Enshittification explains why the internet sucks right now. Here’s how to fix it.

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This year, it became apparent to more shoppers that Prime Day is less a showcase of Amazon deals than a brutish exhibition of the platform’s unmatched power. New reporting indicated that the retail platform’s promoted “sales” large appear to be a mirage, thanks to pricing tactics that artificially inflate costs just before the shopping surges begin. Many disgruntled consumers who got hip to the scheme during July’s Prime Day decided not to return for this month’s deals, and some even filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Amazon last month. Around the same time, Amazon reached a record settlement with the federal government that mandates refunds to customers who were either tricked into signing up for Prime memberships or prevented from canceling their subscriptions.

In a word, these are prime (no pun intended) examples of enshittification: Amazon’s sweeping market share allows it to exploit customers and client sellers who list their products on the site, at the cost of providing a smooth, transparent shopping experience with a multiplicity of options. And that’s simply because it can. What other choice does anyone have?

There’s a reason Amazon’s tricks lay at the heart of a now-iconic 2022 essay penned by Cory Doctorow, a Canadian American author, digital activist, and friend of Slate. On his Pluralistic blog, Doctorow coined the term enshittification as a succinct explanation as to why more Americans and global citizens were embracing the “techlash”: Corporations in Silicon Valley were making their products more extractive, juicing more revenue and rigging the game in their favor, because they’d eliminated all viable competitors.

Google worsening the search experience so that users will enter more queries and see/click on more ads. Elon Musk taking over Twitter and flooding it with Nazis and paid-for accounts, all while reducing technical capacity. Adobe forcing a software-subscription model so that artists have little control over necessary tools and find it prohibitively difficult to cancel any services—it’s all enshittification.

Pretty much every internet user has seen this occur in some form, which is why Doctorow’s neologism took off so widely. Outlets like Wired and the Financial Times prominently republished the blogger’s screeds on the topic; the American Dialect Society deemed enshittification its 2023 Word of the Year; thinkers like Paul Krugman and Slate’s own Dahlia Lithwick have expanded its lens to make sense of the crumbling of American democracy.

Doctorow has now published a new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, expanding on his original theses—and providing some ideas for how to de-enshittify the world wide web that’s become our everyday life. (Ironically, the book itself has had to deal with an enshittified Amazon that prominently listed an A.I.-generated ripoff.) I spoke with Doctorow last week about the long history of enshittification, the bad legal and regulatory incentives that fueled its ubiquity, and why he still has hope the internet can be better. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Nitish Pahwa: When was the first time you began thinking about the concept represented by the term enshittification?

Cory Doctorow: For most of my adult life, I’ve worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, defending our digital rights and stopping the online world from taking away our rights offline. My first day on the job at EFF literally was going to something called the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group. There was this lavishly corrupt congressman named Billy Tauzin, who promised a bunch of Hollywood executives that, if they could agree on a set of restrictions for all computers, he would pass a law making it illegal to make a computer unless it conformed to these restrictions. They boiled down to the ability to reach into a computer and reconfigure stuff after you installed it.

I spent a lot of time talking to those people: If someone were to hijack this facility, what happens when we give the worst people in the world the ability to sell you something and then change how it works after you’ve bought it? I think some of this is science-fiction writer training, where you look at things people can do with technology and immediately start thinking about how it could be a supervillain so you can work it into a story.

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If you take away discipline from firms and allow them to do harmful things that enrich themselves without consequence, you should expect that they will do those things. Enshittification has been something I’ve been warning people about since the Napster wars.

One of the things that’s important about the enshittification hypothesis is that it posits a kind of class alignment between business customers and end users, between suppliers and consumers. The advertisers on Facebook are getting screwed as badly as the people whose eyeballs their ads are being shoved into. The same goes for publishers and Google. The people who buy an iPhone aren’t exempt from being screwed by Apple because Apple takes its suppliers and charges 30 cents for every dollar they make. That means when they raise prices, every Apple customer pays those prices. The suppliers on Amazon have 45 to 51 cents taken out of every dollar that they make on the platform, and if they raise prices on Amazon, they have to raise prices everywhere else, otherwise they get kicked off Amazon. That company is still raising the prices for you when you buy things at Walmart, or when you buy direct from the factory store. You come to realize that it’s not about whether you shop correctly. It’s really about how much power that intermediary who sits between you has.

You bring up an example in your book of digital real-time pricing in brick-and-mortar stores. Between that and the increasing digitization of new electric cars—which just makes them more expensive and allows insurance companies to track and surcharge you—I’ve been wondering: Is enshittification partly an effect of the computerization of everything?

What I would say is it’s the half-computerization of everything, because vendors are free to computerize things to their heart’s content, but we cannot recomputerize them, right? We can’t reverse-engineer and modify these things. There’s certainly someone who could, who would happily sell you the service of taking your cheap, low-end EV and ripping out all the gunk that you don’t want. The problem is that IP law deems it a crime to make those modifications.

