The Enshittification of the Internet – Why Every Good Platform Eventually Goes Bad.

When you were invited to Twitter, it seemed like an inside joke. While scrolling through it during the initial lockdown in the spring of 2020, there was an odd solace in witnessing strangers laugh in real time. There was a pulse in the feed. A comedian and a virologist could argue; they are both correct in different ways. Then the lights abruptly went out. Not all at once. The dimming occurred gradually, the way old hotels begin to smell slightly of moisture before anyone acknowledges that the carpet needs to be replaced.

Your grandmother would scowl at the term Cory Doctorow uses to describe this slow rot. He refers to it as enshittification. It is intended to sound crude. In 2022, he came up with it after witnessing the platforms he had written about for twenty years start to devour their own clientele. Nothing else fit, so the term became popular. “Decline” was too gentle. “Decay” had a passive tone. The state of the internet was anything but passive. According to him, it was a tactic.

You cannot unsee the three stages of his framework’s movement once you’ve seen them. First, a platform is actually beneficial to its users: Uber undercuts taxis, Facebook shows you your friends, and Amazon ships books at a low cost. The platform then shifts to satisfy business clients, keeping locked-in users in check. publishers, drivers, sellers, and advertisers. The platform then takes back value from those business clients in the last act, squeezing everyone—users and vendors alike—for what little is left. The winners are the shareholders. The equivalent of stale lobby coffee is served to everyone else.

If you experience any of this in your own life, the diagnosis becomes clear. The answer is now hidden behind four advertisements, an AI summary you didn’t request, and a wall of SEO sludge in Google Search, which was once almost unsettlingly accurate. Instagram Reels continue to display content that you actively detest. Spotify tests how many advertisements it can fit into a free hour while paying artists pennies on the dollar. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly, but you have the impression that the tools are using you more than you are using them.

The fact that we remain is the cruelest part. Doctorow points to what economists call the collective action problem — you’re on Facebook because your aunt is on Facebook, and your aunt is on Facebook because of her bridge group, and nobody moves first. Not every lock-in is a contract. Sometimes it’s just other people’s gravity. Network effects, switching costs, the slow accumulation of photos and DMs and saved playlists you cannot reasonably extract. As one writer put it, “Welcome to the Hotel Crapifornia.” The door sticks, but you can check out.

It’s easy to interpret all of this as a tale of bad CEOs, and Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter—which was rebranded, vandalized, and monetized—provided the theory with its most prominent case study. However, Doctorow’s reasoning is more acute than his personality. He maintains that enshittification is the outcome of poor policies that led to poor systems. The demise of interoperability, decades of lax antitrust enforcement, and laws that make it illegal to jailbreak your own devices. When those barriers are removed, platforms act just like you would expect.

It’s really unclear if any of this can be undone. The EU’s Digital Markets Act, Bluesky’s quiet expansion, and a slowly growing desire to dismantle the giants are all signs of hope. However, convenience is a potent drug, and habits are obstinate. As this develops, it’s difficult to avoid wondering if the upcoming ten years will see a true correction or merely a more refined form of decay. In any case, the word has arrived. After you acquire it, you begin to see it everywhere.