As he writes in the new book, “I am giving you explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222376640-enshittification
At the alternative elementary school Doctorow attended, students from kindergarten through 8th grade all sat in the same classroom, where they were free to pursue their interests. For Doctorow these included communism, nuclear disarmament, Dungeons and Dragons, Mad Magazine, and most of all an Apple II, on which he spent countless hours learning to code with his friend Tim Wu, a legal scholar and antitrust advocate who served in the Biden Administration as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy.
I knew he was an insufferable “easy for consumption” liberal but it’s good to know that he was always like this.
In any case, Doctorow’s ideas are another form of liberal repackaging of the ideals of the free software movement. Richard Stallman had already written about this phenomenon decades and decades ago. Doctorow is popular because his critiques never offer up any systemic solutions but rather place “enshittification” as a bad thing corporations do.
If a guy supposedly critiquing capitalism gets featured in the NYT, then you know you’re in real radlib territory.
Anyway read the original https://www.gnu.org/doc/fsfs3-hardcover.pdf
Doctorow is popular because his critiques never offer up any systemic solutions but rather place “enshittification” as a bad thing corporations do.
Literally he is constantly saying that there are no personal solutions, only systemic solutions. He even makes fun of people who ask questions like “so what can I do about it?” He’s like, haven’t you been listening? You can do nothing other than organize to build and enforce collective power. I heard him say how important it is that people do not think he is advocating for individual actions of any sort.
I think there are critiques to be made of Cory doctorow but overall he’s a good influence to have around. He sees his role as articulating communism in a way that will be appealing to his constituency, who are mostly lib/center technocrat types.
We are mostly not his target audience. But sometimes I really appreciate his analysis on some technical or legal issue because he knows that shit really well and there’s not a lot of leftists who do.
As to “enshittification” specifically he has been going around introducing the concept by attributing the popularity to how it gives people the opportunity to use bad language in a context they usually wouldn’t. which I find very funny.
Fair point on the fact that we aren’t his target audience. But I dislike Enshitification for another reason that it feels exploitative of a cultural nostalgia over proprietary digital platforms when they were never good in the first place.
Its probably more me pointing out how the NYT has then further sanitized him down.
imo he didn’t set out to exploit that nostalgia and has said that ‘beloved’ platforms of the past went through the same process, not his fault if people have rose-tinted glasses for that period
It’s not like he’s rocking a clippy pfp
I mean, he’s certainly not joining a vanguard anytime soon but he’s certainly influential through orgs like the EFF and using that to fight things like the DMCA. I read pluralistic and I like how he’s been making points like that the US forced other nations to adopt DMCA -like laws under threat of tariffs, and how those tariffs are happening anyways now so may as well lift the laws. And he’s pointed stuff out like how jobs are starting to make people babysit AI, and how that’s a job humans as a class are bad at doing. Like, he doesn’t need to end each article calling for the overthrow of America to still be useful to read.
First, a platform is good to its users. That may look like Facebook connecting you to all of your friends, or Amazon providing a giant, reliable marketplace for goods. Then, when enough people have joined a platform that there aren’t any alternatives, the platforms start exploiting their own users to entice businesses. That may look like Facebook providing personal data about its customers to advertisers, or Google prioritizing paid ads over organic search.
Then, when those business customers are also stuck on one dominant platform, the platform puts the screws to them, too: Ad rates skyrocketing on Facebook amid reports of ad fraud, or Amazon sellers having to pay Amazon to be featured on Prime, just to appear high up in search results.
Good job you explained the “network effect” which was already in discussion for decades before you.
Doctorow is being popularized so he can whitewash this discussion to something more palatable to petite bourgeois.
