The first thing Mia noticed was the silence.
Her Instagram feed, once a messy, brilliant collage of friends, art, and late-night memes, had turned into a scrolling graveyard of ads, “recommended” junk, and rage-bait videos she would never have chosen. She opened Amazon to escape and got hit with knockoff products, fake reviews, and AI-written “summaries” of the book she actually wanted.[1][2]
Somewhere between the tenth ad and the twentieth low-effort “For You” post, Mia realized: it wasn’t just her. The internet itself felt… broken.
Welcome to enshittification — the word, coined by writer Cory Doctorow, for the way big platforms slowly rot from the inside out.[5][2]
What “Enshittification” Really Means
Enshittification is not a vibe. It is a pattern.
Doctorow defines it as the way two-sided platforms — places that connect users and businesses, like Amazon, Facebook, or Uber — steadily decay in quality over time.[5][3]
The cycle looks like this:[2][3][5]
-
Stage One: Be good to users.
Platforms start out great. They’re cheap, open, even delightful. They promise privacy, free shipping, chronological feeds, genuine search results. -
Stage Two: Shift value to business customers.
Once users are “locked in” — because all their friends, data, or purchases are there — platforms start prioritizing advertisers and sellers. More ads. More tracking. More pay-to-play. -
Stage Three: Squeeze everyone for shareholders.
When businesses are locked in too, platforms squeeze them as well: higher fees, worse terms, opaque algorithms, and endless upsells — while users drown in junk.[2][3][4]
The end state is simple and brutal: the service becomes bad for users and bad for business customers, but everyone is trapped while the owners extract maximum profit.[1][2][5]
How Big Tech Pulled It Off
This did not happen by accident. It happened because the guardrails came off.
After the 2008 financial crash, tech companies tapped into huge amounts of cheap money.[2] They could afford to lose billions to do one thing: kill competition and lock people in. Loss-making “free shipping,” subsidized rides, underpriced streaming, and venture-funded growth weren’t generosity; they were weapons.[2][3]
Then, one by one, the restraints that used to hold corporate behavior in check were dismantled:[1][3][4][7]
- Competition law (antitrust) was gutted, allowing mergers and monopolies that would once have been blocked.[3][4]
- Regulation fell behind, leaving governments largely reactive and outgunned.
- Right to repair was weakened; companies used digital locks and legal threats to stop users from fixing or modifying devices.[1][3][4]
- Worker power eroded. Tech union density is now so low it’s “barely charted,” as one analysis put it, making it easier for executives to ship abusive designs and products over internal resistance.[1][7]
“Tech was the first sector to grow up without competition law looking over its shoulder,” Doctorow argues.[3] In an environment like that, enshittification isn’t a bug. It’s the business model.
The Hidden Mechanics of Decay
Under the hood, the process is chillingly calculated.
-
Lock-in and switching costs
Network effects — the value you get from everyone being on the same platform — become handcuffs.[3][5] Your friends, your customers, your digital library, your devices: all trapped. Leaving Facebook or Amazon isn’t like changing brands of cereal; it’s like moving your entire social life or storefront overnight. -
Algorithmic choke points
Platform algorithms decide who sees what, and at what price. Over time, those dials are turned toward whatever maximizes short-term revenue: more ads, more “engagement,” more polarizing or addictive content.[4][5] -
Legal and technical control
One garage-door company remotely killed an open standard that let users control their doors with any app, then forced them into its own ad-filled app that hoovers up data.[3] That kind of move isn’t rare anymore; it’s a template.
As one fictional analyst in Brussels put it to me:
“Once a platform controls the rails — the app store, the search ranking, the social graph — every other actor is just a tenant. And tenants pay rent.”
Mia’s World: When Enshittification Hits Home
For Mia, a freelance illustrator, the shift was personal.
Her Instagram engagement halved when the platform began aggressively pushing viral “slop” over posts from people she actually followed.[2][5] To reach the audience she once had for free, she now had to pay to “boost” posts — into the same clutter she hated.
On Amazon, her small art-print shop saw fees rise toward 45 percent once ads and logistics charges were factored in.[2] She had to buy ads just to appear in search results on her own product keywords — competing against low-quality knockoffs.
At night, she doomscrolled streaming apps, where every movie choice was a battle against auto-playing trailers, algorithmic bait, and disappearing titles.
Her internet wasn’t broken by a single catastrophic event. It was bled out, one dark pattern and one policy change at a time.
The Pushback: Regulators, Workers, and Users Fight Back
The story isn’t all decline.
Governments are starting to wake up:
- Antitrust regulators in the US and EU have launched aggressive cases targeting app-store abuses, self-preferencing in search, and anti-competitive mergers.[3][4]
- Right-to-repair laws are emerging in multiple regions, pushing back against corporate control over devices.[1][4]
- Digital markets acts aim to stop gatekeepers from unfairly favoring their own services.
Inside companies, some workers have tried to resist surveillance features, dark patterns, and exploitative AI tools — though their power has often been blunted by layoffs and anti-union tactics.[1][7]
And users are getting savvier: switching to open-source tools, privacy-first browsers, ad-blockers, and community-owned platforms. It’s still fringe, but every exodus — from Twitter to alternative social networks, from WhatsApp to encrypted messengers — sends a signal.
What’s Next — And Could It Happen Again?
Enshittification thrives when three things align: concentrated power, weak rules, and trapped users.[1][2][3] Change any of those, and the pattern can break.
Experts point to a few levers:[1][3][4][7]
- Rebuild real competition by blocking predatory mergers and forcing interoperability — making it easier to leave without losing your social graph or purchases.
- Strengthen user rights, including data portability and repair rights.
- Empower workers inside tech firms so “do the right thing” isn’t a career-ending slogan.
- Support public and cooperative alternatives that aren’t built solely around shareholder extraction.
But there is a darker possibility: that the next wave — AI-powered assistants, smart homes, connected cars — will follow the same script, only faster.
The platforms of tomorrow will be even more deeply woven into daily life than social media or online shopping are today. Once your car, your fridge, your job, and your kids’ education run through a handful of gatekeepers, the cost of enshittification won’t just be a worse feed. It will be your autonomy.
So the real question isn’t whether the internet has been enshittified.
It’s this: now that we finally see the pattern, are we willing to break it — or will we let the next generation inherit an internet they can’t stand, but can’t escape?
FAQ
What is enshittification in tech?
Enshittification is a pattern where online platforms start out great, then gradually get worse for users and business customers as they’re optimized to extract maximum profit for owners and shareholders.[2][3][5]
Why did big tech platforms get worse over time?
According to analysts, weakened antitrust laws, cheap post-2008 financing, network lock-in, and the erosion of worker and consumer power let tech giants prioritize growth and extraction over user experience.[1][2][3][4]
Which companies are examples of enshittification?
Commentators frequently cite Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, Uber, DoorDash, and major social media platforms as examples of once-good services that have become more ad-heavy, restrictive, and extractive over time.[1][2][3][4][5]
How does enshittification affect regular users and small businesses?
Users get more ads, worse search results, privacy invasion, and subscription creep, while small businesses face rising fees, pay-to-play visibility, and opaque algorithms that can erase their income overnight.[1][2][4]
Can governments stop enshittification?
Regulators are trying through antitrust cases, digital markets rules, and right-to-repair laws, but experts argue they must go further to ensure interoperability, data portability, and real competition.[1][3][4]
What can individuals do about enshittification?
People can support regulation, adopt open or community-owned tools, use privacy protections, and collectively migrate away from abusive platforms — actions that become more powerful when done in groups rather than alone.[1][3][7]