This article appears in the October 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
By Cory Doctorow
MCD
Five years ago this October, the richest man in China “disappeared.” Rumors swirled that he had been sent to a “re-education camp.” The Atlantic dubbed it “The Undoing of China’s Economic Miracle.” Alibaba founder Jack Ma was, the American Enterprise Institute wrote, a casualty of “China’s Takeover of Western Capitalism.”
Cory Doctorow had a different view. In a 56-part thread on Twitter, the British-Canadian novelist-polymath explained how Jack Ma’s retreat was part of a broader campaign by the Chinese government to preserve its money supply from the whims of the yield-chasing ultra-wealthy.
The day I started reading Enshittification, Doctorow’s bleak nonfiction treatise on how and why Big Tech platforms are “all turning into piles of shit, all at once,” the exiled Ma made a shocking comeback. Alibaba, the platform he had founded to connect small and medium-sized manufacturers with international wholesalers and retailers, announced it had developed a proprietary semiconductor that would enable the company to wean itself off Nvidia’s H20 chips, which are critical processors for AI development and whose trade is closely monitored and restricted by wary authorities on both sides of the Pacific. Just a few days later, the federal judge who had called Google Search an illegal monopoly issued a ruling stating that he had no intention of doing anything about it.
Google is a main character in Enshittification. In 1999, the year after its founders published their idea for a search algorithm as an academic research paper, they hired a guy named Ben Gomes to figure out how to crawl enough web pages to catch up with then-dominant Yahoo and AltaVista. Twenty years later, an exec named Prabhakar Raghavan, who’d come to Google from a post as Yahoo’s chief of strategy, issued a “code yellow” to address what he saw as an emergency: Growth in Google search queries had plateaued.
Gomes was incredulous, noting in an email:
We could increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways (turn off spell correction, turn off ranking improvements, place refinements all over the page) … But I will say that I am deeply deeply uncomfortable with this, and I’d be surprised if the ads team wants this. The nature of how you would easily increase queries is a key reason I don’t like queries as an end metric. The easy ways are almost all bad. Having queries as a metric will, in my opinion, have a subtly bad effect as a launch metric even if we “decide not to do the bad things.”
By this point, of course, Google had decided to do the bad things many, many times, often in collaboration with Facebook and Apple. It paid Apple as much as $20 billion in 2021 to make its search engine the default on the iPhone and its Safari browser, thus ensuring that the only company that feasibly could launch a competing search engine would be fiduciarily obliged not to. It conspired with Facebook to manipulate the market for internet advertising in sometimes shameless ways that extracted extreme and often fatal amounts of cash from both advertisers and online publishers (Google has also been ruled a monopolist in the online advertising market; a trial determining the penalty is in progress). It secretly worked with the military to develop AI-based targeting for drone strikes, and with sources close to the CCP on a since-abandoned project to build a Great Firewall–compatible version of Google. And in spite of its wholesome academic corporate culture, Google executives gaslit and marginalized employees who reported top executives for sexual predation, paying a $310 million fine in 2020.
And so, when faced with the choice of degrading its flagship search engine to goose ad revenue or listening to one of its most venerated executives, it won’t shock you to learn what Google did next: It demoted Gomes, named Raghavan as his replacement, and condemned Google’s flagship search product, the very soul of its business, to the scourge of “enshittification.”
DOCTOROW COINED THE TERM “ENSHITTIFICATION” in 2022, though it was hardly a new phenomenon even then. Facebook had started burying all posts with external hyperlinks in 2017 in a bid to force users to spend more time with its lousy ads; Apple had been purposely sabotaging the quality of iMessage texts since at least 2013; Amazon had retooled its search results to aggressively preference sellers who had spent heavily on ads, and de-emphasized price comparisons, which were replaced with a price-hiking algorithm called Project Nessie starting in 2015. (After four years, Amazon dropped Nessie, perhaps presuming they could hit their benchmarks by milking third-party sellers for an ever larger cut of their revenues.)
