How to Save the Internet From “Enshittification”

The activist and writer Cory Doctorow spoke to Jacobin about the steady decline of the “enshittified” internet and what we can do to save it.

---

There are very few people that have written as consistently and incisively about the internet and its broken promises than the digital rights activist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow. His new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, explains what ruined, and is continuing to ruin, the web. Jacobin spoke to Doctorow about the origin of the neologism he coined, and how the process of enshittification is beginning to spread from screens to physical reality.

---

Bartolomeo Sala

You start your book by saying: “It is not just you, the internet is getting worse, fast.” You’re adamant enshittification is not the result of vaguely related phenomena but a precise logic that repeats with clockwork precision. In your book, you describe “enshittification” as a three-stage process and then use Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Apple as examples of once good services that have become obnoxious rent-seeking operations. Can you give us a brief definition of enshittification and how this process takes root in practice?

Cory Doctorow

My book Enshittification does three things: offers a description of how platforms go bad; a theory about why they’re all going bad now and why it’s so hard to leave them; and finally, a prescription for what to do about it.

You have platforms that are good to their end users to lure them in, while finding a way to lock them in. Once they’re lured in and locked in, the platform makes things worse for them,…