If you’ve felt your favorite platforms turn from delightful to downright hostile, you’re not imagining it. Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It names the disease and maps the cure.
Platforms start out “good to users,” then pivot to pleasing business customers, and finally squeeze both sides to extract value for themselves until the product becomes, in Doctorow’s words, “a giant pile of shit” (his four-step “natural history of enshittification”).
Doctorow threads case studies across Amazon, Apple/Google app stores, Facebook/Meta, and Uber, interleaving antitrust scholarship and numbers: Amazon sellers losing 45–51% of every dollar to fees; Amazon earning $38B/year from paid search placement whose top result is on average 29% more expensive than your best match; Meta’s record $250B one-day value wipeout in 2022; Uber burning $31B to subsidize rides while losing $0.41 per dollar for twelve years.
Best for readers who want a plain-English, evidence-rich framework to decode why Big Tech keeps getting worse—and how policy and collective action can reverse it. Not for anyone hoping for a “life hack” to beat rigged platforms one click at a time; Doctorow’s thesis is systemic, not self-help.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It expands his viral coinage into a full-spectrum diagnosis and treatment plan for our digital malaise.
The book’s genre sits between tech criticism, political economy, and policy guide, but the voice is personal and insurgent—Doctorow is a novelist, EFF veteran, and prolific essayist, so his pages mix storytelling with receipts. The table of contents flags four parts—Natural History, Pathology, Epidemiology, and The Cure—plus case studies on Facebook, Amazon, iPhone, and Twitter, so the arc moves from naming to fixing.
The purpose is crisp: define enshittification as a predictable life cycle and prove it with data and law, then outline realistic remedies (antitrust, interoperability, worker power, privacy, and reversing “felony contempt of business model”). The core model appears early: “1) good to users; 2) then abuse users for business customers; 3) next abuse business customers; 4) finally a giant pile of shit.”
2. Background
The long consolidation after the dot-com era shrank the open web into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four,” a line Doctorow borrows to dramatize the rise of intermediaries across tech, shipping, finance, and entertainment.
“In the Enshittocene,” as he dubs it, platforms gained capital and regulatory slack, learned to lock users in, and made switching costly—setting the stage for end-game extraction.
3. Enshittification Summary
Big-picture throughline
Cory Doctorow argues that dominant platforms follow a predictable life cycle he calls enshittification: they start out unusually good to win users, then pivot to favor business customers at users’ expense, then squeeze those business customers too, and finally reduce the whole ecosystem to “a giant pile of shit.”
The trigger isn’t corporate “goodness” or “badness,” but power—once lock-in and switching costs are high, firms can change the deal and extract rents.
Extended summary
How platforms get you in (Stage One) and tighten the loop
Platforms over-deliver at first: Apple’s iPhone and App Store are the model case—slick synchronization, curated apps that “just worked,” and genuine surplus the company chose to allocate to users (and, initially, to developers). That “walled garden” was marketed as safety and quality, and for a while it truly felt that way.
The same design choices that made the experience smooth, however, also made it hard to leave: Apple’s platform allows only Apple-approved software, and one year in, the App Store became the sole, curated gateway to iPhone apps. That is the seed of lock-in—what Doctorow calls the moment when “users checked in, but they couldn’t easily check out.”
The pivot (Stage Two): luring, then disciplining business customers
As network effects compound, the platform gains leverage over sellers and developers. Apple’s fee regime is Doctorow’s vivid example: the processing fee doubled to 30%, and Apple began charging it on every dollar, forever, while punishing developers who even mention cheaper web payments.
In practice, the policy is a speech ban: merely telling customers they could save money by paying on the web was “grounds for removal from the App Store.”
Doctorow shows how these “discipline” tactics aren’t unique to Apple. Google’s Play store mirrored the same lock-in and fee structure; antitrust authorities in the United States and European Union concluded Google used strong-arm tactics to keep developers and users inside Play—functionally the same enclosure, just with “subtler” levers.
