October 28, 2025

Hi readers, happy Tuesday! Cameron Peters here. 

Today, I wanted to spotlight a great conversation my colleague Sean Illing had recently with Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

Doctorow coined the term to describe the way the internet can feel like it's decaying around us. He talked with Sean about what enshittification looks like, how it's spreading, and the impact it's had on our politics: 

⮕ Start here

Why every website feels worse now

Sean Illing

What is “enshittification”? Give me the cleanest definition.

Cory Doctorow

At the descriptive level, it’s a pattern in how platforms go bad. First, they’re great to end users. Then they find ways to lock those users in — switching costs, network effects, contracts, DRM — and once users are stuck, the company makes the product worse for them to extract more value. Next, they use that surplus to woo business customers (advertisers, sellers, creators), lock them in, and start making the product worse for the business side too. Eventually, everyone is trapped and the platform turns into a pile of crap. You can see this in places as different as Google, Facebook, Uber, and Amazon.

The more interesting question is: Why now? Greed isn’t new. Venture capital isn’t new. What changed were the constraints on firms, especially the degree of competition and the legal environment that lets platforms “twiddle” the experience for each user, while blocking users and rivals from pushing back.

Sean Illing

When did the “great enshittification” begin? Can you put a stake in the ground?

Cory Doctorow

There are obvious post-enshittification moments. In 2019, for example, Google had 90 percent market share in search, growth had stalled, and an executive pitched a strategy to make search worse so users would have to run multiple queries and see more ads. That’s enshittification in a nutshell — and we all kept using Google anyway.

But it’s not a single date. The defining feature isn’t “things got worse” — it’s “things got worse and we stayed.” The preconditions — consolidation, policy choices, and legal shields — built up over years.

Sean Illing

Why do we keep using products after they get worse? Why not just leave?

Cory Doctorow

The galaxy-brain answer blames consumers for “shopping wrong,” or says, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” That’s not it. The real story is diminished constraint [on market consolidation]. It’s hard to take your business elsewhere when there is nowhere else to go.

That was policy-driven. Facebook’s purchase of Instagram is the classic example. Mark Zuckerberg literally wrote that people were leaving Facebook for Instagram and that buying Instagram would keep them as Facebook users even if they never touched Facebook again. That’s an antitrust admission in plain English. And yet the Obama administration waved it through, just as the Bush and Trump administrations green-lit their own waves of consolidation.

Sean Illing

You emphasize that this corrosion is especially intense on platforms. Why are platforms such fertile soil for enshittification?

Cory Doctorow

Because platforms sit between two groups that need each other: end users and business customers. That intermediation is useful, and most of us don’t want to process payments or write our own mail servers just to publish a newsletter. But digital platforms have a unique superpower: They can change the business logic on a per-user, per-interaction basis. I call this “twiddling.”

Platforms can constantly tweak what you see and what you pay, while users and independent developers are barred from looking under the hood or restoring balance.

Sean Illing

Is this just a platform story, or is everything enshittifying?

Cory Doctorow

It’s spreading. When Jeff Bezos wants to change Amazon Fresh prices, he moves a slider. When he wants to change a Whole Foods shelf, he needs an army with price guns — unless the shelf labels are e-ink tags, which are rolling out everywhere. Once a sector is digitized, it’s platformized — and the twiddling follows. That’s how you get “dynamic” prices for fast food or “surge” pricing at the drive-thru. Even when companies walk back the PR, the trial balloon shows what’s technologically trivial and what’s hard for us to detect without the legal right to inspect the software.

Sean Illing

What is enshittification doing to our politics?

Cory Doctorow

It breeds trauma and nihilism. Ask a vaccine skeptic why they’re skeptical: “Pharma is greedy and would kill us for a nickel; the FDA is captured and will let them.” In the wake of the opioid crisis — where the Sacklers made tens of billions while communities were gutted — that’s not an irrational story. Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization: When there are five firms, they sing from the same hymn sheet; when there are 500, regulators hear discordant demands. Capture produces failure; failure produces trauma; trauma makes people vulnerable to grifters who tell them to tan their perineum and eat horse paste.

People say the answer is “restore trust” in agencies. I think the answer is “make the agencies trustworthy” — and the only way to do that is to break up the firms that captured them and restore healthy rivalry.

Sean Illing

Are we nearing a tipping point where the pendulum swings back toward consumers and sanity?

Cory Doctorow

There’s a finance maxim called Stein’s Law: “If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” You can only extract so much rent before there’s nothing left. What comes next is up for grabs. I don’t do predictions; the future isn’t a place we discover, it’s a place we make. Today, the shared frame is the fight against consolidated corporate power. If we connect the dots — between your crappy search results, your locked-down car, your exploding drug prices, your brittle supply chains, and your polarized feeds — we can build a coalition with enough mass to change the rules.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, staff editor Cameron Peters. Thanks for reading!