Enshittification

The gradual breakdown in quality of digital platforms and services as companies shift focus from pleasing users to maximizing profits.

Definition

The gradual breakdown in quality of digital platforms and services as companies shift focus from pleasing users to maximizing profits.

Origin

The term was coined by the writer and activist Cory Doctorow, who first used it in late 2022 and set out the full argument in a January 2023 post on his site Pluralistic about TikTok. It was named digital word of the year by the American Dialect Society for 2023 and word of the year by Australia's Macquarie Dictionary for 2024, and Doctorow expanded the argument into Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025).

The Three Stages

Doctorow's formulation is deliberately blunt and is worth quoting because the sequence is the whole argument:

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

• Stage one: good to users. The platform runs at a loss, subsidised by investment, and delivers genuine value in order to accumulate people.
• Stage two: value shifted to business customers. Once users are locked in, the surplus is redirected to advertisers, sellers, publishers or creators. Users notice a decline and mostly stay.
• Stage three: value clawed back to the platform. Business customers are now dependent too, and the terms turn against them — rising fees, falling reach, mandatory advertising to reach an audience the seller already had.
• Stage four: the platform dies, or persists as a husk with no remaining constituency that likes it.

The Mechanism

The part of Doctorow's argument that does the analytic work is his account of why this became possible, because platform decay is not new and the sequence above is close to ordinary monopoly behaviour. His claim is that four constraints that historically checked it have been removed:

• Competition, by four decades of permissive merger policy.
• Regulation, by regulatory capture in concentrated industries.
• Self-help, by anti-circumvention law. This is his most distinctive point. Reverse-engineering, modding, scraping, ad-blocking and interoperable clients are the traditional ways users route around a degrading service, and laws such as the DMCA's Section 1201 make them legally hazardous — so the exit that used to discipline a platform is now illegal.
• Labour, by the weakening of worker power in technology firms, whose employees had at times refused to ship the worst decisions.

His proposed remedies follow from the diagnosis: antitrust enforcement, and above all adversarial interoperability — the legal right to build a competing or complementary product that plugs into an existing platform without permission.

Related Concepts

The observation is not without ancestors. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) describes the same dynamic in the abstract, and enshittification is precisely what happens when exit is blocked: users retain only voice, which platforms can ignore. The related term platform decay is used for the phenomenon without Doctorow's specific causal account.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Enshittification names the economic mechanism behind a large share of what this site describes. The attention economy's tuning of systems toward capture, the conversion of ambient intimacy into ambient obligation, the arrival of advertising in interfaces that did not previously carry it, and the asymmetric application of friction — easy to subscribe, hard to cancel — are all stage-two and stage-three behaviours.

It also supplies the sharpest available frame for a worry that recurs across this wiki: that connection, memory, identity and belonging are now rented from operators whose incentives change once the renter cannot leave. See future runoff for the material version of the same problem.

Related Reading

• Attention Economy
• Frictional Interface
• Future Runoff
• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
• Belonging
• Ted Nelson