Doctorow’s Enshittification explains well how capitalism degrades internet services but is less convincing on what to do about it, argues Kevin Crane

This book is a rare instance of a writer chasing a zeitgeist he actually started. Journalist, campaigner and author Cory Doctorow coined the word enshittification last year. It speaks to how much the public urgently needed a word for the phenomenon that it was already in common usage before he’d finished writing his book to explain what it means.

It’s very unlikely that anyone reading this doesn’t already know what enshittification is, at least in broad strokes. Just in case, though, it is a handy catch-all term for the widely recognised decline in the usefulness and enjoyability of all things internet-related. Of course, since almost all things are now internet-related, it is fully legitimate to argue that enshittification has infected most of the products, services and life experiences we all have.

We all increasingly struggle with Google giving us adverts instead of basic information, social media deluging us with idiotic AI slop instead of connecting to our friends, and products you buy online constantly getting more expensive and worse. It’s no wonder the new word gained rapid acceptance as soon as it was coined. However, identifying that a problem exists can only ever be a first step: if you want to solve said problem, you do need to identify what it fundamentally is in order to propose solutions. So having given us the name, Doctorow has now followed up with this book outlining both his diagnoses and his proposals.

The structure of a two-sided scam

The author’s definition of what enshittification is, in my opinion, a solid one because he explains the mechanisms of the process in terms of cold hard cash and where it is being distributed. He identifies three distinct stages of the corporate lifecycle that end in enshittification. The stages are quite specific to the ‘Web 2.0’ tech platforms, which is also a crucial point, because the internet is a communication technology and the corporations we’re talking about are fundamentally communication companies.

Web 1.0, as it’s retroactively known, had a relatively high skills bar for participation. You needed to be reasonably computer literate to get much out of the internet well into the mid-2000s. Web 2.0 was born when companies provided more user-friendly and convenient ways to connect both individual and business users. This coincided with the late 2000s economic crisis, in which a huge crash in over-valued housing markets had caused governments to slash interest rates (often called the Zero Interest Rate Policy, or Zirp) and left investment funds looking for new opportunities. The tech companies caught these investors’ attention and got huge cash injections.

This is where most of the platforms enter the first stage of their development, as Doctorow identifies it. Suddenly stuffed with cheap dollars, tech companies hired staff with wild abandon and expanded their functionality, and user bases, in the metaphorical storm that was ‘blitz-scaling’. It is during this early phase that the platforms suddenly entered every part of our lives: Facebook connected everyone you knew, Amazon was a convenient way to buy anything you could think of, and Uber was an insanely cheap way to travel.

The magic that was powering all this was not, alas, advanced technology alone. Large quantities of cash were being burned to make sure we were all getting blown away by the possibilities opened up by these shiny new applications on our shiny new electronic devices. Partially, that wow-factor was achieved by making sure that high-paid teams of tech workers were polishing the software to a glass-smooth finish, but it was also by just allowing a lot of start-ups to run at a market-busting loss. A lot of that venture capital cash was subsidising your purchases of goods and services, to the point you felt you couldn’t afford not to use them. Leaving them would cost you either money or inconvenience or both, known as the ‘switching cost’. Of course, once we’d been fully habituated to the platforms, it was time for stage two of Big Tech evolutionary process.

The next phase saw the cash surpluses shifted away from the private individual user, towards the interests of business users. The platforms now had millions upon millions of people regularly engaging, and a truly overwhelming quantity of data about those people, so it was fairly easy to go to other businesses with a myriad of business ideas about how to sell more stuff to the masses.

Now it was time for the third-party companies to experience the euphoria of too-good-to-be true opportunities. Suddenly, all the strain and expense of market research, advertising, vending and distribution could be done for them, at a fraction of the costs of hiring their own agencies and maintaining their own shops and depots. As with the private users previously, business users just didn’t appreciate that the reason while all this seemed so cheap and effortless was that investor subsidies were offsetting the real costs for them. They, too, became locked into the platforms, and now faced potentially destructive switching costs if they wanted to look at other options.

The captivity of both private and business users was the first precondition for phase three, which is enshittification. Now came the withdrawal of cash surpluses from all users altogether, so that Big Tech can just extract that surplus value for their investors. Doctorow argues that enshittification became inevitable at this point because there were no longer countervailing forces to the desire for raw profit-seeking. The changed factors included the user-base expansion being at a natural end, a weakening of the power of tech workers within the companies, historically useless government regulations and the fact that the companies were now simply too big to care about their reputations.