The squeeze (Stage Three): extraction from both sides
Once enshittification “heaves into sight,” the platform can pick winners and losers, selectively exempting favored partners (Doctorow cites Uber and Lyft) from the 30% “app tax,” while rivals pay in full; the platform can also clone successful businesses and advantage its own vertically integrated services (Apple Books doesn’t charge itself 30% on sales, independent audiobook sellers effectively lose money per transaction).
Crucially, the surveillance/privacy narrative doesn’t save you: in 2021 Apple let users opt out of third-party tracking (96% opted out), which hit Facebook’s ad business hard, yet Apple was simultaneously rolling out its own commercial surveillance to feed Apple’s ad network.
Doctorow’s point: the “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” cliché fails—companies treat you well when they lack power and treat you badly when they have it.
Amazon as the textbook case: the “Amazon tax” and pay-to-rank “search”
The Amazon chapter is the book’s masterclass in following the money. Doctorow tallies how “optional” seller programs (Prime eligibility, Fulfillment by Amazon, paid placement) are effectively mandatory.
When you add the junk fees together, an Amazon seller loses 45–51¢ on every dollar earned on the platform—margins that simply cannot be absorbed. Sellers must raise prices. Then Amazon’s most-favored-nation terms force those higher prices everywhere, even off-Amazon sites, turning Amazon’s extraction into a retail-wide tax.
“Search” on Amazon isn’t really search, Doctorow argues: Amazon makes $38B/year selling placement; the first result is ~29% more expensive than the best match, the true best value sits ~17 places down, and sorting by price still isn’t a fix because quantity games hide per-unit costs. The result is a rigged browsing experience where “Our Pick” often costs more, and ratings are polluted by under-policed fraud.
Uber: from subsidy bonfire to monopoly/monopsony
Uber burned $31 billion, losing $0.41 per dollar for twelve years, to undercut taxis and make rides feel permanently cheap. That debt-fueled blitz reshaped cities (a “lost decade” of public-transit disinvestment) and destroyed competitors.
After dominance, Uber raised prices (monopoly over riders) while driving down driver pay (monopsony over labor). Platforms prefer squeezing suppliers first—antitrust’s “consumer welfare” lens long tolerated monopsony moves—then they hike consumer prices when they’re “too big to jail.”
The political economy underneath: from profit-seeking to rent-seeking
The pathology Doctorow maps isn’t just tech; it’s what he, borrowing from Yanis Varoufakis, calls technofeudalism—an economy where owners of chokepoints extract rents rather than earn profits by making better products.
Amazon looks like a bustling bazaar, but in reality “one guy” (the CEO) decides what’s sold, how it’s shelved, and whether you ever see it—a lord over a domain, not a neutral market host.
App stores illustrate the same landlord logic backed by law (DMCA §1201): bypassing the gate (jailbreaking) is criminalized, giving platforms power to set 10× higher payment fees (30% vs. 2–5% typical card processing), ban links to cheaper web payments, and veto portability—thereby ratcheting switching costs.
Doctorow ties this to the broader rollback of antitrust since the Carter/Reagan era, when the consumer welfare test (price today, not power tomorrow) replaced structural remedies. Platforms, he writes, learned to fit the doctrine—boast of lower prices now, while building the rails for extraction later.
Case studies as pattern recognition: Apple/Google, Amazon, Twitter, Meta
- Apple/Google App Stores: From user-favoring curation to fee extraction and speech bans (no signposting cheaper web payments), to selective exemptions for favored firms and first-party self-preferencing (e.g., Apple Books). Result: developers operate under a monopolist toward users and a monopsonist toward creators—precisely where rents beat profits.
- Amazon Marketplace: Junk-fee stack → higher prices everywhere (MFN) + pay-to-rank “search” that buries the true best value. Result: consumers and sellers pay an Amazon tax even off-platform, while Amazon’s own shipping is cross-subsidized by seller fees.
- Twitter (as a type): Early openness (APIs, user-invented hashtags) created surplus for users and developers; later the platform clamps down, walls off data, and repurposes the surplus inward—another instance of the surplus-reallocation sequence.
