The decay of Google, Amazon, and Facebook are part of a larger trend.
TikTok and airlines have something in common with your search engine, your grocery app, and (increasingly) your car: They start out great, lock you in, and then quietly get worse while you keep using them. That very familiar decline now has a catchy name: “enshittification.”
Cory Doctorow has been writing about this for decades as a journalist, activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and science-fiction author. His new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, is a field guide to how platforms decay, why they get away with it, and what it will take to reverse course.
I invited Doctorow onto The Gray Area to map the lifecycle of a platform, explain the policy choices that made today’s tech feudalism possible, and outline the structural fixes that could make the internet (and the economy around it) less extractive and more humane.
As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is “enshittification”? Give me the cleanest definition.
At the descriptive level, it’s a pattern in how platforms go bad. First, they’re great to end users. Then they find ways to lock those users in — switching costs, network effects, contracts, DRM — and once users are stuck, the company makes the product worse for them to extract more value. Next, they use that surplus to woo business customers (advertisers, sellers, creators), lock them in, and start making the product worse for the business side too. Eventually, everyone is trapped and the platform turns into a pile of crap. You can see this in places as different as Google, Facebook, Uber, and Amazon.
The more interesting question is: Why now? Greed isn’t new. Venture capital isn’t new. What changed were the constraints on firms, especially the degree of competition and the legal environment that lets platforms “twiddle” the experience for each user, while blocking users and rivals from pushing back.
When did the “great enshittification” begin? Can you put a stake in the ground?