2026-06-23

title: Enshittification

📚 Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse

A deep review of Cory Doctorow’s theory of platform decay, monopoly power, digital lock-in, and how we can reclaim the internet before the next generation of platforms repeats the same mistakes.

📖 Metadata

Title: Enshittification
Subtitle: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and How to Reclaim the Internet
Author: Cory Doctorow
Publication Year: 2025 (book edition; the concept was popularized earlier through Doctorow’s essays and talks)
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: Varies by edition (multiple international editions; check publisher)
Genre: Technology, Economics, Internet Policy, Social Critique
Pages: ~350 (varies by edition)
Intended Audience: Software engineers, product managers, startup founders, policy makers, technology investors, academics, and anyone interested in the evolution of digital platforms and the internet.

📑 Table of Contents / Chapter Themes

Introduction: What is Enshittification?
The Lifecycle of Digital Platforms
Network Effects and Their Double-Edged Sword
Lock-In, Switching Costs, and the Loss of User Power
APIs, Walled Gardens, and the End of Interoperability
Surveillance Capitalism and Data Extraction
Antitrust, Regulatory Capture, and Monopoly Power
Case Studies: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Reddit, and More
AI, Cloud, and the Next Generation of Platform Risks
Restoring Competition: Policy, Open Standards, and User Rights
Practical Lessons for Builders and Users
Conclusion: Reclaiming the Internet
Mental Models for Understanding Platform Decay
Glossary of Key Concepts
Practical Checklist for Builders

🌍 Overview

Enshittification is Cory Doctorow’s powerful term for the gradual, almost inevitable-seeming decline of digital platforms from beloved, user-centric services into extractive, frustrating, and exploitative monopolies. In this book, Doctorow dissects why so many of the internet’s most important platforms—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Reddit, Uber, Apple, and more—have gotten worse for users, workers, and even business partners, all while becoming more profitable for their shareholders.

The brilliance of the concept is that it names something millions of people already feel but struggle to explain. Search results feel worse. Social feeds feel more manipulative. Marketplaces feel more cluttered with ads and low-quality products. Streaming services become more expensive while offering less. Apps that once felt simple become bloated, restrictive, and hostile to power users. Doctorow gives this pattern a memorable name and, more importantly, a causal explanation.

What is Enshittification?

Doctorow defines enshittification as the process by which digital platforms, initially designed to delight users, morph over time into systems that extract maximum value from everyone involved—users, suppliers, and business customers—until the platform itself becomes a “husk” of its former self. The word is tongue-in-cheek but describes a very real and serious economic and technical phenomenon.

In simple terms: a platform gets worse when the people who depend on it can no longer easily leave it. Once exit becomes difficult, the platform no longer has to win loyalty through quality. It can instead harvest value from dependency.

That is why enshittification is not merely “bad UX” or “corporate greed.” It is a structural problem. It emerges when platforms become unavoidable infrastructure while still behaving like private toll booths.

The Three-Stage Lifecycle

The book’s central thesis is the “three-stage lifecycle” of platform decay:

User-First: Platforms start by providing outsized value to users, often subsidizing usage, offering generous free features, and prioritizing user experience to build a large user base.
Business-First: Once they reach scale, platforms shift their attention to business customers (advertisers, sellers, partners), extracting value from users (via attention, data, or fees) and passing it to business customers to lock them in.
Shareholder-First: Finally, platforms prioritize shareholders and executives, extracting value from both users and business customers, often at the expense of both, to maximize short-term profits.

At each stage, the incentives change. Early on, growth is everything. Later, the platform’s control over users and business customers allows it to squeeze both sides, increasing profits by degrading the experience, raising fees, or limiting competition.

🧩 The central pattern: First the platform is good to users. Then it is good to business customers. Finally, it is good only to itself.

Why Do Incentives Change?

Doctorow argues that the shift is not a result of individual corporate evil, but a systemic response to market incentives. As platforms grow, network effects and switching costs lock in users and partners, making it possible (and rational) for companies to degrade their offerings without losing their captive audience. Over time, the temptation to extract more value becomes irresistible, especially under pressure from shareholders and the logic of maximizing quarterly profits.

This is especially important for software engineers and product managers because many technical decisions that look neutral—API limits, export formats, ranking algorithms, default settings, pricing tiers—are actually incentive-shaping mechanisms. Architecture is not separate from economics. A closed API is an economic policy. A difficult export flow is an economic policy. A recommendation algorithm is an economic policy.