Well, the network effect just explains why it’s hard for certain industries to have new competitors introduced. Enshittification takes advantage of the network effect, sure (Happy customers means leaving money on the table, after all), but it’s a distinct process
I gotta point out that this guy is frequently comparing this concept to “network effect”. So if you alleging that he is taking credit for an idea developed by others, you are incorrect. You can find various iterations of it if you are interested… here is 2 examples I found on his blog but there are literally hundreds of others available.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/
The thesis of the series – and indeed, of my life’s work – is that the internet didn’t turn to shit because of the “great forces of history,” or “network effects,” or “returns to scale.” Rather, the Great Enshittening is the result of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned at the time that this would happen, and they did it anyway. These wreckers are the largely forgotten authors of our misery, and they mingle with impunity in polite society, never fearing that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork.
longer explanation from 2021 when he was working it out https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#hostage-takers
long quote
Facebook’s war on switching costs
If you took a drink every time an economist used “network effects” to explain why Big Tech is so big, you’d get very, very drunk.
To be fair to economists, network effects are important to the Big Tech story.
A system is said to have network effects if it gets better when more people use it. That certainly describes Facebook – you join FB because of the friends that are already there, and then someone else joins because you’re there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
But network effects are how FB gets big, but not how it stays big. Because even though you might join FB to talk to your friends, the reason you stay there – despite surveillance and FB’s many abusive tactics – is that leaving FB will cut you off from those friends.
There’s no technical reason you couldn’t stay in touch with FB friends without being an FB user. You can switch phone companies or email providers without walking away from the family, community and customers you’re connected to.
FB deliberately engineers its system to block “interoperability” – the ability to plug rival services into its network.
Interop would let non-FB users connect with FB users, and make it so FB users don’t have to choose between their community and Facebook’s abuses.
The economist’s term for this is “switching costs.” A “switching cost” is whatever you have to give up to switch between products or services – switching from Audible to a rival platform would cost you all your audiobooks, for example, thanks to Audible’s DRM.
Facebook deliberately engineers its products to have high switching costs so that it can impose more pain on its users without losing them. So long as the pain of staying is less than the pain of leaving, Facebook calculates it can maintain its dominance.
Network effects are how Facebook attracts users, but switching costs are how it holds them hostage.
The higher the switching costs, the bigger the shit sandwich Facebook can force you to eat before you leave.
That’s why interoperability is such a big deal – because it lowers the switching costs. If you can take your apps or friends or files or media with you when you leave a service, then the service has to treat you better, lest you depart.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
Now, I’ve been accusing Facebook of deliberately raising its switching costs for years, based on the obvious external evidence of this conduct. But to be honest, I didn’t have any proof that this was going on…
…Until now.
In its amended antitrust complaint against Facebook, the FTC draws on the internal communications it compelled Facebook to give up in order to build up a factual record of FB’s abuse of switching costs, which go all the way to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/ecf_75-1_ftc_v_facebook_public_redacted_fac.pdf
I published a collection of these for EFF’s Deeplinks blog, under the title, “Facebook’s Secret War on Switching Costs.”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs
Here’s some highlights:
Para 87: Zuckerberg’s M&A chief writes to him to say, "imo, photos (along with comprehensive/smart contacts and unified messaging) is perhaps one of the most important ways we can make switching costs very high for users…
“…if we are where all users’ photos reside because the upoading [sic] (mobile and web), editing, organizing, and sharing features are best in class, will be very tough for a user to switch if they can’t take those photos and associated data/comments with them.”
Translation: “I figured out a way to get our users to eat a very large shit sandwich indeed. Just take all their family photos hostage!”
Para 187: An exec explains how FB is preventing G+ from succeeding: “[P]eople who are big fans of G+ are having a hard time convincing their friends to participate because…switching costs would be high due to friend density on Facebook.”
Translation: Our users would rather be on G+ but we’ve stopped them because leaving means leaving behind their friends, because we won’t interconnect with Google’s service.
Para 212: One of Zuck’s execs sends him a memo reading, " if we are where all users’ photos reside . . . will be very tough for a user to switch if they can’t take those photos and associated data/comments with them."
There’s that shit sandwich again.
I’m so excited to see this stuff in the FTC complaint – not because it vindicates me (it was obvious that this was going on, though having the receipts is nice), but because it suggests that US antitrust enforcers are homing in on switching costs as an anticompetitive force.
The problem with the network effects story is that it’s a counsel of despair: “Well, this company has attained scale and now there’s no way they can lose.”
That’s bullshit. You don’t search Altavista with your Cray.
