Giant Platforms of Shit

Dave Mandl catches a whiff of Cory Doctorow’s anatomy of platform “enshittification.”

By Dave MandlNovember 5, 2025

• Science & Technology

TO ANYONE WHO has been on the internet regularly during the last 15 years or so, it should be clear that “the user experience,” as it’s called, has grown increasingly unpleasant. However, referring to this as an “internet” problem vastly understates its scope. It’s an everything problem, given that nearly everything we do now either happens on the internet or is mediated by it in some way: shopping, socializing, reading, checking the news, watching “television,” listening to music. And nearly all of these experiences have been declining in one way or another.

Of course, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. There are powerful forces afoot with the very real goal of making things worse—because, in many cases, there’s money to be made. Tech critic Cory Doctorow’s term for this trend is “enshittification,” a word that has entered the lexicon so quickly and thoroughly that it was declared the 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. In his new book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Doctorow illuminates the enshittification process of internet apps and platforms—everything from Facebook to Amazon to Google to Microsoft Office to the Apple App Store. He defines that process very precisely, as follows:

1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. Then, they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.

As Doctorow observes, these products and apps are often created with good intentions—or, at the least, designed to deliver something of value both to users and to business customers (advertisers, for example). But as the impulse to boost the bottom line becomes irresistible, the companies slowly, and then with alacrity, implement strategies to increase profits. This invariably worsens the users’ experience while benefiting business customers. And then, once all avenues for wresting value from users have been exhausted, the company proceeds to, put frankly, screw their business customers. Eventually, the platform becomes little more than a money-extraction machine—a hellscape for users and a barely profitable but inescapable black hole for business customers. In short: a “giant pile of shit” for everyone involved.

How is this not only possible but also common? No one is being forced to do business with, or use the platforms run by, these companies. Can’t we simply vote with our feet?

Take the example of Facebook. For users, leaving the platform, as the company is aware, is next to impossible because of various internet and network dynamics. The main hurdle is switching costs: when all your friends (possibly thousands of them) and mutual interest groups (possibly dozens of them) conduct their lives on Facebook, you can’t simply quit. After all, this would potentially terminate most of your relationships and social contacts. Can you convince all those people to up and leave with you? Very unlikely. And where would you all go? How easy would it be to recreate those connections in a new space? (This is known as the collective action problem.)

With an effectively captive audience of users numbering in the billions, Facebook can thus act with impunity. It can, for instance, get away with shoveling a steady stream of junk into feeds. And by surveilling a user’s every movement online (something that, back during Enshittification Stage 1, it promised it would never do), the platform can provide valuable personal data to its business customers, allowing them to engage in finely targeted advertising at the expense of not just users’ experience but their privacy as well.

Before you start hating on the advertisers and publishers responsible for the stream of junk fed to you on Facebook, you should be aware that they themselves have fared little better. Advertising rates have skyrocketed even as the presentation of ads has become sloppier; increasingly, they are shown to random users whom the advertisers hadn’t intended to target, while not being shown to the audiences advertisers had paid to target. When, “in 2018, Procter & Gamble zeroed out its $200 million annual ‘programmatic advertising’ budget,” Doctorow reports, the company’s sales did not decline at all. No one seems to understand why, or indeed how any of this works, because Facebook’s algorithms are shrouded in secrecy.

As for publishers such as news sites, Facebook has over the last several years required longer and longer excerpts of their articles to appear on its site. This means that it is now unnecessary for users to jump to the publishers’ own sites, which was the whole reason for publishing excerpts on Facebook in the first place. Eventually, even the longer excerpts were randomly suppressed, with publishers forced to pay extra to have their content “boosted” on Facebook. And so, we reach Enshittification Stage 4.