The Role of Monopolies

While these dynamics can occur in any market, Doctorow shows that monopolistic platforms accelerate enshittification. When users have nowhere to go, and when business customers cannot reach their markets except through a dominant platform, the incentives to exploit both become overwhelming. Monopolies can raise prices, degrade service, and close off interoperability with impunity, knowing that alternatives are few and switching is costly or impossible.

Is Enshittification Inevitable?

Doctorow is clear: enshittification is not an inherent feature of capitalism, technology, or markets. Rather, it is the result of deliberate policy choices—especially the weakening of antitrust enforcement, the erosion of interoperability and open standards, and the capture of regulators by the industries they oversee. He argues that with the right policies and technical architectures—open APIs, true data portability, strong antitrust action, and a culture of user rights—platforms can be forced to serve their users and partners well, or else make room for competitors who will.

Historical and Modern Examples

Throughout the book, Doctorow offers rich, detailed case studies: Amazon’s shift from customer obsession to seller exploitation; Google’s transformation from a search engine to an ad-driven data harvester; Facebook’s journey from social network to engagement-maximizing attention trap; Reddit’s recent API clampdown; Apple’s App Store lock-in; Uber’s fare manipulation; and many more. Each case illustrates how the logic of enshittification plays out in practice, and why it so often feels like “everything suddenly got worse.”

A Call to Action

Enshittification is not destiny. Doctorow calls for technologists, policymakers, and users to demand better—through technical design (open standards, real data export, interoperability), through regulation (restoring antitrust, preventing regulatory capture), and through collective action. The book is both a warning and a roadmap for reclaiming the internet from those who would enshittify it for profit.

🧠 Main Ideas Explained

The Three Stages of Platform Decay

User-First: Generous features, low prices, open APIs, and genuine user focus. Think early Google Search, Amazon’s original customer obsession, or Facebook’s early social features.
Business-First: As platforms scale, they prioritize business customers, often by extracting more value from users (ads, fees, surveillance) and passing it to advertisers, sellers, or partners to lock them in.
Shareholder-First: At maturity, platforms squeeze both users and business customers—raising fees, degrading quality, and closing off the ecosystem—to maximize profits and shareholder value.

Network Effects

Platforms become more valuable as more people use them (e.g., social networks, marketplaces).
Network effects create “winner-take-all” markets, where a single platform dominates and user choice dwindles.
Doctorow argues these effects, while powerful, can be weaponized to lock in users and stifle competition.

Switching Costs

As platforms grow, it becomes harder for users and businesses to leave.
High switching costs stem from lost data, social graphs, business relationships, and proprietary features.
Platforms deliberately increase these costs (e.g., by making data export hard or breaking interoperability).

Lock-in

Lock-in is the process by which users or businesses become so dependent on a platform that leaving is costly or impossible.
Examples: Apple’s App Store, Amazon Marketplace, Google’s ad ecosystem.
Lock-in is often achieved through technical means (proprietary formats, closed APIs) and business strategies (exclusive deals, pricing models).

Interoperability

The ability for different systems and platforms to work together, exchange data, and allow users to move freely.
Doctorow argues that loss of interoperability is a key driver of enshittification.
Open standards and APIs are essential for healthy competition and user choice.

APIs and Walled Gardens

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow third parties to build on top of platforms.
In early stages, platforms offer open APIs to encourage growth and innovation.
As platforms mature, they often restrict APIs, creating “walled gardens” that trap users and partners.
Recent examples: Reddit’s API changes, Twitter’s API restrictions, Facebook’s walled ecosystem.

Antitrust

Antitrust laws are meant to prevent monopolies and promote competition.
Doctorow argues that decades of weak enforcement have allowed digital monopolies to flourish.
He calls for renewed antitrust action, especially to restore interoperability and prevent abusive lock-in.

Regulatory Capture

Regulatory capture occurs when regulators serve the interests of the industries they’re supposed to oversee.
In tech, this often means lobbying, revolving doors, and policies that favor incumbents.
Doctorow warns that without vigilant oversight, regulation can entrench monopolies rather than rein them in.

