is beyond the scope of this book, I wondered about the proliferation of poor-quality educational software, often created by large, consolidated platforms. In education, I believe that a broken feedback-incentive loop could be an important cause that isn't as much of a factor in the larger tech world. I would love to see more innovation and easier switching in educational software, and I am curious about the barriers to this and whether they are the same or different from the ones that Doctorow describes.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. I did find the organization to be a bit challenging at times. But the framework of "enshittification" was useful, and I like how Doctorow provided some clear and workable solutions. The book affirmed some of my negative experiences with big tech in the last few years, while not leaving me totally hopeless.