- Meta/Facebook: Apple’s 2021 privacy change shows how a small tweak to the chokepoint can hit an ad giant’s cashflow (Facebook warned of a $10B impact). Meta’s reactionary pivots illustrate late-stage turbulence when growth stalls and extraction pressures mount.
The cure: structural fixes, not “shop smarter”
Doctorow insists that personal “hacks” can’t solve structural power. The solutions chapter lists overlapping levers:
- Antitrust revival (US, EU, UK, JP, KR): global regulators now share investigations and technical capacity; once one jurisdiction cracks a tech giant’s black box, others can reuse the evidence—a practical, ongoing shift in enforcement.
- Interoperability and portability: lowering switching costs by requiring data export/import and third-party clients/services to plug in—so users can leave without losing their social graph, media, or tools. (Doctorow pairs this with reversing laws that criminalize compatibility, i.e., DMCA §1201.)
- Worker power and monopsony scrutiny: shift antitrust beyond price to labor markets, contesting the “squeeze suppliers first” playbook that platforms prefer.
- Privacy with teeth: privacy constraints must not simply reassign surveillance rents from one giant (Facebook) to another (Apple); they should curb extraction overall by banning coercive design and locking in user rights.
Doctorow’s core message: don’t wait for benevolence. Platforms behaved when they lacked power; they will behave again if we remove coercive lock-ins, enforce competition, and make exits real.
Highlighted cheat-sheet
- Definition of “enshittification” (core model):
- Great to users → 2) shift value to business customers (worse for users) → 3) squeeze business customers too → 4) total decay (“a giant pile of shit”). Mechanism: lock-in + switching costs + sidelined antitrust enable rule-changes and rent extraction at each step.
- Apple/Google App Stores (2008→today):
• Start: curated safety, fewer hacks, “it just works.”
• Pivot: 30% fee “forever” + bans on even mentioning cheaper web payments; selective exemptions (e.g., ride-hailing); self-preferencing (Apple’s stores don’t pay Apple’s tax). Effect: rivals can’t profit on categories like audiobooks (20% wholesale discount vs. 30% app fee).
• Law as lock-in: DMCA §1201 criminalizes jailbreak/compatibility: five-year felony risk to bypass Apple’s gate. - Apple privacy twist (2021):
• One-click opt-out from third-party tracking; 96% opt out; Facebook warns of $10B hit.
• Simultaneously, Apple expands its own surveillance ads—proving the thesis that firms behave according to power, not virtue. - Amazon marketplace (2000s→today):
• Seller “options” like Prime/FBA are effectively mandatory; fees total 45–51% of revenue.
• MFN terms force higher prices everywhere (your local store, the brand’s own site). Bottom line: you pay the Amazon tax even off-Amazon.
• “Search” = paid placement: $38B/year; first result ~29% pricier; best match ~17 places down; sort-by-price games hide per-unit value; under-policed fake reviews. - Uber (2010s):
• $31B subsidies; $0.41 loss per $1 revenue across 12 years; city transit disinvestment; destruction of rivals via misclassification. After dominance: higher prices to riders (monopoly), lower pay to drivers (monopsony). - Technofeudalism vs. technocapitalism (framework):
• Chokepoint owners (platform “lords”) capture the majority of value from those who do the work. Amazon’s “bazaar” is actually ruled by a single executive deciding what you see and buy. Rents (ownership returns) beat profits (making and selling). - Law & policy (2017–2024):
• After decades of consumer-welfare antitrust (Carter→Reagan→… ), regulators begin rebuilding capacity; the UK DMCC Act (2024) empowers the DMU; EU and other jurisdictions reuse UK technical studies to pursue Big Tech; news markets show extraction via 30% app fees and ~51% ad-tech rents. Moral: enforcement sharing is raising real heat. - Core lesson:
• Enshittification is not inevitable; it’s a design plus policy choice. Undo criminalized interoperability (DMCA §1201), mandate portability and third-party access, and treat monopsony and switching costs as first-class antitrust harms. The goal isn’t nostalgia; it’s making exit credible so platforms must compete again.