Surveillance Capitalism

Platforms extract value by surveilling users, collecting data, and monetizing attention.
Doctorow links this to enshittification: as user growth slows, platforms turn to ever more invasive data extraction to maintain profits.
Surveillance becomes both a business model and a tool of lock-in.

Shareholder Primacy

The doctrine that a company’s primary duty is to maximize shareholder value.
Doctorow argues this principle drives the final stage of enshittification, where all other stakeholders (users, partners, workers) are sacrificed for profit.
He suggests alternative governance models and regulatory frameworks to rebalance incentives.

🧭 Mental Models for Understanding Enshittification

1. The Platform as a Toll Bridge

At first, the bridge is free or very cheap because the company wants everyone to cross it. Once the city is built around that bridge, the owner raises the tolls. Users, sellers, advertisers, workers, and developers are no longer choosing freely; they are paying because the bridge has become infrastructure.

This is how Amazon Marketplace, app stores, ad networks, and social platforms often behave. They are not simply products. They become chokepoints.

2. The Hotel California Model

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

A platform may technically allow account deletion, but practical exit is much harder. You may lose your audience, purchase history, photos, reputation, reviews, integrations, developer tooling, or business customers. Exit exists legally but not economically.

3. The Boiling Frog of UX Decay

Platforms rarely become terrible overnight. They add one extra ad, one extra paywall, one extra dark pattern, one extra API restriction, one extra fee. Each step seems tolerable. Over years, the product becomes unrecognizable.

The danger is gradual degradation. Users adapt to each small loss until they forget how good the product used to be.

4. The Captive Audience Problem

When a company still has to earn your attention, it must serve you. When it owns your attention, it can exploit you.

This explains why dominant social networks often optimize for addiction, outrage, and endless scrolling rather than user well-being. The goal shifts from helping users do something meaningful to keeping users available for monetization.

5. The Moat Becomes a Cage

Founders and investors love “moats”: network effects, proprietary data, brand, integrations, exclusive relationships, and switching costs. But the same moat that protects a company from competitors can become a cage for users.

Doctorow’s warning is that what investors call defensibility, users may experience as captivity.

🔬 Scientific Foundations

Network Effect Theory

Describes how the value of a service increases as more people use it.
In the book, network effects explain why platforms can grow rapidly—and why, once dominant, they can degrade quality without losing users.

Information Economics

Studies how information asymmetry, data ownership, and market power shape economic outcomes.
Doctorow applies these concepts to explain how platforms control information flows, set prices, and create artificial scarcity.

Behavioral Economics

Explores how cognitive biases, habit formation, and default choices affect user behavior.
Enshittification exploits biases like status quo bias, loss aversion, and attention traps to keep users engaged and discourage switching.

Principal-Agent Theory

Examines conflicts of interest between those who control resources (agents, e.g., executives) and those they’re supposed to serve (principals, e.g., users, society).
Doctorow shows how platform executives, acting as agents for shareholders, often act against the long-term interests of users and even the platform itself.

Public Choice Theory

Applies economic reasoning to political and regulatory institutions.
The book draws on public choice to explain regulatory capture and why tech regulation often benefits incumbents.

Complex Systems

Platforms are complex, adaptive systems with feedback loops, emergent behaviors, and tipping points.
Doctorow uses systems thinking to show how small changes (e.g., closing an API) can have cascading effects on the ecosystem.

Game Theory

Analyzes strategic interactions between users, platforms, competitors, and regulators.
The book’s framework helps explain why platforms defect from cooperation (with users or partners) once they have sufficient market power.
In the early game, cooperation builds trust. In the late game, dominance makes defection profitable.

Systems Thinking

From a systems perspective, enshittification is a feedback loop:

A platform grows by subsidizing users.
Growth creates dependency.
Dependency creates pricing power.
Pricing power attracts shareholder pressure.
Shareholder pressure produces extraction.
Extraction degrades the ecosystem.
Degraded ecosystems reduce trust, creativity, and long-term resilience.

The tragedy is that the platform may destroy the very ecosystem that made it valuable in the first place.

The Innovator’s Dilemma

Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma helps explain why dominant companies often fail to serve emerging needs. Once a platform becomes large, it optimizes for its best existing revenue streams. It becomes less willing to support disruptive features, third-party innovation, or user freedoms that might threaten its current profit engine.

🏛️ Historical Case Studies

Microsoft in the 1990s

Used its Windows monopoly to crush competitors (e.g., Netscape), bundle products, and lock in users.
Faced antitrust action for anti-competitive practices, which shaped the tech industry for decades.

