enshittification
Planted Nov 2026 Tended 3 days ago
Contents
A colorful term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the way tech platforms get worse over time and why. Initially they offer a quality service to attract users, then they degrade the service (hoping users will stay) in favor of business customers (e.g. advertisers), and finally they degrade the service to business customers in order to maximize short-term profit for investors.
More Broadly
While Doctorow was focused on tech platforms, the concept of enshittification has been applied to trends across the economy, with tech as just a special-case of the more general rules. Causes include:
shareholder primacy: the dominant legal theory that businesses exist solely to maximize profit for their shareholders. Executives can face legal consequences for prioritizing anything—customers, quality, their future, even ethics short of illegality—over short-term profits. Businesses no longer exist to make shoes or run trains, they exist solely to extract profit.
private equity: unlike public companies that are regulated and accountable to their shareholders, private equity firms have massive resources supercharged by inequality and face little oversight in their pursuit of maximum profit no matter the costs to society. (A study of private equity buying up nursing homes found that PE-owner nursing homes had higher patient mortality against comparable non-PE homes. Private equity ownership was the variable that killed people.)
monopoly power: competition is necessary for a healthy economy, but we’ve allowed (thanks to regulatory capture) most of our industries to consolidate into oligopolies in which consumers have no meaningful choice between alternatives. An example of the Success to the Successful systems trap.
reduced consumer protections: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis in which overspeculation by the financial industry led to the Great Recession putting many Americans out of their jobs and homes. It exists to protect us from scams and exploitation, and its shuttering by the Trump administration has cost Americans $19 billion according to a Senate report. In the absence of watchdogs, it becomes rational for profit-maximizing machines with far more power than individual consumers to toe or even cross the line into deception and fraud.
“The Mechanisms of Enshittification” goes into more detail.
What We Can Do
The Worse on Purpose Ledger tracks which reliable brands are in the process of enshittification (being strip-mined by private equity, for instance) and which still stand by their products.
Doctorow suggests a two-prong regulatory approach, “the end-to-end principle” requiring tech platforms to give users what they ask for (e.g. not showing less-relevant, sponsored results above more relevant organic ones) and the “right of exit” making it easier for users to export their data to competing services. Though it seems unlikely for either to be adopted by the current regulatory regime.
Further Reading
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow