End-stage Rot
Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Verso, 352pp, £22.00, ISBN 9780374619329
reviewed by Christopher Webb
'It's not just you', Cory Doctorow assures us in his much-anticipated new work, Enshittification, 'the internet is getting worse, fast'. The deliberately vulgar neologism and title of his latest book went viral after he first coined it in 2022 (it's since been used widely across social media, quoted in newspaper articles and magazines and, in 2023, it was the American Dialect Society's word of the year). But, as Doctorow insists, 'enshittification isn't just a way to say "Something got worse". It's an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that's causing everything to get worse, all at once.'
Couching his analysis in epidemiological terms, his purpose is both diagnostic and therapeutic: to explain how so many platforms, apps, and connected devices have turned into ‘a giant pile of shit’ and to show how, with sufficient political will, the process can be reversed. Enshittification, Doctorow argues, is not a natural stage of technological maturity (as companies like to suggest) but a pathology — a man-made disease that infects digital platforms. Its life cycle has four very clear stages: ‘First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit’.
The first part of Enshittification, entitled, ‘The Natural History,’ reads like a field guide to managed decline. Doctorow revisits the familiar giants (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Twitter) and performs a forensic autopsy on each. The Facebook chapter traces the company’s metamorphosis from social network to behavioural-advertising machine. Once upon a time, Facebook was a place where ‘you weren’t imagining it: it was fun and useful and valuable’. Then came the bait-and-switch. Users were locked in by network effects; publishers and advertisers were seduced by “free” reach; eventually both groups were squeezed. The feed that once showed what friends posted now shows what advertisers pay to show. Facebook’s trajectory ends, in Doctorow’s telling, with Mark Zuckerberg’s panicked pivot to the Metaverse — ‘a legless, sexless, low-polygon hellscape’ — a perfect image of end-stage rot.
Amazon follows a similar curve. Early Amazon, Doctorow reminds us, ‘raised a fortune from investors and used that fortune to subsidize many goods, selling them below cost’. The aim was lock-in. Once competitors had been crushed, the screws tightened: sellers faced ‘junk fees,’ fake search results, and the ‘Amazon tax’ that inflated prices everywhere else. Even if you never shop on Amazon, you pay for its dominance because its contracts force merchants to raise prices across the board. Apple’s story, meanwhile, is a parable of hypocrisy. The company that advertised itself as a privacy-first alternative to Google quietly built its own surveillance network. Its walled garden became, in Doctorow’s words, ‘a prison,’ one that charges app developers 30 per cent rent for access to their own customers. And Twitter — perhaps the saddest case of all — shows what happens when the disease mutates into utter farce. Once an open API that encouraged third-party innovation, it devolved into a brittle, ad-choked service before collapsing under Elon Musk’s misrule.
These chapters are not new journalism; most of the evidence has circulated for years in the pages of Wired and The Verge. But Doctorow’s talent — and Enshittification’s power — lies in synthesis. He takes a decade of dispersed outrage and arranges it into a pattern. Each company follows the same ‘natural history’: initial generosity (user growth subsidised by investors), middle-stage exploitation (the turn toward monetisation), and terminal extraction (shareholder supremacy). It’s capitalism as thermodynamics: value moves inexorably upward until the system burns out.
Part Two, ‘The Pathology,’ digs into why this keeps happening. Here the book shifts from reportage to polemic. The culprit, Doctorow argues, is not human nature or technological determinism but policy — specifically, the late-twentieth-century shift to the ‘consumer welfare’ model of antitrust, which treats monopoly as benign unless prices rise. Under this doctrine, companies like Amazon could devastate suppliers, workers, and entire industries so long as the sticker price stayed low. Enshittification, then, is what happens when the state forgets that the purpose of markets is competition, not efficiency. Add to this the network effects and ‘switching costs’ that keep users captive — what Doctorow calls the ‘collective action problem’ of quitting Facebook — and you have a perfect closed system: monopoly without exit, exploitation without escape.
The next section, ‘The Epidemiology,’ expands the metaphor further. Enshittification spreads. Once monopolies capture one sector, they metastasise into others—finance, logistics, media, labour. Doctorow sketches this as a new social order he refers to as ‘technofeudalism’ (a term popularised by Yanis Varoufakis in 2023): a world where wealth no longer comes from producing goods but from owning chokepoints — app stores, ad networks, APIs, data pipelines. Every transaction passes through a tollbooth. The chapter ‘It’s Not Wage Theft If We Do It with an App’ makes the point vividly. Gig-economy platforms like Uber algorithmically underpay drivers, using opaque ‘reverse-centaur’ systems that combine the worst of human precarity with the worst of machine indifference. Other chapters trace how ‘right-to-repair’ laws, DRM, and licensing schemes criminalise self-help and lock users out of their own tools. ‘Tech rights are worker rights,’ Doctorow insists. The same laws that prevent you from fixing your phone also prevent farmers from fixing tractors or warehouse staff from resisting algorithmic management.
The final part, ‘The Cure,’ offers a programme of reform. Much of it will sound familiar — break up monopolies, restore regulation, rebuild unions — but Doctorow grounds these calls in the specifics of digital architecture. His preferred remedy is interoperability: legally enforced standards that allow users to leave one platform and take their data, friends, and content elsewhere. (Think of how newer social media like BlueSky, Mastodon, etc. work.) This ‘right to exit,’ he argues, would restore genuine competition and neutralise network effects. He’s equally passionate about the ‘right to repair,’ the revival of privacy, and what he calls ‘administrability’ — rules ordinary people can use without lawyers or venture capital. The tone is almost utopian: ‘We can create enshittification-resistant infrastructure for a new, good world’.
Doctorow’s style throughout is conversational, furious, funny. Each page crackles with analogies, jokes, and anger. It is pointedly un-academic in tone. He is that rare activist who can make antitrust law read like a thriller. And in an era when most writers approach Big Tech with either academic detachment or nihilistic despair, his insistence on repair—on the idea that this can be fixed — is invigorating. The book adds to the conversation a usable vocabulary, one that condenses complex structural critiques into a single, portable word. ‘Enshittification’ may feel a bit crude, a bit juvenile at times, but it has what all political language needs: stickiness.
As you might expect from a work with such a broad remit, there are some noticeable blindspots. The very term that gives the book its energy also, at times, flattens its analysis. Enshittification becomes a catch-all for every form of decline — monopoly, surveillance, labour precarity, bad UX. At times, it reads like Doctorow’s attempt to brand the entire political economy under one meme. (He attempts, semi-successfully, to address this in the final chapter: ‘Is enshittification just capitalism?’). On top of this, the book suffers from a peculiarly novel strain of Silicon-Valley-parochialism: while he praises the EU’s Digital Markets Act, the story remains essentially American, with little attention to the ways enshittification looks different in other parts of the world (perhaps this is forgivable if we consider most of the worst offenders of what he describes are American companies). Nor does he dwell on the cultural complicity of users themselves — the fact that billions continue to use Facebook, Amazon and TikTok not only out of necessity but out of pleasure. Lastly, even before this month’s announcement from OpenAI that they would start trialling ads in the free versions of ChatGPT, it felt very obvious the developments in AI would make everything a lot worse and that the AI labs would be following suit. Some suggestion towards this new period we’re entering would have been welcome.
But this should not detract from the fact that Enshittification is a massive, crucial achievement. For now, Doctorow offers a map of the wreckage and a language to navigate it. While Doctorow may not cure the disease, he has given it a name that, once heard, is impossible to forget.
Couching his analysis in epidemiological terms, his purpose is both diagnostic and therapeutic: to explain how so many platforms, apps, and connected devices have turned into ‘a giant pile of shit’ and to show how, with sufficient political will, the process can be reversed. Enshittification, Doctorow argues, is not a natural stage of technological maturity (as companies like to suggest) but a pathology — a man-made disease that infects digital platforms. Its life cycle has four very clear stages: ‘First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit’.
The first part of Enshittification, entitled, ‘The Natural History,’ reads like a field guide to managed decline. Doctorow revisits the familiar giants (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Twitter) and performs a forensic autopsy on each. The Facebook chapter traces the company’s metamorphosis from social network to behavioural-advertising machine. Once upon a time, Facebook was a place where ‘you weren’t imagining it: it was fun and useful and valuable’. Then came the bait-and-switch. Users were locked in by network effects; publishers and advertisers were seduced by “free” reach; eventually both groups were squeezed. The feed that once showed what friends posted now shows what advertisers pay to show. Facebook’s trajectory ends, in Doctorow’s telling, with Mark Zuckerberg’s panicked pivot to the Metaverse — ‘a legless, sexless, low-polygon hellscape’ — a perfect image of end-stage rot.
Amazon follows a similar curve. Early Amazon, Doctorow reminds us, ‘raised a fortune from investors and used that fortune to subsidize many goods, selling them below cost’. The aim was lock-in. Once competitors had been crushed, the screws tightened: sellers faced ‘junk fees,’ fake search results, and the ‘Amazon tax’ that inflated prices everywhere else. Even if you never shop on Amazon, you pay for its dominance because its contracts force merchants to raise prices across the board. Apple’s story, meanwhile, is a parable of hypocrisy. The company that advertised itself as a privacy-first alternative to Google quietly built its own surveillance network. Its walled garden became, in Doctorow’s words, ‘a prison,’ one that charges app developers 30 per cent rent for access to their own customers. And Twitter — perhaps the saddest case of all — shows what happens when the disease mutates into utter farce. Once an open API that encouraged third-party innovation, it devolved into a brittle, ad-choked service before collapsing under Elon Musk’s misrule.
