NEW YORK — Canadian author and digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow’s “Enshittification,” released Oct. 7, 2025, turns a profane buzzword into a crisp diagnosis of why the internet keeps getting worse. He argues the decline isn’t inevitable — it’s a predictable outcome of monopoly power and lock-in — and he lays out a plan to unwind it, Dec. 15, 2025.
If you’ve watched search results fill with junk, social feeds drown in ads and online shopping turn into a pay-to-play maze, Doctorow’s message lands with a thud: this isn’t “the price of free.” It’s the business model working as designed, protected by rules that make leaving costly and competition optional.
Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” diagnosis: a three-act platform tragedy
Doctorow’s “enshittification” describes a repeatable pattern. Platforms start out generous to attract users, then tilt toward business customers (advertisers, sellers, publishers), then squeeze both sides once everyone is stuck. In a 2023 Wired essay about TikTok, Cory Doctorow boiled it down: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.”
The term broke out fast because it gave a name to a feeling people couldn’t stop bumping into. The American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year write-up captured the cultural mood, quoting language columnist Ben Zimmer calling it “a sadly apt term for how our online lives have become gradually degraded.” The sting is that enshittified services don’t just get worse — they get harder to quit without losing your network, your work or your purchases.
What Cory Doctorow says fixes Big Tech: make leaving easy
“Enshittification” doesn’t ask readers to perfect their digital hygiene. Cory Doctorow’s blueprint is about leverage: make dominant platforms weaker, and the incentives to degrade quality collapse.
Right of exit: portability for your data, your audience and what you’ve paid for, so “leave” isn’t a scorched-earth decision.
Interoperability: allow competing services to connect across boundaries, cutting switching costs and making real alternatives possible.
Antitrust muscle: stop “catch-and-kill” acquisitions and unwind monopoly power that lets companies change the deal whenever they want.
That’s the logic in the book’s own pitch. Macmillan’s overview of “Enshittification” frames Doctorow’s project as moving from complaint to cure — naming the decisions that got us here and the policies that can undo them.
The Cory Doctorow argument didn’t start in 2025
Doctorow has been warning about the same power dynamics for years. In 2012, he argued that legal and technical locks could turn general-purpose computers into permissioned devices in “Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing”. By 2019, he was pushing “adversarial interoperability” — competitors plugging into entrenched systems even without permission — in his Electronic Frontier Foundation essay “Adversarial Interoperability”.
What’s different now is the mainstreaming of the frustration. A recent New Yorker essay on the “age of enshittification” framed Doctorow’s idea as more than a tech gripe: it’s a story about power, policy and platforms that can “twiddle” the knobs of daily life without meaningful pushback.
Cory Doctorow’s wager is simple: once you can name the pattern, you can organize against it — and build an internet that’s easier to use than to escape.