Massive internet platforms aside, companies like Boeing and GE had been enshittifying for years, in arguably a direct descendant of “planned obsolescence,” a term whose first usage I could find came from a 1929 Christian Science Monitor essay contemplating the fashion industry’s exhausting habit of raising and lowering hemlines.
But the era of enshitment clearly started to accelerate in the early post-pandemic period, as evidenced by the parallel output of intellectual kindred spirit Yanis Varoufakis, who Doctorow reminds us worked for a video game developer after resigning his post as the finance minister of Greece, to identify and analyze an epidemic of algorithm-abetted parasitism he called “technofeudalism,” another description of the business model behind enshittification.
Both Technofeudalism and Enshittification owe much inspiration to Elon Musk’s leveraged buyout of Twitter, where Doctorow has nearly a half million followers and Varoufakis has 1.2 million. For the Greek economist, Musk’s self-destructive pursuit of Twitter, which destroyed his personal brand and tanked Tesla sales, was definitive proof that something fundamental had changed about the sociology of capitalism.
“If I had to name one person to illustrate the need for technofeudalism, both word and concept, in order to understand our collective predicament, it would be Elon Musk,” Varoufakis wrote in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. “For all his success as manufacturer, and despite attaining richest-man-in-the-world status, neither his achievements nor his wealth granted him entry into the new ruling class … he has lacked a gateway to the gigantic rents that cloud capital can furnish. Twitter could be that missing gateway.”
From Doctorow, a former software programmer and son of a programmer, one gets the sense that the lightning speed with which Musk’s takeover plunged users into a disorienting cesspool of self-righteous ethno-supremacists, crypto influencers, race science sock puppets, and obnoxious relentless scam ads—then asked them to pay $8 a month for the privilege of not getting shadow banned—offended something deep and personal in a man who is not easily offended. One day, he arose to find that some Musk minion had added a blue check mark to his profile free of charge, something “that had come to mean ‘I am someone who tolerates—or even likes—Musk’s unhinged management of Twitter and/or his personal views on race, immigration, gender, and workers’ rights. I am voluntarily giving money to the Hitler-salute guy, every month.’” That pissed him off even more.
Platform barons like Jeff Bezos have actually transcended conventional capitalism to install themselves as post-risk tollbooth operators.
Twitter was just the crest of a tidal wave of software companies suddenly charging subscription fees to access services that had once either been one-time purchases or supported by ads. Doctorow helpfully explains how enshittifiers are enabled by the ludicrous architecture of Bubble 1.0-era legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it illegal to “break a digital lock” and enables copyright holders to press felony charges against users who somehow enable others to break said locks. The DMCA is the legal backbone of every company, like Apple, that renders it effectively impossible to repair their products without hauling them in to an explicitly certified Apple feudal fiefdom. Each tiny component of an Apple phone or watch is engraved with microscopic logos that Apple then uses to lodge copyright infringement complaints against unauthorized repair shops that buy old phones for their parts; the argument is that unauthorized repairs jeopardize the brand’s image.
The DMCA is also the reason McDonald’s franchisees were barred from repairing their own failure-prone McFlurry machines. Doctorow smells DMCA’s influence in Adobe’s abrupt 2022 announcement that it would begin charging $21 a month for the privilege of accessing certain colors, and DoorDash’s legal harassment of Para, Inc., an app founded by a former Uber employee that before its abrupt shutdown last spring enabled gig workers to view tips that had been prepaid by DoorDash users but concealed from them to prevent them knowing whether a job is worth doing. At its peak, DoorDash detailed a team of 40 full-time engineers to blocking Para from accessing tip data. (DoorDash lawyers additionally accused Para of “tortious interference” and violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but only the DMCA is a sufficiently terrifying statute to have likely convinced the moderators of the DoorDash driver subreddit to ban all discussion of the app and excommunicate any poster who mentioned it.)
