Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
by Cory Doctorow
Why your favorite app got worse on purpose.
For you if
you have watched every platform you loved turn to garbage and suspected it was not an accident.
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The word enshittification hit different because it named something everyone had been feeling without language for it — the moment when a favorite app goes from useful to annoying to actively hostile, not by accident but because the people running it decided their users were a resource to harvest, not people to serve. Doctorow traces the mechanics of how this happens every single time: platforms attract users, then squeeze them to attract businesses, then squeeze both to extract maximum value for shareholders. The book is half diagnosis, half manifesto — and the second half, about what to do about it, is the part that earns it a place on the shelf.
Where This Book Lives
The word came first — Doctorow coined enshittification in 2022 as a technical term for why platforms decay, and it won word of the year from the American Dialect Society in 2023. The book is the full argument behind the word: not just diagnosis but a theory of change. It belongs in MAKE SOMETHING BETTER as much as SEE THROUGH IT because the second half is genuinely about resistance, regulation, and what a different internet could look like.
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