Network effects inflate services, but low switching costs let the air out again. Interop is the escape valve that keeps big tech firms from sucking up all the oxygen and asphyxiating their rivals.
I was told that I should read Walkaway by Doctorow because it’s one of his best fictional works. If that’s his best then I don’t really need to read anything else. I don’t know if it’s the paper-thin characters or the most awkward sex scenes ever written I enjoyed the least, but what I disliked a lot was Doctorow’s frankly baffling world building.
Tap for spoiler
The beginning of the book starts out with tons of nifty sci-fi elements, like bacteria that ferment pee into alcohol or whatever. And I’m thinking, “Oh neat, this technology must have a bunch of novel uses in this story and impact the narrative and world in many unique ways.” It doesn’t. It just isn’t brought up again. And there’s a bunch of technologies like that in the story. Imagine writing a story about generative AI and saying it’s only used to make meme pictures and not investigating any of the socioeconomic impacts of that technology.
Isn’t that one like The Fountainhead but for DIYers?
What’s up with SciFi authors and doing this sort of revolutionary colonialism genre?
Yes. People make the comparison a lot. It’s a quasi-anarchist response to The Fountainhead. And what makes it worse is that it’s not satirizing The Fountainhead. It reads completely sincere, which made the whole thing almost unbearable for me.
ferment pee into alcohol
If you’re diabetic you can do that right now
I’ll be honest I don’t know what people see in his fiction. I think he makes good contribution with his non-fiction but I agree with your overall assessment. It feels really… tacky…?
I guess some people find the narrative aspect a more accessible way to engage with the ideas. The ideas can be interesting so if that’s what it takes… I do enjoy occasionally listening to him talk about his fiction, that way you can get the main concepts without having to plod through the characters and plot.
I’m perhaps a less picky eater when it comes to books, but I’ve read the bezzle (yes I’m now aware that’s the middle of the series, fortunately I don’t think that mattered much) and am currently reading through the lost cause, and I find them enjoyable reads. I’m hardly a stranger to the ideas and concepts he’s discussing, but reading stories is fun and I enjoy reading a story that aligns with my values.
Why do you assume that I am not familiar with Richard Stallman? Richard Stallman reads Cory Doctorow himself. There are many mentions of Cory Doctorow on stallman.org
I didn’t assume that you weren’t familiar with Stallman, just that it’s annoying to hear the term “enshittification” be brought up as if it were something original and also many people are unaware of stallmans pioneering work.
Also I don’t read stallmans personal blog since I find stallmans writings outside of his early work the same kind of liberal trite I accuse Doctorow of here.
Yeah, he’s… really emblematic of all the tech politics in certain spaces I really hate. Lots of commies in the Free Software world, none of them with power and influence, and I fucking hate the libs but I like the software ethos and the tech politics specifically.
If anyone wants reccs for good Doctorow fiction with a leftist bent his recentish collection Radicalised, features the stories:
Unauthorized Bread: A woman immigrant to a slightly more fascistic US helps her neighbours hack there locked-down DRM appliances that only allow you to use specific expensive proprietary stuff like dough in breadmakers, food in ovens, detergent in washing machines(Keurig cups on steroids basically) etc
Model Minority: A Superman analogue tries to take on police racism in the US and finds out being an alien his whiteness is contingent on upholding the system
Radicalized: A cancer survivor joins a darknet organised terror group of terminally ill people and their relatives that begin bombing/attacking insurance companies and CEOs
Masque of the Red Death: (not the Poe one lol) A crypto-bro financier builds a bunker filled with supplies to the survive the apocalypse, gets on much worse than the poorer people in the city who form mutual aid networks
I highly recommend that, and Walkaway for a full length novel of his with great lefty and free software themes, also some really good trans and GNC stuff in it
If you’re a big ol’ geek like me you’ll like most of his stuff, even the older ones like Down and out in the Magic Kingdom where his politics are a bit more libertarian(he’s evolved a lot since the 90’s when that was written and in Walkaway there’s a scene that is him basically arguing with himself about right-libertarianism vs lefty anarchist socialism, with socialism coming out on top) but he’s never been scum on that front
I used to read a lot of his FOSS and digital rights stuff(how I got into the EFF lol) but not much recently so couldn’t speak to the state of his recent non-fiction
He was on QAA a few months ago to talk about enshitfacation(the concept mainly not this book) that was a good listen
Radicalized: A cancer survivor joins a darknet organised terror group of terminally ill people and their relatives that begin bombing/attacking insurance companies and CEOs
published 2019 tho
I’ve heard Doctorow take some credit for inspiring edward snowden via Walkaway but not yet seen him make any connection to Luigi although I’m sure it was the first thing he thought of.