Enshittification teaches that power, not virtue, dictates platform behavior: Apple’s and Google’s app stores migrated from user-serving curation to an entrenched 30% rent and speech bans about cheaper web payments; Amazon’s “optional” services and MFN clauses convert into a de facto 45–51% seller tax and a $38B pay-to-rank system that pushes ~29% pricier items to the top while burying the best match 17 results down; Uber’s decade-long subsidy blitz ($31B, $0.41 loss per dollar) yielded monopoly/monopsony muscle.
The cure is interoperability, portability, labor scrutiny, and antitrust that restores competition by making exit real and rents costly.
4. Enshittification Analysis
Doctorow’s evidence is punchy and specific, and it largely holds up under scrutiny. Consider Amazon: tally up the not-really-optional fees (Prime eligibility, Fulfillment by Amazon, pay-to-play search), and sellers “are being screwed out of 45 to 51 cents on every dollar” earned on the platform—costs that spill over into the rest of retail via “most-favored-nation” terms, effectively an “Amazon tax” for everyone.
Doctorow then points to Amazon’s paid search: the company “makes $38 billion every year charging merchants for search placement,” with the first result ~29% more expensive than the best match, and your best-value result buried seventeen places down—a finding aligned with the law-review article “Amazon’s Pricing Paradox.”
He cross-checks the platform arc with Apple and Google: initial generosity to app makers turned into a perpetual 30% rent and “draconian policies” against even mentioning cheaper web payments—“grounds for removal from the App Store.”
Evaluation of Content
Doctorow’s logic tracks: network effects + switching costs + weakened antitrust → durable market power → rent extraction (“rent-seeking” beating “profit-seeking”). He draws on Yanis Varoufakis’s “technofeudalism” to argue that post-2008 Big Tech shifted from making things to owning chokepoints and collecting tolls—an economy “in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff.”
Empirically, the numbers are consistent across independent sources: the FTC’s 2023 lawsuit against Amazon spotlights allegations of punitive MFN rules and pay-to-rank tactics; subsequent rulings let major federal claims proceed; press coverage from AP and The Verge provides procedural clarity.
Doctorow also grounds the macro story in moments you likely felt. In February 2022, a wobble in Facebook’s user-growth sparked a $250B single-day market cap wipeout—evidence that a small pivot can detonate platform incentives, pushing managers into frantic “pivots” like the Metaverse, which Doctorow frames as “end-stage enshittification.”
Does the book fulfill its purpose?
Yes—because it isn’t just doom. The latter sections inventory remedies: reinvigorated antitrust (“Antitrust Is Back, Baby”), DMCA-1201 reform, EU-style DMA/DSA privacy and interoperability, labor power, and a legal rollback of “felony contempt of business model.” The book’s table of contents telegraphs that cure-first orientation.
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
What worked best for me is how Doctorow translates abstract economics into felt experience without condescension. His four-stage natural history is memorable enough to spot in the wild the next time your feed gets worse or your search results drown in ads.
I also appreciated the clean surgical cuts through Amazon’s economics—how “junk fees” and MFNs propagate price hikes beyond Amazon, so even your neighborhood hardware store quietly pays the “Amazon tax,” a point far too few consumer pieces make explicit.
On the flip side, I wanted even more table-ready stats outside of Amazon and the app stores; the Uber chapter brings heat (the $31B subsidy, $0.41 per dollar losses over 12 years) but I wished for a few more fresh, quantitative snapshots on Google Search’s own enshittification beyond the (excellent) PageRank history and paid-placement critique.
At times the rhetoric (joyfully profane by design) could alienate readers who prefer a more academic register; that said, Doctorow explicitly gives readers “permission” to use the term as living language—“English words mean whatever English speakers say they mean. Go nuts.”
6. Reception
The concept’s cultural reach is unusual: Macquarie Dictionary named “enshittification” its 2024 Word of the Year, arguing the term captures “what many of us feel” about declining online experiences. Mainstream coverage in places like The Guardian and The New Yorker has amplified and debated the thesis, often adopting Doctorow’s four-stage arc as a shared frame.
Even publishers position the book as timely and prescriptive—MCD x FSG’s official listing (2025) foregrounds endorsements from Edward Snowden, James Gleick, Yanis Varoufakis, and Molly White, signaling both policy heft and tech-culture resonance.