AT&T

Controlled telecommunications in the US for most of the 20th century.
Stifled innovation and competition until forced to break up in 1984, leading to a wave of innovation and new entrants.

Standard Oil

Built a monopoly through ruthless business tactics, vertical integration, and control of infrastructure.
Broken up by antitrust law, serving as a foundational case for US competition policy.

Google Search

Began as the best search engine, focused on user experience.
Gradually shifted to prioritizing ad revenue, manipulating search results, and locking in users and advertisers.
Now dominates global search, with little effective competition.

Amazon Marketplace

Initially obsessed with customer satisfaction and low prices.
Now extracts high fees from sellers, manipulates search rankings, and exploits its gatekeeper position.
Sellers and users are locked in by convenience, reach, and logistics.

Facebook

Once a simple social network, now a complex engagement-maximizing machine.
Prioritizes content that maximizes attention, often at the expense of user well-being and discourse.
Acquired competitors (Instagram, WhatsApp) to solidify its dominance.

Long celebrated for open APIs and third-party apps.
In 2023, began restricting API access, angering users and developers, and signaling a shift to shareholder-first priorities.

Uber

Subsidized rides to gain market share, then raised prices and squeezed drivers once dominant.
Uses algorithmic opacity and data asymmetry to control both drivers and riders.

Apple App Store

Locks in developers and users through proprietary rules, high fees, and strict control over what apps can do.
Faces increasing regulatory pressure over its “walled garden” approach.

🤖 AI and the Future of Enshittification

Doctorow’s framework is especially relevant as AI platforms—like OpenAI, Google, and cloud-based AI APIs—rise to prominence:

Model Lock-in: AI companies can lock users and developers into proprietary APIs, models, and data formats, making switching costly.
Cloud Ecosystems: AI services are often part of larger cloud platforms, increasing dependency and reducing portability.
API Changes: As with previous platforms, AI providers may start open and generous, then restrict access, raise prices, or limit features as they gain dominance.
Data and IP: Control over training data, model weights, and user-generated content can further entrench monopolies.
Interoperability Risks: Without open standards, AI platforms may become new “walled gardens,” repeating the mistakes of previous generations.
Doctorow’s Warning: The book urges technologists and policymakers to learn from the past—designing AI systems for openness, portability, and user control before enshittification takes hold.

👨‍💻 Practical Architecture Guidance for Software Engineers

Favor Open Standards: Use and contribute to open protocols and data formats; avoid proprietary lock-in when possible.
API Design: Build APIs that are well-documented, stable, and accessible. Avoid unnecessary restrictions or arbitrary changes that break third-party integrations.
Portability: Allow users to easily export their data, settings, and content in usable formats.
Interoperability: Design systems that can interact with other platforms and services, supporting bridges, plugins, and third-party clients.
Avoid Unnecessary Lock-in: Resist business pressures to create artificial switching costs or technical barriers.
Long-term Thinking: Prioritize sustainable, user-centric architectures over short-term extraction or engagement hacks.
Transparency: Make business models and data practices clear to users and partners.
Support Decentralization: Where possible, design for modularity and decentralization to reduce single points of control.

🧪 Practical Lessons for Product Managers

Understand Incentives: Map out how your product’s incentives will evolve as it scales—be wary of pressures to degrade user experience for short-term gains.
Champion User Rights: Advocate for user data portability, transparent terms, and clear opt-outs from exploitative practices.
Monitor Lock-in: Regularly assess whether your product is creating unhealthy switching costs or dependencies.
Build for Interoperability: Support integrations, open APIs, and partnerships that empower users and business customers.
Resist Dark Patterns: Avoid manipulative UX designed to trap users; prioritize trust and long-term loyalty.
Plan for Regulation: Stay ahead of regulatory trends (GDPR, antitrust, platform liability) and design for compliance and fairness.
Measure Real Value: Focus on metrics that reflect genuine user value, not just engagement, extraction, or revenue per user.