A confession: I am no true believer in markets as the best arbiter of how our society should work, who should be in charge of it and how its productive capacity should be organised. Like other leftists, I am deeply suspicious of capitalism. I understand the temptation to look at all this verbiage about enshittification, throw your hands up and say, “What do you expect? Capitalism always produces crises of production. Enshittification is just a sweary euphemism for capitalism.”
…
Take Amazon: to fix Amazon, we need policy solutions. We need to ban predatory pricing … We need to impose structural separation …We need to end its most favoured nation deal … We need to unionise its drivers and warehouse workers. We need to treat its rigged search results as the fraud they are.
There’s a lot I don’t like about Cory Doctorow, and lots to criticise, but I do think he’s generally out too improve stuff.
Cory doctorow is a white supremacist liberal whose opinion on anything should not be taken seriously. He has less understanding of class or class analysis than probably the least read person on here.
He already wrote this book, and it was supremely worthless. Half of it was just getting into US legal cases, and the overall recommendation of the book was “here’s how liberalism can still win and we can beat those authoritarian countries and not become like them!”
Cory doctorow is a white supremacist
source(s) for this?
Read his book enshittification. Within the first 20 pages, he decries the “authoritarian regimes” of china, russia, and the middle east with “superior western democracies”, and is scared that the US and Canada will become just like them.
one good criticism in the thread!
For me this is a blind spot because I took this kind of framework for granted for a long time and am still working out what I actually think, generally. But I have noticed that Doctorow adopts this kind of prejuduce and I’m not sure how well thought-out it is. I wonder if he just got some kinds of ideas growing up and maybe never challenged them. Found a 2016 interview where he talks about circumstances of leaving the USSR.
my father’s parents are from Eastern Europe. My grandmother was born in Leningrad. My grandfather was born in a country that is now Poland, but was then Belarus, a territory rather, that is now Polish but was then Belarusian. My father was born while his parents were in a displaced persons camp in Azerbaijan and his first language was Yiddish. My mother’s family are first and second generation Ukrainian-Russian Romanians. Her first language was English, but her mother’s first language was French and was raised in Quebec. I was born in Canada. My first language is English. And I attended Yiddish school at a radical socialist Yiddish program run by the Workman’s Circle until I was 13.
My grandfather and grandmother were Red Army deserters, and they destroyed their papers after leaving Azerbaijan in order to qualify as displaced people and not be ingested back into the Soviet population. Maintaining that ruse, they were able to board a DP boat from Hamburg to Halifax, and that was how they migrated to Canada. If they had been truthful in their immigration process, they would have almost certainly ended up in the former Soviet Union and likely faced reprisals for deserting from the army as well.
Just in terms of his tech, legal analysis I think he would only be improved if he would be willing to have a less reactionary POV.
I’ve read a few good blog posts by Doctorow. There were a couple mentions of AI usage in healthcare that made the point clearly enough to be terrifying:
The narrative around these bots is that they are there to help humans. In this story, the hospital buys a radiology bot that offers a second opinion to the human radiologist. If they disagree, the human radiologist takes another look. In this tale, AI is a way for hospitals to make fewer mistakes by spending more money. An AI assisted radiologist is less productive (because they re-run some x-rays to resolve disagreements with the bot) but more accurate.
In automation theory jargon, this radiologist is a “centaur” – a human head grafted onto the tireless, ever-vigilant body of a robot.
Of course, no one who invests in an AI company expects this to happen. Instead, they want reverse-centaurs: a human who acts as an assistant to a robot. The real pitch to hospital is, “Fire all but one of your radiologists and then put that poor bastard to work reviewing the judgments our robot makes at machine scale.”