These chapters are not new journalism; most of the evidence has circulated for years in the pages of Wired and The Verge. But Doctorow’s talent — and Enshittification’s power — lies in synthesis. He takes a decade of dispersed outrage and arranges it into a pattern. Each company follows the same ‘natural history’: initial generosity (user growth subsidised by investors), middle-stage exploitation (the turn toward monetisation), and terminal extraction (shareholder supremacy). It’s capitalism as thermodynamics: value moves inexorably upward until the system burns out.
Part Two, ‘The Pathology,’ digs into why this keeps happening. Here the book shifts from reportage to polemic. The culprit, Doctorow argues, is not human nature or technological determinism but policy — specifically, the late-twentieth-century shift to the ‘consumer welfare’ model of antitrust, which treats monopoly as benign unless prices rise. Under this doctrine, companies like Amazon could devastate suppliers, workers, and entire industries so long as the sticker price stayed low. Enshittification, then, is what happens when the state forgets that the purpose of markets is competition, not efficiency. Add to this the network effects and ‘switching costs’ that keep users captive — what Doctorow calls the ‘collective action problem’ of quitting Facebook — and you have a perfect closed system: monopoly without exit, exploitation without escape.
The next section, ‘The Epidemiology,’ expands the metaphor further. Enshittification spreads. Once monopolies capture one sector, they metastasise into others—finance, logistics, media, labour. Doctorow sketches this as a new social order he refers to as ‘technofeudalism’ (a term popularised by Yanis Varoufakis in 2023): a world where wealth no longer comes from producing goods but from owning chokepoints — app stores, ad networks, APIs, data pipelines. Every transaction passes through a tollbooth. The chapter ‘It’s Not Wage Theft If We Do It with an App’ makes the point vividly. Gig-economy platforms like Uber algorithmically underpay drivers, using opaque ‘reverse-centaur’ systems that combine the worst of human precarity with the worst of machine indifference. Other chapters trace how ‘right-to-repair’ laws, DRM, and licensing schemes criminalise self-help and lock users out of their own tools. ‘Tech rights are worker rights,’ Doctorow insists. The same laws that prevent you from fixing your phone also prevent farmers from fixing tractors or warehouse staff from resisting algorithmic management.
The final part, ‘The Cure,’ offers a programme of reform. Much of it will sound familiar — break up monopolies, restore regulation, rebuild unions — but Doctorow grounds these calls in the specifics of digital architecture. His preferred remedy is interoperability: legally enforced standards that allow users to leave one platform and take their data, friends, and content elsewhere. (Think of how newer social media like BlueSky, Mastodon, etc. work.) This ‘right to exit,’ he argues, would restore genuine competition and neutralise network effects. He’s equally passionate about the ‘right to repair,’ the revival of privacy, and what he calls ‘administrability’ — rules ordinary people can use without lawyers or venture capital. The tone is almost utopian: ‘We can create enshittification-resistant infrastructure for a new, good world’.
Doctorow’s style throughout is conversational, furious, funny. Each page crackles with analogies, jokes, and anger. It is pointedly un-academic in tone. He is that rare activist who can make antitrust law read like a thriller. And in an era when most writers approach Big Tech with either academic detachment or nihilistic despair, his insistence on repair—on the idea that this can be fixed — is invigorating. The book adds to the conversation a usable vocabulary, one that condenses complex structural critiques into a single, portable word. ‘Enshittification’ may feel a bit crude, a bit juvenile at times, but it has what all political language needs: stickiness.
As you might expect from a work with such a broad remit, there are some noticeable blindspots. The very term that gives the book its energy also, at times, flattens its analysis. Enshittification becomes a catch-all for every form of decline — monopoly, surveillance, labour precarity, bad UX. At times, it reads like Doctorow’s attempt to brand the entire political economy under one meme. (He attempts, semi-successfully, to address this in the final chapter: ‘Is enshittification just capitalism?’). On top of this, the book suffers from a peculiarly novel strain of Silicon-Valley-parochialism: while he praises the EU’s Digital Markets Act, the story remains essentially American, with little attention to the ways enshittification looks different in other parts of the world (perhaps this is forgivable if we consider most of the worst offenders of what he describes are American companies). Nor does he dwell on the cultural complicity of users themselves — the fact that billions continue to use Facebook, Amazon and TikTok not only out of necessity but out of pleasure. Lastly, even before this month’s announcement from OpenAI that they would start trialling ads in the free versions of ChatGPT, it felt very obvious the developments in AI would make everything a lot worse and that the AI labs would be following suit. Some suggestion towards this new period we’re entering would have been welcome.
But this should not detract from the fact that Enshittification is a massive, crucial achievement. For now, Doctorow offers a map of the wreckage and a language to navigate it. While Doctorow may not cure the disease, he has given it a name that, once heard, is impossible to forget.