In the last two yearsiPhone customers may have been pleasantly surprised to see a standardized USB-C charger portallowing them to dispose of Apple’s custom Lightning wires. The world’s 1.5 billion iPhone users can thank Europe for forcing Apple’s change. The tech giant decided to switch all its new iPhonesdetermining it too costly to produce the USB-C port just for Europe.
It’s only in recent years that consumers have woken up to Big Tech’s power over our attentionmoodsprivacystock marketeconomyand wallets—over us. It’s fortunate then that with our heads buried in our phones scrolling through social mediaconsumer advocatesregulatory agenciesand litigators have been sounding the alarm on surveillance and monopoly power and delving into the drier nuts-and-bolts details of right-to-repair and interoperability regulationslike the one that led to Apple standardizing its charging port.
Prolific tech critic Cory Doctorowwhose pronouncements make him akin to a town crier in the digital squareis among those leading the charge. After coining and popularizing the term “enshittification” to mean how tech platforms degrade over timeDoctorow has bestowed his latest bookEnshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, with the title.
His bookderived mainly from his blog Pluralisticwill be eye-opening to consumers and those like me who are already familiar with Big Tech’s bullying methods. (I’m the editorial director of the Open Markets Institutea think tank that seeks to regulate Big Tech monopolies and curb corporate power.)
Enshittification is a ride through all the bait-and-switch tacticsfinancial trickeryand gatekeeping to which Big Tech platforms subject users. A prime example is how Google began degrading its always reliable workhorse of a productsearchin the mid-aughtsonce there was no more room for its flagship segmentwhich had captured a 90 percent global market shareto grow. In a strategy laid bare in internal memos and emails in the Department of Justice exhibits in one of its two monopoly cases against the corporationGoogle made users input more queries into the search bar to get the answersleading to more ads and more revenue for Google. “After alleven if Google couldn’t find more people to searchor more ways to use searchthey could certainly find new ways to charge for search,” Doctorow observes. “In other wordsonce Google stopped growingit started squeezing.”
Doctorow takes us through the how and why of enshittification. How tech companies enshittify proceeds in four steps: 1) firstplatforms are good to their individual customers2) they abuse their individuals to improve things for their business customers3) nextthey undercut their business customers to keep more profitand 4) finallythey have turned into a giant pile of shit.
Both Amazon and Facebook have turned on their once-prized business customersFacebookby raising the price of ad targeting and failing to show its users the ads advertisers paid for. News outletsin particularwere hurt badly when the platform began downranking short excerpts of news articles in favor of longer oneseffectively cannibalizing the news business. SimilarlyAmazon started to shaft the merchants who sell on its marketplace by effectively forcing them to pay to be included in Amazon Primeforbidding them to sell their product at a lower price on any other websiteincluding their ownandperhaps most gallingripping off merchants’ ideas to make its own Amazon-branded copycat products.
According to Doctorowthe enshittifier’s “credo” is“Your job is to create as much value on that platform as possible. Our job is to harvest all of that valueleaving behind the smaller quantum of utility that will keep the platform from imploding.”
But it’s not just the well-known platforms. Tech companiesin generalhave gotten into the game. In one of the book’s most brazen examplesUnitya company that offers tools for video game developersannounced a change to its pricing policy: it would start charging game developer customers a fee every time they sold a video gameclaiming it wanted “shared success” with its customersthe developers who used their tools.
Unity’s customer base of video game developers balked. Doctorow likens the scheme to selling hammers to build a lemonade stand and expecting a nickel from each drink sold. “Unity is an avatar of the attitudes that produce enshittification,” he writes. “Enshittification is what happens when the executives calculate that they can force you to go along with their schemesand when they’re right about it.” In Unity’s caseits plan to fleece its customers didn’t work
Part of the reason is that the law allows them to get away with things traditional companies never couldowing to underregulationcopyright lawand regulatory capture. Having an app allows tech companies to break the law and then claim they didn’t because the crime was committed with an appfor instanceapp-based lending platforms that ignore usury law or cryptocurrency apps that illegally trade in unregistered securities.
Regulation hasn’t kept pace with technologyas we see most vexingly in the case of AIwhich has sent government regulators worldwide scrambling. Add to underregulation the billions of dollars the tech industry has funneled into lobbyingand you have regulatory capture that has helped tech companies weaponize intellectual property laws. For instanceIP laws for apps ban “circumvention,” which means technology companies can destroy rivals that have developed anti-features allowing users to skirt the app’s undesirable features: “In other wordstech companies don’t stop with ‘It’s not a crime if we do it with an app.’ They also say‘It’s a crime if you fix our app to defend yourself from our crimes.’”
Enshittification also describes the waning counterbalancing influence of the tech industry’s white-collar workforcean aspect of Big Tech’s exceptionalism that gets little attention. Doctorow notes that Google’s way of sorting web pages came from an academic research paper on citation analysis by its foundersLarry Page and Sergey Bringiving the company its scholarly atmosphere. Technologists were recruited from top universities worldwideoffered generous pay with stock optionsand given one day a week to work on side projects.
For yearsGoogle deferred to its technical staffwho remained a bulwark against enshittification. It believed deeply in Google’s mission statement to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Yetletting engineers run the show exasperated investorswhose greed won out over workers’ idealism as we saw with the corporation’s strategy to degrade search quality.
Google wasn’t the only giant to rein in its high-minded workers; it was among the most prominent. The rupture with their workforcewhich began when Big Tech corporations ramped up their enshittificatory (yesDoctorow uses this form of the wordtoo) ways over the past decadebecame a chasm in 2023 when a quarter of a million tech workers were fired—despite the industry’s record profits. In 2025the unspoken covenant was severed with tech executives’ embracing Donald Trump at his inauguration.
Big Tech may have outfoxed regulators and its workforcebut Doctorow sees a reckoning coming. Absent U.S. regulationas the Trump administration protects the tech platformswe may have to rely on Europe to check the tech industry’s power.
We saw this dissonance between the U.S. and Europe this autumn when a federal judge imposed a modest penalty on Google for its illegal search market dominance. That stood in sharp contrast to the much largeralbeit affordable for Google$3.5 billion fine levied by the European Commission for its digital advertising monopoly.
Enshittification may seem outdated amid the surge of AIwhich is barely mentioned. It’s not that Doctorow hasn’t been thinking and talking about AI—he considers it a bubble—it’s that we have to wait for his AI book to be released next yearby which time his predictions might already have come true.
Sneak preview: He’s not optimistic. In a recent postDoctorow warns“I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can’t be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people’s money and lighting it on fire. Eventuallythose other people are going to want to see a return on their investmentand when they don’t get itthey will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.”
Doctorow’s Enshittification is an indispensable guide to understanding how we got here. If Part 1 is a must-readPart 2 will be epic.