7. Comparison with similar other works
Think of Enshittification as a punchier, systems-level complement to works like Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (attention manipulation), Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism (data extraction), or Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness (antitrust). Where those books isolate one organ of the patient, Doctorow writes the clinical chart of the disease and prescribes coordinated treatment—antitrust plus interoperability plus labor plus privacy—rather than a single-issue fix.
Doctorow also deepens arguments from his own earlier Chokepoint Capitalism (with Rebecca Giblin) by connecting creative-industry chokepoints to platform rent extraction across the entire economy, from app stores (perpetual 30% rent and “don’t even mention the cheaper web” rules) to marketplace search (payola-like dynamics that hide the best price).
8. Thematic Review
I read Enshittification like a field guide: one part taxonomy, one part map, one part first-aid kit.
Doctorow opens with the clearest definition I’ve seen, listing the “natural history” in four steps and then proving it with a parade of case studies; after you learn the pattern, he promises, “you’ll start seeing it, too.”
He writes, memorably, that Stage Three looks like this: Apple and Google didn’t decline because they “stopped loving users,” but because they had successfully built walled gardens and then changed the deal—“the processing fee … doubled, to 30 percent, and Apple switched to charging that fee on every dollar the app made, forever,” while punishing apps that even mention cheaper web payments.
The Amazon chapter crystallizes how power cascades down a supply chain. “Add all the junk fees together,” he writes, and a seller is losing 45–51¢ per dollar; then MFN clauses push that higher price everywhere, so “you’re paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop.” He adds the kicker: Amazon’s search isn’t “search” so much as a $38B paid-placement market where the first result is typically 29% pricier and the best match sits 17 slots down—what scholars Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal dub the “pricing paradox.”
For Uber, he shows how a company can dominate both sides of a market—classic monopoly over riders, and monopsony over drivers—after burning $31B to buy time, misclassifying workers, and convincing cities to disinvest from transit, only to drive prices up and driver pay down later.
When he turns to Facebook/Meta, he describes end-stage pathology with gallows humor and a history lesson: after a decade of growth fever, a mere growth wobble triggered that unprecedented $250B single-day value collapse in February 2022, and the pivot to the Metaverse reads like flailing—what he calls “end-stage enshittification.”
Doctorow’s history of Google helps readers see what changed: early PageRank worked like academic citation analysis, making sites like the BBC authoritative nodes (if the BBC links to you, you inherit some authority), an approach that beat the spammy, pay-to-rank search of the Lycos era. That context makes today’s ad-heavy, SEO-gamified results feel like a betrayal of the original promise.
The remedies are not nostalgic—Doctorow refuses to rely on corporate benevolence. Instead, he argues for antitrust revival (structural separation and bans on self-preferencing), interoperability (so you can mix and match services and escape “walled gardens”), privacy first rules with real enforcement, labor power (tech workers + gig workers), and reversing DMCA-1201 “felony contempt of business model” that criminalizes competing with platform lock-in. The very existence of the FTC’s Amazon case—and the judge’s decision to let core federal claims proceed—suggests the Overton window moved.
Who should read this—and who will bounce?
If you’re a journalist, policy maker, startup builder, product leader, union organizer, or simply a citizen who wants to understand why your feeds, stores, and phones feel worse, this is your map and compass.
If you’re searching for a guru to help you “beat the algorithm” with ten clever toggles, you’ll bristle—the book argues the game itself is rigged, and only collective, structural fixes work.
9. Conclusion
If you want one vivid takeaway, it’s this: enshittification thrives when law and market structure reward rent-seeking over profit-seeking—a reversal Doctorow (and Varoufakis) frame as a drift toward “technofeudalism,” where “the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff” rather than people who do stuff.
My recommendation: Enshittification is essential for general readers frustrated with Big Tech, policy professionals hunting for leverage points, founders and product leaders who don’t want to reenact the same harms, and workers organizing inside tech. It’s less ideal if you’re after a quick consumer checklist; this is a book about power—and how to take it back.