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The stories at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple (mainly through its App Store) differ in their specifics but, as depicted by Doctorow, follow the same general pattern. In the case of Amazon, which is possibly even more shameless than Facebook, the company used predatory pricing to drive out competition, charged such high fees to third-party vendors that these could scarcely make any profit at all, dictated the prices that vendors could charge for their products anywhere (thus affecting consumers even outside of Amazon), and treated their delivery drivers like factory farm animals, monitoring their eye movements and, as has been well publicized, imposing such strict schedules that their peeing in bottles became the norm. Google has long since become an advertising platform rather than a “search engine,” with the mistreatment of users and advertisers alike rendering the site almost unusable. Items appear at the top of search results simply because Google has been paid to put them there. Results have been intentionally broken so that users are forced to do multiple searches, with each search presenting a new set of ads. Users of YouTube, owned by Google, are so inundated with junk that ad blockers for the app have become a virtual necessity. Meanwhile, the company has done its best to crush its non-enshittified competition.

Despite these similarities, Doctorow’s map of the steps to enshittification suffers somewhat from being too neat. These companies will pursue greater profits wherever and whenever opportunity knocks, and not necessarily in a set sequence of steps: they are just as likely to make things worse for their paying customers before rather than after their users have been squeezed dry. The order is not so important; what is critical to the process, though, is the creation of monopolies, which enable user and customer captivity. The screwed-over parties then have little choice but to stick around and be abused.

Still, what is perhaps most striking—and where the book truly succeeds—is in Doctorow’s detailed anatomy of enshittification, his comprehensive account of the sheer inventiveness of Facebook and the others, which makes 19th- or 20th-century robber barons seem tame by comparison. Their audacious overreach is enabled in part by their ability to operate in uncharted legal waters. Consumer protection laws and regulations enacted in decades and centuries past often don’t apply in the age of the smartphone app. And among the regulations that have been enacted more recently, some have either been overly industry-friendly or have loopholes big enough to drive the proverbial tractor trailer through. For example, printer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard can prevent you from buying cheaper substitutes for its outrageously expensive printer cartridges (ink: $10,000 per gallon) because the cartridges have computer chips inside them. Those chips run a computer program designed to ensure that you’re not using a non-HP cartridge, and bypassing that program is a felony under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. An innovation like charging monthly or yearly “rent” for computer apps (rather than allowing consumers to purchase them outright) forces users to pay a growing number of companies such as Adobe many times what they used to charge, for software that they can never actually own. A similar situation prevails with ebooks, where the sellers can, if the mood strikes, simply reach into your library and repossess an electronic book you’ve bought and paid for. At present, such action appears to be completely legal.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly given its subtitle, Enshittification concludes with an exposition on What Can Be Done. Doctorow seems genuinely optimistic about the prospects for reversing the global enshittification process. First, he believes that the general legal-societal trend is bending toward stronger antitrust regulation. In the second Trump era, it’s hard not to be cynical here (it should be noted that Doctorow wrote most of the book before Donald Trump’s reelection).

Nonetheless, Doctorow insists that he remains right overall. The Biden administration, he notes, backed a significant antitrust agenda before the MAGA takeover brought it to a halt. As I write this, Facebook and Apple are settling antitrust cases with European regulators. For Doctorow, then, the halt is to be interpreted as temporary. He points as well to likely reform in the current rat’s nest of intellectual property law. Tech-savvy consumers are, he brightly notes, waking up to the fact that the IP playing field is blatantly tilted against them.

Doctorow is confident, too, that the long decline of unions in the United States may soon see a reversal. The era of the pampered, extravagantly compensated geek seems to be ending, he points out, which may wake that sector of the population to the fact that they are workers with some power over their employers. To date, much of the sporadic but significant resistance inside tech firms to those companies’ most egregious policies has been quickly quelled: Google scientist and AI researcher Timnit Gebru was fired after publishing a paper critical of the company; Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, was fired after grumbling about the company’s plan to make the results of searches worse. Yet unionized techies are unlikely to be so easily silenced.

For its occasional flaws, Doctorow has performed a valuable public service with Enshittification. The evils uncovered here represent a disturbing and accelerating trend in the wrong direction. The sooner we wake up to the nature of this trend, the sooner we will stop, like the Simpsons character in a now-ubiquitous meme, shaking our fists at the sky, and act to reverse the tide. A tax on breathing is not inevitable.