What is enshittification?
“Enshittification” is a term coined by the British-Canadian technology critic and author Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe how the digital services that increasingly dominate our lives – Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and the rest – all turned to crud at the same time. Not everyone is as comfortable with vulgarity as Doctorow. When speaking about the phenomenon in public forums, the author plumps for “enpoopification”, employing a more decorous euphemism – poop – that dates from the mid-18th century. Here, though, we ask readers to tolerate a word that has been in continuous usage in England for about a millennium and which has only been considered rude for the past four centuries or so. “Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment,” said Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. Enshittification is the only word that does justice to what is going on.
What are some examples of enshittification?
This (Generation X) MoneyWeek writer no longer chats pleasurably with old university friends on Facebook because the platform has become so unashamedly crap. Ten years ago, a Facebook feed was made up of friends’ news, views and recommended articles. Now it’s an incomprehensible cesspit of advertisements and pathetic videos. For a while, you wondered if it was just you suffering. Then you realise it’s everybody. That’s enshittification. Or remember when Twitter gave you instant access to your own curated pick of the best journalism, insight and a “livestream feed of smart people on the ground at the most pressing events of the day, not to mention the wisecracks and insights of your friends”? Now, says Charles Barbour on The Conversation, it’s rammed with “ads, gore, porn, toxicity, AI slop and scams of all variety”. That, too, is enshittification. “Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, Google, Apple, Uber, Spotify: everything turns to shit. And no one is able to escape.”
That won’t necessarily help. Enshittification is not the result of a business failure that risks driving customers to other platforms. It’s about intentionally letting your platform get crappier once customers are locked in, whether by their own commercial imperatives or by network effects. Enshittification is a strategy, not an accident. In Doctorow’s conception – in numerous essays and laid out more fully in his recent book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It – the process of enshittification has three distinct phases. At first, products are great for end users: they let old chums reconnect for free, say, with no surveillance and no “boosted” slop. Next, they abuse those end users to benefit their business customers. They find ways to lock end users in – switching costs, network effects, contracts, digital rights management – and once users are stuck, the company makes the product worse for them to extract more value.
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What's the third stage of enshittification?
Finally, platforms use their surpluses to woo business customers (advertisers, sellers, creators), lock them in and start making the product worse for the business side, too. This is the highest form of enshittification: when platforms abuse their business customers, and a lack of meaningful competition and regulation means they can still increase profits. The defining feature of the process is not “things got worse”: it’s “things got worse and we stayed”. For example, in 2019, Google had a 90% market share in search, but growth had stalled, so a strategy was pitched to make search worse so that users would have to run multiple queries and see more advertisements. “That’s enshittification in a nutshell – and we all kept using Google anyway.”
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Is this a sustainable model for companies?
The assumption that enshittified companies are doomed to die may be optimistic, says Henry Mance in the Financial Times. Today on Amazon, the top search results are more expensive and sometimes fraudulent. The product you want is, on average, 17th in the results – yet Amazon is thriving. Apple surveils its users as much as Facebook, and refuses to let companies sell refurbished iPhone parts. It lured customers “into its walled garden, which was then revealed to be a prison”, says Doctorow. Now, car firms such as Tesla charge drivers monthly subscriptions for features they have already bought. Indeed, Doctorow’s concept is so “brilliant” it should be applied more broadly, says Paul Krugman in his blog on Substack – a platform that recently pulled off a fundraising round that valued it at $1.1billion, raising fears about its own future path. The logic of enshittification “applies to any business characterised by network effects. It may go under different names such as ‘penetration pricing’, but the logic is the same.” Others go even further, positing Donald Trump, for example, as the “enshittifier-in-chief” of US politics.
Is there a way to combat enshittification?
Doctorow’s book is less convincing on solutions than on entertainingly setting out the problems. But the combination of Trump’s tariffs (undercutting US trade threats) and Brexit (restoring regulatory autonomy) provides a striking opportunity to gain back control of our digital lives, Doctorow argues in The Guardian. Outside the EU, Britain could choose to legalise reverse-engineering for interoperability and user benefit, thus allowing UK firms to modify and improve US tech products, and undercut the rent-extraction models of US platforms. Such a move would attract talent and capital spooked by Trump, reclaim digital sovereignty, and build a profitable tech sector focused on “disenshittifying” platforms. The opportunity is narrow and fraught with political and economic risk. But, says Doctorow, it is “the most exciting proposition in decades”.
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