“Manufacturers of every description are scrambling to find ways to infuse ‘IP’ into their products in order to allow them to mobilize the courts and federal law enforcement to turn their shareholders’ financial interest into legal obligations,” Doctorow writes, and “an app is a website wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to install an ad blocker or any other modification that makes the product work better for you at the expense of a company’s shareholders.”
IN GRANTING APPS THE RIGHT to wield the absurdities of intellectual property law to legally bully their users, Doctorow argues, the government emboldened tech founders to view their companies as exempt from laws and regulations they choose to ignore. Like the ones requiring worker minimum wages, or banning companies from misclassifying employees as independent contractors to circumvent labor law, or outlawing interest on a $2,000 loan in excess of 36 percent, which is the law in most states. Or, for that matter, the ones that bar Anthropic from feeding terabyte upon terabyte of copyrighted content to train addictive chatbots, safe in the knowledge that the captured IP bar will convince class action lawyers to settle a half-million author claims for one-time payments totaling all of $3,000, whilst happily supplying media quotes about how “sobering” the act of watching liability insurance premiums tick gently upward will be for the $183 billion startup backed by Google and Amazon, leaving the beaten-down federal judge presiding over the case to rant about the latest obscene humiliation ritual to which BigLaw is demanding his submission.
Both Doctorow and Varoufakis insist that Enshittified Technofeudalism is something qualitatively different from plain old “capitalism,” which after all gave the world such wonders as chattel slavery and the synthetic collateralized debt obligation squared. The insidious, extractive, heads-I-win-tails-you-lose tyranny of Varoufakis’s technofeudal lords and Doctorow’s algorithmic tip thieves and royalty check bandits has always been with us, but a couple of generations ago we read about their deeds in plain language in the newspapers, painstakingly pieced together by organized-crime task forces and fraud watchdogs. The internet added layers of plausible deniability and egghead inscrutability to those narratives, while professional eggheads (née economists) promised legislators that the miracles of modern markets had rendered regulation effectively obsolete, while assuring hedge fund investors they had rendered risk itself obsolete.
Enshittification and Technofeudalism detail how platform barons like Jeff Bezos have actually transcended conventional capitalism to install themselves as post-risk tollbooth operators, siphoning an increasing cut of the revenues of economic activity of others on their platforms. Amazon takes an average of 45 percent of the gross sales of its hundreds of thousands of third-party sellers, a state of affairs Varoufakis accurately describes as unprecedented.
By comparison, Jack Ma’s Alibaba facilitated nearly three times the dollar volume of gross sales on its platform in 2022, but historically generates less than a third of Amazon’s operating profits; sellers pay the platform an annual subscription fee but are charged less than 1 percent of sales in transaction fees. Perhaps that is why Ma decided in the heady days of zero interest rates to diversify into data-driven predatory microloans, which is how he wound up running afoul of the CCP. (That, and his sneering criticism of Chinese bank regulators’ “pawn shop mentality,” which is admittedly nicer than anything David Sacks ever said about Rohit Chopra.)
Alibaba stock plunged, Ma’s net worth along with it. He later surfaced teaching classes in Japan about sustainable agriculture. SoftBank divested its stake in the company, albeit more due to limiting WeWork-driven losses than choice. It ultimately turned out that a billionaire had been using Alibaba’s fintech platforms to transfer vast sums of rich clients’ wealth into offshore slush funds, all from his jail cell; perhaps Ma’s courageous words of “dissent” were not primarily the driver of the Chinese government’s decision to cancel the fintech platform’s IPO.
By 2021, Alibaba was back in the government’s good graces, premiering a new “digital yuan,” likely the first-ever example of an actually useful stablecoin; by 2025, he was meeting with Xi Jinping and giving conference keynotes encouraging attendees to remember their “ethics” and think of AI as a tool to “empower, not replace” workers. Such sentiments were relatively standard in World Economic Forum circles a decade ago, but seem downright radical alongside Enshittification’s nauseating email exchanges between Musk and his buddies about all the Twitter engineers he can’t wait to axe. Imagine if we could sentence them all to re-education camp.
This article appears in Oct 2025 Issue.