No one seriously thinks that the reverse-centaur radiologist will be able to maintain perfect vigilance over long shifts of supervising automated processes that rarely go wrong, but when they do, the error must be caught. The role of this “human in the loop” isn’t to prevent errors. That human is there to be blamed for errors. The human is there to be a “moral crumple zone”. The human is there to be an “accountability sink”. But they’re not there to be radiologists.
AI radiology programs are said to be able to spot cancerous masses that human radiologists miss. A centaur-based AI-assisted radiology program would keep the same number of radiologists in the field, but they would get less done: every time they assessed an X-ray, the AI would give them a second opinion. If the human and the AI disagreed, the human would go back and re-assess the X-ray. We’d get better radiology, at a higher price (the price of the AI software, plus the additional hours the radiologist would work).
No one who invests in an AI company believes that their returns will come from business customers who agree to increase their costs. The AI can’t do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway.
In hindsight it’s an obvious point that this is how AI would be used in capitalistic healthcare, but it’s pretty natural to want to default to the pitch because it genuinely could improve healthcare rather than make it worse.
The AI can’t do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway.
This sentence encapsulates what I’ve been trying to say a while. Just because AI can’t do your job, doesn’t mean it’s not a threat to it
I have found value in some of the factual content of his blog posts and I think it’s a decent message to get out there, but tbh even with the two or three I’ve read they get pretty bloated and repetitive, so I doubt I’d want to read a whole book of his writing. I could see this as being a useful entry point for the libs in your life, but then again, a blog post is an easier ask.
One could level a similar criticism at Bullshit Jobs, which I’ve heard described as taking a pretty snappy essay and padding it out many times over, but I think the fact that a lot of the “padding” consists of individuals talking about their own experiences and the bullshit they have to endure makes it more compelling. Like, it’s been a while since I read it, and I actually listened to the audiobook rather than reading so my retention’s inevitably much worse, but I can still remember some of the specific people and their stories.
but I think the fact that a lot of the “padding” consists of individuals talking about their own experiences and the bullshit they have to endure makes it more compelling.
Pretty much this and then some analysis cribbed from Weber is the core of the main book (also padding out the “why” for political forces proliferating these jobs).
Nothing wrong with this, especially as an entry point for libs. Doctorow isn’t nearly as pernicious as most libs.
I really wish it were a different word that caught on :/
Its still better than “the tendency for the rate of profit to fall” although I wish the term was connected to the Marxist theory that proves its existence
In keeping with marxist lore they should have called it Profitfallsratentedenz!
I have to admit that since I learned “the tendency for the rate of profit to fall” I have dropped it in to a few very inappropriate conversations. I think it could catch on!
Agree
So does Doctorow tbf, he talks about it in his QAA interview
I’ll have to check that out haha
He’s like many of these western marxists like mark fisher and zizek, who take long established marxist terminology, defang them, then repackage them as products.
Enshittification is a less-descriptive stand-in for the trpf, just like fisher’s capitalist realism is a stand-in for Gramsci’s cultural hegemony.
Also why does the cover of this book spell it weirdly? Words don’t tend to have a double consonant when -ification is put at the end. For example, pontification, gamification, etc. If we must use this stupid word, it should be “enshitification” without the extra t in the middle.
Because a doubled consonant usually follows a short vowel sound. “Enshitification” might read en-SHY-tuh-fic-ation
Is that really the common practice? I (skimmed) through the list on https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ification and didn’t catch a singly double-consonant that wasn’t already in the original word.
I’m not sure it is for -ification suffix words, but it is for other forms. Wed -> Wedded, short e. Weed -> Weeded, long e.
But I guess at the end of the day “Enshittify” just feels right to me, which is the only real rule of the english language
It feels wrong to me! But I’m the one disagreeing with a book that will probably get rather wide distribution, do the full press circuit, and get put into spellchecking & autocorrect software, so what I feel doesn’t matter.
Remember: English is 4 languages in a trench coat that hides in dark alleys where it mugs other languages, shaking them down for loose change and grammar.
I’ll never get over the npr interview I heard with this guy aboit this. They kept bleeping the first part so all you heard was ification