🚀 Lessons for Startup Founders

Design for Trust: Build products that users can leave without fear—paradoxically, this increases loyalty and goodwill.
Embrace Openness: Open ecosystems often outcompete closed ones in the long run; interoperability can be a moat.
Avoid the Enshittification Trap: Be vigilant as you scale—don’t let investor or board pressure push you into extractive practices.
Diversify Revenue: Don’t become dependent on a single business customer group (e.g., advertisers); align your incentives with users.
Prepare for Competition: Assume that today’s lock-in can be tomorrow’s liability—build flexibility into your business model.
Lead Ethically: Set a culture that values user rights and long-term societal impact.

✅ Practical Checklist: How Not to Enshittify Your Product

For Engineers

Can users export their data in a useful, documented format?
Are APIs stable, versioned, and respectful of third-party developers?
Are integrations treated as ecosystem value rather than as threats?
Can users migrate away without losing their identity, history, or work?
Are ranking and recommendation systems explainable enough to audit?
Are breaking changes communicated early and honestly?
Is the system designed for user agency, or for dependency?

For Product Managers

Are we improving the user experience or merely increasing extraction?
Are we measuring meaningful user outcomes, or only engagement and revenue?
Are we using dark patterns to hide price increases, cancellations, or data export?
Are we making the product better, or making alternatives harder?
Are business customers paying for real value, or for access to a captive audience?

For Founders

Would users still choose us if switching were easy?
Does our moat protect innovation or trap customers?
Are our investors aligned with long-term trust?
Could our pricing strategy survive real competition?
Are we building a platform, a protocol, or a toll booth?

🧾 Glossary of Key Concepts

API: A structured way for software systems to communicate. Open APIs enable ecosystems; closed APIs can create lock-in.
Antitrust: Laws and policies designed to prevent monopolies and protect competition.
Data Portability: The ability to export and move your data from one service to another.
Dark Pattern: A manipulative design choice that pushes users toward actions they might not freely choose.
Interoperability: The ability of different systems to work together.
Lock-in: A state where leaving a platform is technically, socially, or economically costly.
Monopoly Rent: Extra profit extracted because users or suppliers lack realistic alternatives.
Network Effect: A dynamic where a product becomes more valuable as more people use it.
Platform: A system that mediates interactions between groups, such as buyers and sellers, users and advertisers, or developers and customers.
Protocol: A shared standard that allows independent systems to communicate without requiring one central owner.
Regulatory Capture: When regulators become overly influenced by the industries they regulate.
Shareholder Primacy: The belief that a company’s main duty is to maximize shareholder value.
Switching Cost: The cost—financial, emotional, social, or technical—of moving from one product to another.
Surveillance Capitalism: A business model based on collecting behavioral data and monetizing prediction, targeting, or influence.
Walled Garden: A closed ecosystem controlled by one company.

⚖️ Criticisms of the Book

Strengths

Highly accessible, engaging writing style.
Rich, well-researched historical and contemporary case studies.
Connects technical, economic, and policy perspectives.
Offers practical recommendations for technologists and policymakers.

Weaknesses & Counterarguments

Overemphasis on Regulation: Some critics argue Doctorow underestimates the complexity and unintended consequences of regulation.
Neglects Alternative Business Models: The book focuses on platform failures, but gives less attention to successful open or cooperative models.
Inevitability Debate: Some economists argue that market pressures—not just monopolies—drive enshittification, and that even competitive markets can degrade.
Optimism Gap: Doctorow is hopeful about reform, but some readers may find his policy solutions ambitious given entrenched interests.
Examples May Age: Rapid changes in technology may render some examples outdated, though the underlying framework remains relevant.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff: Explores how tech giants monetize personal data.
The Master Switch — Tim Wu: A history of information empires and cycles of openness and control.
Platform Revolution — Parker, Van Alstyne, Choudary: Explains the economics and dynamics of platform businesses.
The Wealth of Networks — Yochai Benkler: A deep dive into networked information economies.
Who Owns the Future? — Jaron Lanier: Argues for a more equitable digital economy.
Move Fast and Break Things — Jonathan Taplin: Chronicles the rise of digital monopolies.
Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows: Foundational guide to systems thinking.
Technopoly — Neil Postman: Examines technology’s impact on culture and power.
The Attention Merchants — Tim Wu: How businesses monetize human attention.
Antitrust — Amy Klobuchar: Explores the history and future of competition law.
The Big Switch — Nicholas Carr: The shift to cloud computing and its implications.
The Internet Trap — Matthew Hindman: How digital platforms shape public discourse.
The Code — Margaret O’Mara: The political history of Silicon Valley.
Open Standards and the Digital Age — Andrew L. Russell: The history and politics of open standards.
The Platform Society — van Dijck, Poell, de Waal: How platforms transform society.
Digital Minimalism — Cal Newport: Strategies for regaining control from digital platforms.
Radical Markets — Eric Posner & Glen Weyl: Proposes new economic models for digital platforms.
The Shallows — Nicholas Carr: How the internet changes our brains and society.
Data and Goliath — Bruce Schneier: Surveillance, privacy, and power in the digital age.
The People’s Platform — Astra Taylor: Critique of the myth of the open, democratic internet.

