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An Excerpt from Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It

by Cory Doctorow

An excerpt from Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, published by MCD and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Current Events & Public Affairs category.

We are all living through the Enshittocene—the Great Enshittening—a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are being turned into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.

The once-glorious internet has degenerated into “platforms” that rose to dominance because they delivered convenient and delightful services efficiently and reliably. But once we were locked in to those services, the tech bosses turned on us, relying on our dependency to keep us using the services even as they got worse and worse. The platform bosses did the same to the companies that had flocked to their services to sell stuff to us. Once we were all locked in—businesses and users—the tech companies stripped out all utility, save the bare minimum needed to stave off total collapse.

In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow shows us where it comes from: not the iron laws of economics, or the great forces of history, but specific policy choices made by powerful people who ignored every warning about the consequences of those choices. These are choices that can be undone. Enshittification is a Big Tech disassembly manual, a road map for the seizure of the means of computation. It is a diagnosis, and it is a cure.

Enshittification has been longlisted in the Current Events & Public Affairs category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is the Introduction to the book.

◊◊◊◊◊

It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck. 

This is infuriating. It’s frustrating. And, depending on how important those services are to you, it’s terrifying. 

I’ve been an internet activist for a quarter of a century, working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital human rights group that more or less invented the whole idea of digital human rights. I’ve been a United Nations observer and helped draft internet treaties; I’ve lobbied legislatures and agencies in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the United King dom. I’ve been through street protests and virtual blackouts. 

I’ve never seen anything like this. 

In 2022, after decades of striving to get people fired up about the esoteric world of internet policy, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. 

It’s a funny, naughty word, and it’s funny and naughty to say, and I’m proud of that. But that’s not why the American Dialect Society named it its word of the year in 2023, nor why Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary named it its word of the year for 2024, nor why millions of people have used it to describe the inescapable online dumpster fire that’s roasting them alive. 

The reason for enshittification’s popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and what we should do about it. 

Because 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. 

*Though it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way! One of the glories of English is its malleability. English words mean whatever English speakers say they mean. Go nuts. You have my blessing. 

You see, this moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening? It’s not a mystery. It’s not the Great Forces of History bearing down on our moment, decreeing that we must all suffer through the end of services that once met our needs. It’s a material phenomenon, much like a disease. 

Like a disease, it has symptoms, a mechanism, and an epidemiology. The first part of this book will explain these components of enshittification. 

But the point of this analysis isn’t to merely give you a more technically informed way to feel demoralized and furious about the state of the digital world—I wrote this book to propose a cure. That’s the second part of the book. 

This era, the Enshittocene, is the result of specific policy decisions, made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the  decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us. 

We can make a new, good internet, one that’s fit for human thriving. We can create the digital nervous system we need to connect and coordinate us through a twenty-first century haunted by climate collapse, genocide, authoritarianism, and economic chaos. 

We can create enshittification-resistant infrastructure for a new, good world. 

 

Excerpted from Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It by Cory Doctorow, published by MCD, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Cory Doctorow. All rights reserved.

 

About the Author

Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and activist. For more than twenty years, he has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on campaigns to safeguard and further our human rights online. He was coeditor of the weblog Boing Boing for nineteen years and now maintains a daily(ish) newsletter at Pluralistic.net. He has written more than thirty books, including nonfiction books, many science fiction novels, collections of short stories and essays, young adult novels, graphic novels, and even a picture book. Born in Toronto, he now lives in Burbank, California. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in laws by York University and an honorary doctorate in computer science by the Open University. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association Hall of Fame and was awarded the Sir Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. He holds visiting professorship and research appointments at MIT, the University of North Carolina, Cornell University, and the Open University.

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Enshittification: it's not just you--the internet sucks now. Here's why, and here's how we can disenshittify it. We're living through the Enshittoc...
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