Enshittification

Enshittification is Cory Doctorow's term for the way platforms predictably decay. It's referenced across this wiki as shorthand for platform decline; this page is the term itself getting its own entry.

The three stages

The pattern runs in a fixed order. First the platform is good to its users, subsidizing a genuinely good experience to lock them in — cheap rides, free shipping, an unfiltered feed of what you asked to see. Once users are captured, the platform turns on them to favor its business customers: advertisers, sellers, publishers, drivers. It degrades the user experience to extract value on the business side — worse search results padded with ads, feeds reordered to sell reach, terms rewritten in the sellers' favor. Then, with business customers now locked in too, the platform turns on them, clawing value back to itself: rising take rates, worse ad placement for the same money, arbitrary demonetization. At the end, the platform is a pile of value extracted from everyone who depends on it, held together by lock-in alone, until it collapses or is abandoned.

The word names a trajectory, not a single bad decision. It applies whether the platform is a marketplace, a social feed, a search engine, or a subscription service, and the stages are driven by who is currently trapped and who can still leave.

Why it was once restrained

Doctorow's central point is that enshittifiers always existed — there were always operators who would plunder user data and treat people with contempt — but they used to be held back by four external forces. Competition meant an abused user could leave for a rival, so degrading the experience cost real customers. Regulation set floors that a platform couldn't extract below without legal consequence. Worker power meant the engineers and staff building the product had their own sense of fairness and duty and would resist shipping user-hostile changes. And the threat of new entrants meant any deliberately introduced defect was an opening for a competitor to fix, so introducing defects was dangerous.

Underneath all four sat antitrust enforcement. Its founding idea was that no company should be allowed to grow so large it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade." Antitrust kept firms small enough that competition stayed live, kept them regulable, kept switching costs low enough that workers and users retained leverage. In the Dark Tower metaphor Doctorow uses in lapsarianism-doctorow, antitrust is the tower on which all the other restraining "beams" converge.

Why it was unleashed

Roughly fifty years of dismantled antitrust removed the anchor, and the other checks weakened with it. Consolidation killed the competition that let users leave. Deregulation removed the floors. Mergers and monopsony power removed workers' leverage. And a firm large enough that no new entrant can realistically challenge it faces no penalty for introducing defects. Once all four checks are gone, enshittification isn't an aberration — it's the rational strategy, and it runs to completion because nothing stops it.

This is why Doctorow insists the remedy is political rather than personal. "You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Shopping is not politics." Restoring the checks means restoring antitrust, unions, and regulation, not choosing better products.

Where it appears

The term anchors the platform-decay cluster in the wiki. lapsarianism-doctorow is the fullest statement of the antitrust-and-beams argument. edward-zitron's subprime-ai-crisis is enshittification playing out in the AI industry — subsidized-good-to-users pricing that must eventually turn extractive because the underlying economics never worked. build-a-new-internet is the response of someone who assumes the decay is terminal and wants to build a small good-faith commons outside it, and marius-rise-of-the-bullshittery traces the same incentive rot into the labor market for professional work. There's also a narrower AI-specific reading in llm-enshittification, which repurposes the word as a moral indictment of LLMs.