Interestingly, one thing he argues was not a significant factor was the end of Zirp. Interest rates didn’t really start rising internationally until 2022, and Doctorow says that we can see the signs of enshittification setting in from at least 2016 onwards. This leads him to conclude that it was more internal, rather than external, factors that led the tech companies to shift from being led primarily by vision-inspired engineers to being led by unsentimental financiers.

It’s worse than you think

Doctorow’s descriptions of just how bad enshittification actual is are also a really valuable part of the book. Even though most of us have realised the problem exists, most don’t actually appreciate the sheer scale of it. Make no mistake, the awfulness of what the social-media giants Facebook and Twitter (or ‘X’ if you absolutely must) have become is worth remarking upon, as is the brutal anti-worker practices of companies like Uber and Deliveroo. All these things are still dwarfed by just how harmful Google and Amazon are to the world around them.

The potted history of Google that the author gives us throughout this book is both interesting and useful as a dissection of how tech companies have evolved. There’s something almost tragically mythical about its journey, starting out as a tiny operation that simply hit upon a clever way of helping people navigate the opacity of the Web 1.0. Who’d have wanted to believe that would lead to its present incarnation as a lumbering dragon that limits access to the internet it once guided people through? In order to ensure that no plucky heroes can ever slay said dragon, Google resorts to some truly astonishing business practices, of which the most shocking is probably making routine payments of millions of dollars to Apple (who are the most significant example of hardware-based enshittifying company), in order to stop them from making their own search engine. This payment is not a license fee, or a service charge. It is a bribe, and it’s a powerful example of the capture of the regulatory authorities by Big Tech that governments pretend that this could possibly be legal.

Google has a similar anti-competitive relationship with Facebook, and the two companies effectively stich up the online advertising market between them. The power of this duopoly is such that Doctorow estimates that the advertising costs of consumer products have rocketed from 13% of shop prices in the days of TV, to an eye-watering 51% today. The advertising itself is also comically over-valued from a business point of view, with very dubious audience reach. Most business users are too afraid to put that to the test, but an exception was when the chemical giant Proctor and Gamble got fed up with the tech companies and decided to just stop paying their gigantic ad bill. They proceeded to report that sales had been affected in no way at all! This is strong evidence of a dangerous financial bubble.

If Google is a terrible tyranny, Amazon is somehow something even worse. It’s control of every level of the sales process is so all-encompassing that vendors, and therefore their customers, are subject to it even if they try doing business outside the platform. Many goods companies cannot afford not to use some aspect of Amazon’s services – marketing, distribution and so on – but the terms that Amazon imposes on those sellers is so restrictive that it demands that they cannot trade via any other means, unless it is done at the same prices as they would on Amazon.

Therefore, they cannot sell their goods at lower prices if they happen to use some other platform (that does not charge Amazon’s crippling fees) for doing so. So, the now-exorbitant charges that Amazon extracts from its business users – what with the halcyon days of ‘phase two’ being far in the past – are applied even if the public try to buy directly from the vendor or via a service that isn’t hellbent on world domination. This is clearly a huge distortion of market pricing, to the extent that Doctorow says that company is effectively levying its own taxes.

A running theme throughout the descriptions of Big Tech’s abuses is that the companies continually act in the manner of governments rather than businesses. Doctorow says that many people understand that there has been regulatory capture, but he stresses that most people think that this just means that the companies are ensuring that they are under-regulated. He says that it is just as important to comprehend that the companies also create over-regulation from government, in order to engineer a scenario he refers to as ‘criminal breach of business model’. This is the perverse use of intellectual property (IP) and copyright laws to make it, implicitly or explicitly, illegal to not keep giving the platforms your business, money and data. He is able to point to some genuinely astonishing expressions of this, such as the topsy-turvy way that Amazon uses software licensing to remove authors’ power over their own printed works.

Debating history and the future

The parts of the book that start to look at what to do to counter enshittification are, for me, less well-grounded than the analysis sections. One of the weaker arguments that the author makes is to link enshittification to the concept of ‘technofeudalism’, as recently popularised by the left-wing economist Yiannis Varoufakis, in a book of the same name. I’ll say straight-up that I have not read that book, so I can’t comment on it directly, but I can discuss Doctorow’s interpretation of the concept.

Comparing the present state of capitalism to feudalism rests on an assertion that there has been a fundamental inversion of how value is being accumulated, such that rents are now favoured over profits. This leads Doctorow to compare Big Tech companies to feudal landowners who ‘… get paid no matter what. Nice work, if you can get it’. He then goes on to suggest that when early revolutionaries fought for ‘free markets’ against the feudal order, the freedom they were fighting for was freedom from rent, not freedom from regulation like modern libertarians.

There are a number of problems with this argument. Firstly, the Big Tech companies mostly do not create surplus value themselves, as they are simply engaged in seizing a part of the social surplus through the costs of advertising. Nothing has changed in the way that capitalism overall produces surplus value (and therefore profit), it is just that Big Tech has mastered some market techniques for hoovering up an outsize share of the available surplus, to the detriment of other capitalists. Then there is the problem with labelling these market strategies as ‘rent’; that is a metaphorical usage, and it is dubious at best to pretend it is identical with other historical forms of rent.

It certainly doesn’t tally with the reality of feudalism. For a start, feudal lords did not simply sit around getting their rents paid to them in the way that a bourgeois landowner now does. There was no clear division between property ownership and government in a feudal state, so the lord was only getting his rent if he went out with his guys and collected it. The functions of police, courts and civil servants had to carried out by the aristocracy, because they essentially were the state and they couldn’t just rely on facetious legal arguments to get an external entity to extort money for them, as Jeff Bezos does today. It’s also completely wrong to say that no one was worried about regulation in feudal governance, as feudal England was subject to politically motivated price and wage controls almost constantly. The monarchy believed that such things were vital to the preservation of social order, and the great peasants’ revolt of 1381 was, at least in part, a rebellion against wage controls.

The reason why these arguments matter is that casting Big Tech as something fundamentally worse than capitalist monopolies – or implying that monopolies are something inherently outside of, and worse than, capitalism – creates a temptation that to confront bad technofeudalists we could search for ‘good’, or at least preferable, techno-capitalists.

One book I did read this year that I felt dealt with these arguments well was Jathan Sadowski’s The Mechanic and the Luddite, which laid out very simply that monopolies are something capitalism creates a lot and often, and it is simply something to be expected from the system rather than a throwback or foreign imposition. Consequently, there’s no capitalist solution to monopolies. Actually, you could draw the same conclusion from Doctorow’s own explanation of the history of antitrust legislation in this very book, oddly enough.

That’s not to say nothing Doctorow proposes isn’t valuable, but it is a little bit of a mixed bag and very heavily based on hoping government does the right thing. On the positive side, I thought his proposals for legislation to reduce the ‘switching cost’ of platforms are strong, because they rest on giving power to people and not corporations. He also makes some really interesting observations about class struggle inside the tech sector, which are always good to find out more about.

Less convincing is the argument that antitrust legislation, that is to say breaking up monopolies, is quite as powerful as he argues it could be. Undoubtably, monopolies could be broken up, and the US state has gone through phases of doing that very decisively in history. However, just pushing companies to compete with each other doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t still engage in enshittification tactics. By Doctorow’s own reportage in the book, Apple and Google have been engaging in a bizarre technological dirty war over file formats for decades now, in which they intentionally make their word processing and spreadsheet formats incompatible with each other to spite each other’s customers. This is enshittification within (and for) competition. To be fair, the author does additionally argue for interoperability regulations to combat that phenomenon, but this adds to an already heavy reliance on legislative change. Those changes feel a long way away from anything that the prevailing politics of the Western world is likely to deliver in the near term.

I couldn’t help but feel that there was one website that was conspicuous in this book for its near-absence: Wikipedia. The online encyclopaedia is, after all, one of a very few major web platforms that has not only resisted enshittification but is also now proving remarkably resilient against the onslaught of generative ‘AI’ slop, which is otherwise beating you about the head from every other corner of the internet. I can’t help but feel a bit of a look at why Wikipedia, while not perfect by any means, is so robust might have been useful. We could do with suggestions about how to have more websites like that, and fewer that are like Twitter.

Overall, this book is very accessible, and the author’s breadth of knowledge is undeniably impressive. Enshittification is a pretty good primer for someone who would like to get a basic understanding what’s wrong with the tech sector. Speaking as someone who already knows a fair bit, though, I did also find the first half of this book genuinely informative, particularly the deep dives in the murky worlds of Google and Amazon. The political conclusions that it comes to however, feel a bit short of the level of radicalism for which this situation calls.