Enshittification

Enshittification is the term coined by writer and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow to describe the predictable decay cycle of digital platforms. The concept crystallised in a January 2023 essay about TikTok's trajectory, but Doctorow argued the pattern is structural — visible in the history of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, and most major platform businesses. The American Dialect Society named it Word of the Year for 2023, reflecting both its explanatory power and the widely shared intuition it named.

Doctorow's framework describes three stages. In the first, the platform offers genuine value to users — often at a loss, subsidised by investor capital — in order to establish a user base large enough to become attractive to businesses. This phase feels like a golden age and is often remembered as one. Users experience the product as unusually good because it is being deliberately made so, at artificial cost, to produce dependency.

In the second stage, having achieved sufficient user lock-in, the platform begins to degrade the user experience in favour of the business customers — advertisers, sellers, publishers — who pay for access to those users. Search results fill with paid placements. Feeds are reordered to prioritise content from paying producers rather than genuinely engaging content from personal connections. The product still works, but less for users and more for the businesses harvesting them.

In the third stage, having locked in both users and business customers — who have now built dependencies, storefronts, and audiences on the platform — the platform begins extracting value from both. Advertising rates rise. Algorithmic visibility for businesses drops unless they pay for promotion. Data that was previously shared to help partners optimise is withdrawn or weaponised. The platform becomes a landlord extracting rent from a tenant who cannot leave.

What makes enshittification structurally predictable rather than a contingent moral failure is the interaction of network effects and regulatory conditions. Network effects mean that the value of being on a platform increases with the number of other users — which makes leaving costly even as quality falls. You do not leave Facebook because your friends are there, even if you find Facebook increasingly unpleasant. This creates the captive population that makes extraction possible. Regulatory conditions — weak antitrust enforcement, permissive data ownership rules, limited interoperability requirements — remove the structural constraints that would otherwise limit how much value a platform can extract before users defect.

Doctorow's underlying argument is that enshittification is not primarily a story about corporate greed or the corruption of founder idealism. It is a story about what happens when network effect monopolies meet weak regulation. The implication is that the remedy is structural — interoperability requirements that reduce switching costs, strong antitrust enforcement that prevents monopoly entrenchment, and data portability rules that shift power toward users — rather than the expectation that platforms will choose quality over extraction.