THINGS HAVE GONE TERRIBLY WRONG

A Review of Enshittification by Cory Doctorow

I don’t normally purchase books, or really any product, with depictions of feces on the packaging. But I made an exemption for Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, which features a skeptical turd emoji on its cover (and comes wrapped in an easily disposable dust jacket). The name is unfortunate, at least in that this concept cannot be taught in high schools. Or maybe we’re at that point, I don’t know. The NY Times, which goes back-and-forth on what cuss words it’ll print, reviewed the book by name. The American Dialect Society named ‘enshittification’—defined as the decline of online platforms and services for maximum profit extraction—their word of the year in 2023.

The term has been a long time coming. In 2019, I asked Instagram,

It’s just senseless, the way everything good must be gobbled up and turned into poop. Who’s doing it? Is it capitalism? Is it just some dark part of the human brain? Who’s responsible? Where is the cabal or machine or secret law that says everything good must be repackaged as puke?¹

Doctorow answers these questions with merciless precision. Enshittification (the concept, not the book) has three acts. One, an online company—Apple, Facebook, Google, Uber—is good to their users, transforming groundbreaking services into massive growth. Two, the same company switches allegiances to their business users. Finally, three, the same company betrays both customers and businesses, extracting maximum wealth for owners and shareholders with the outcome of degrading the initial product for everyone else. These companies are aided by both government laxity (weak monopoly enforcement) and overreach (draconian copyright laws limiting Right to Repair). Like the Matrix, enshittification is everywhere and nowhere at once. We see it every time Google forces us to run multiple search queries, or paid streaming services force us to mute commercials. In Doctorow’s view, this phenomenon was part of the plan all along, a thousand Chekhov’s guns, first left out in the early days of the dot com boom, all going off at once. ChatGPT, responsible for the growing enshittification of human cognitive ability, will roll out ads later this year.

Long before this book, I marveled at the uniformity of the degradation. In 2013, I dictated an entire novel with Apple’s text-to-speech function. Over the last decade, this interface has devolved into a ludicrous wonderland of mistranscription (the word ‘ludicrous’ itself, when spoken into my iPhone, now translates as ‘Ludacris’). In 2018, the privately-owned behemoth Rock Holdings purchased Thesaurus.com—a website I use every day of my life—and made the interface less useful than the paper thesaurus I relied on in college. Photoshop, once a one-time purchase, now requires a monthly subscription; every day I have to swat away update alerts that threaten to do the same thing to my paid Microsoft Office software.

Enshittification came out just three months ago. I read it as a companion piece to Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. Klein’s 2023 book tackled topsy-turvy Covid times, an era when anti-vaxxers scrambled traditional political allegiances and “the far right met the far out.”² Enshittification was published only two years later, yet feels suited to our own far different current era. The difference between the two books is the difference between the age of mask mandates and the age of masked men. Doctorow wrapped his project in early 2025, and thus could only react in passing to the early shocks of Trump’s second term. But his book makes the connections for him. As with Facebook and Google and Uber, America’s terms of service—its laws and constitution—have been rudely downgraded (“twiddled” is the author’s more precise term) to make life drastically worse for everyone but the top stakeholders. In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the enshittification process roll out over the course of six Republican administrations: Nixon outdone by Reagan, Bush 1 outdone by Bush 2, Trump 1 outdone by Trump 2.

Doctorow is all wonk. He writes with ease on the perils of “vocational awe,” the crucial legal differences between an app and a website, the razor-precise distinctions between capitalists and rentiers, the invisible tollbooths of capital extraction, the grubby ecosystems of patent trolls and the internal nitty-gritty of arbitration clauses. The and What to Do About It part of the subtitle is equally wonky and seems to pin a lot of hope on European regulators, it being easier to retool one huge platform than trying to craft smaller, nation-specific versions. It can be a lot to take in, even with the author’s relentless good cheer, often expressed in an exuberant over-reliance on italics. When, in the acknowledgments, he falsely calls the cover art banging (italics his), I had to wonder: isn’t slapping a piece of poop on the cover of your book its own form of enshittification?

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AUCTION ALERT

If you’re interested, I’ll be auctioning off some of my old fanzine titles on my Instagram account, starting tomorrow, 1/21/26, at 6PM PST. The auction will run through Saturday.

1. This was regarding two ominous developments; the 2019 sequel to The Shining, and Kimberly-Clark’s degradation of Scott toilet paper, which brought the concept of enshittification to its terrible, literal conclusion.

2. Although I was disappointed by one omission. In a previous book, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Klein broke down the profound influence of professional wrestling on Trumpian politics: the feuds, the nicknames, the channeling of intense public rage. I’d expected her to similarly probe the role of punk in creating “the mirror world” of Covid times. In my experience, the connections run far deeper than the current ‘punk-begat-hipsters, hipsters-begat-edgelords’ narrative. In the late 1980s, I worked in a Lower East Side health store frequented by many of the NY punk luminaries, and I realize now I was being shown glimpses of a future Make America Healthy Again movement. One of those regulars, John Bloodclot of the Cro-Mags, still rages against covid restrictions from a half-decade ago.