It’s not just that the humble typewriter ribbon is now the inkjet printer and the ink costs $10,000 a gallon. It’s that modifying your printer so it just takes generic ink is a crime because you’re violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s rule that bans what’s called circumvention, which is just going around a software lock.

IP law allows a company to reach beyond the walls of its offices and exert control over the conduct of its competitors, its critics, and its customers. Once you give a firm that power, you are disarming everyone else and giving them this pluripotent doomsday device that they can use to take away value and shift things around and screw you over. And as chips metastasize out of our computers and into our cars and into our grocery stores and sex toys and toothbrushes and all manner of things, this is an extremely dangerous arrangement.

I grew up in some middle-of-nowhere and suburban parts of Michigan. My friends and I obviously connected over the internet, but even the least tech-savvy people I knew found ways to jailbreak everything—iPods, our PlayStation Portables. Once iPhones got there, the main thing that would give jailbreakers pause is the removal of warranty protections, but otherwise they didn’t care that much. I wonder whether jailbreak culture has gone by the wayside, because of the overall strength of enshittification.

It’s one thing to be a kid and master the recipe, but it’s not really about whether those people can DIY. It’s whether, at the checkout aisle in Walmart, there’s a hang rack with a little 99-cent device that jailbreaks your iPhone and installs another app store. That’s where you start to get into mass movement and mass liberation.

There was a company called Static Controls that figured out how to jailbreak the toner cartridges for the Lexmark printer. That was IBM’s printer division, and they had this little chip on their toner cartridge with powdered carbon. When it ran out of powdered carbon, this chip, which only had 60 bytes of memory, would flip from a program that said I am full to a program that said I’m empty. And even if you put more carbon in, it wouldn’t work. Static Controls started refilling the cartridge, and they would flip the chip back to full. There was a lawsuit about this, and Static Controls prevailed because the court ruled that the program on the chip was too short to be a copyrighted work.

Static Controls was able to go on refilling toner cartridges, which was so good for them that Lexmark became a division of Static Controls. This is what markets can actually do: take companies that suck and allow them to be supplanted by companies that are good. It’s a circle of life, the dynamism we had in the early days of the internet, that we’ve lost now that these companies last long past the day when someone should have stuffed them in a shallow grave.

That also interested me, the concept of a lifespan for these communities. It seems that was much better understood in earlier internet days, thinking about the social platforms we look back on with varying levels of fondness, Friendster … 

LiveJournal!

Right. But Facebook’s been around for more than 20 years. No one seems to like it, yet it’s the biggest distributor of A.I. slop to senior citizens. People have gotten used to such powerful platforms lasting so long that it’s hard for them to imagine moving. But finding different platforms on the internet was sort of the original promise, was it not?

I think, rather than demanding platforms that last longer, we should demand platforms that are easier to leave. If we interconnect these things—and there’s no technical reason we can’t—then we can make it so that the people who are running the service are accountable to users. You can imagine that if popping off and being grossly offensive to a lot of your users would precipitate these mass exoduses, that the people who ran the services would take their responsibility to their community a little more seriously.

I think that’s good for everyone. It’s good for firms to have a healthy fear of their users defecting somewhere else. And the way to instill that fear is to lower those switching costs.

Is there a solution that involves clarifying the status of your data ownership—reconfiguring things so that everyone is less dependent on a sort of renter system, where these digital landlords maintain a grip on everything you use and share?

There’s both a policy path and a technical path to that. For example, we could say, “We’re going to make it legal to jailbreak things.” If you switch from one form of mass storage to another, the company that’s the upstart in the market can provide you with a tool that iterates through all the records you created on the old service and bring that data over to the new service. The same way that when the iWork suite came out, you could just open all your Word and Excel and PowerPoint files with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. As these habits become more common, more socially acceptable, more expected, people get angry about not having them, and we open up the policy space to say to companies, “You must do this.”

In America we have a relatively large number of phone companies—although they’re mostly just piggybacking off big companies’ networks—and the reason is because, with one click, you can move your phone number from one place to the other. It’s one of the unsung success stories of policy: We said to all the phone companies, here’s a standard, adhere to it. Once they did, it was possible to open up competition and a huge number of different offers in what has historically been one of the most concentrated and abusive markets that we’ve had in this industry.

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The states have a lot of work to do here to dis-enshittify our technology, and they can do it. California Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a bill that ends the practice of using platforms to rig prices—these companies like RealPage, for rent, and Agri Stats, for meat, that pretend that they’re consultants on pricing.  What they’re actually doing is coercing all the members of an industry cartel into raising their prices in lockstep. When Berkeley passed an ordinance banning RealPage, it filed the most bizarre pretextual lawsuit you can imagine. Berkeley immediately folded because they couldn’t afford to litigate. Doing this at the state level eliminates all of these questions.

If you live in a state where the government has the will to defend you against predatory conduct, there is a lot they can do. Privacy laws are a huge vacuum in American law. The last federal consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing your VHS rental habits. No new technological threat has been addressed since then.

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