📚 Scientific Papers & Further Reading

Katz, M. & Shapiro, C. (1985). “Network Externalities, Competition, and Compatibility.” American Economic Review.
Rochet, J.-C. & Tirole, J. (2003). “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets.” Journal of the European Economic Association.
Farrell, J. & Klemperer, P. (2007). “Coordination and Lock-In: Competition with Switching Costs and Network Effects.” Handbook of Industrial Organization.
Shapiro, C. & Varian, H. (1998). Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Wu, T. (2010). The Master Switch.
Parker, G., Van Alstyne, M., & Choudary, S. (2016). Platform Revolution.
Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks.
Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in Systems.
Posner, E. & Weyl, G. (2018). Radical Markets.
Stigler Committee on Digital Platforms (2019). “Final Report.”
European Commission (2020). “Digital Markets Act.”
Authors to explore: Jean Tirole, Carl Shapiro, Hal Varian, Tim Wu, Shoshana Zuboff, Yochai Benkler.

💬 Notable Quotes & Paraphrased Ideas

“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.”

“The incentives change—not because people become evil, but because the system rewards extraction over service.” (paraphrased)
“Lock-in is more profitable than innovation.” (paraphrased)
“Network effects are a double-edged sword: they can build empires, and they can entrench abuse.” (paraphrased)
“APIs are open when platforms need growth, and closed when they want control.” (paraphrased)
“The final stage of platform life is extraction: users and business customers are both squeezed for shareholder gain.” (paraphrased)
“Regulatory capture is the silent partner of monopoly power.” (paraphrased)
“Surveillance is not a side-effect, it’s the business model.” (paraphrased)
“Interoperability is the antidote to enshittification.” (paraphrased)
“Antitrust is not just about prices—it’s about freedom, innovation, and user choice.” (paraphrased)
“Shareholder primacy is the logic that turns good products bad.” (paraphrased)
“Switching costs are the invisible chains that bind users to platforms.” (paraphrased)
“Open standards are the oxygen of a healthy internet.” (paraphrased)
“Every platform is a protocol, until it becomes a product, until it becomes a prison.” (paraphrased)
“Reddit’s API revolt is a warning to every developer and user.” (paraphrased)
“AI platforms are poised to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.” (paraphrased)
“Competition is the best consumer protection.” (paraphrased)
“When you can’t leave, you stop being the customer and start being the product.” (paraphrased)
“We can choose a better internet—if we fight for it.” (paraphrased)
“The internet’s decline is not inevitable, but the result of choices we can unmake.” (paraphrased)

📝 Conclusion

The deepest lesson of Enshittification is that technology is never just technology. Every API, every search ranking, every default setting, every export tool, every app store rule, every pricing tier, and every recommendation algorithm encodes a theory of power. The question is whether that power serves users, communities, creators, and markets—or whether it slowly turns them into resources to be mined.

For software engineers, the book is a reminder that architecture has ethics. For product managers, it is a warning that growth metrics can hide ecosystem decay. For founders, it is a challenge to build companies whose moats do not become cages. For policymakers, it is a call to treat digital platforms not merely as private apps, but as social and economic infrastructure.

Enshittification is a must-read for anyone who builds, invests in, or regulates technology. Doctorow’s analysis is essential for software engineers seeking to understand the long-term consequences of design and business choices; for founders and investors wanting to avoid the fate of so many platforms that lost their way; and for policymakers grappling with the challenge of restoring competition, openness, and user rights to the digital world. The book’s blend of economic theory, technical insight, and real-world case studies offers a clear framework for understanding why “everything suddenly got worse”—and what we can do to reclaim the internet before the next wave of enshittification takes hold.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5) — Essential reading for technologists, founders, and anyone who cares about the future of the internet.