Book Review: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow

Have you noticed everything online getting worse? Has the magic gone from your social media experience? Do you wonder why we even use this stuff anymore? Well, you’re not alone. Many of us remember when Amazon only carried products they sold themselves, stood by their service, and treated their customers with respect. Or when Facebook showed us a chronological feed of what our actual friends were doing and the most stressful thing you’d encounter there was a reminder to tend your crops on FarmVille. Or maybe when YouTube was more “Charlie bit my finger” and Llamas with Hats than Mr. Beast and Joe Rogan. Or Instagram was for pictures. Or even when TikTok wasn’t QVC for attention-addled Gen Zers. Well, those days are gone.

Prolific writer Cory Doctorow expands upon the theory he first named in an essay about Amazon on his blog back in 2022 in this brief but lively and extensive examination of the ways that “enshittification” has taken hold of nearly every aspect of modern life. Anyone who hasn’t been able to put into words what exactly was wrong with Google Search in 2025 will see their feelings spelled out here, likewise with many of the companies mentioned above as well as others like Adobe and Microsoft. Truly no one in the tech sector is immune, as anyone who uses any of these products will attest, but it’s increasingly spilling out into other aspects of our lives and the economy as well.

Streaming was supposed to free us from the very expensive shackles of cable but it is now becoming a more-confusing version of its predecessor. Household appliances we thought we bought outright a year ago can suddenly demand that we pay a subscription to continue using their basic functionality. Cars want a monthly fee from owners to use features that are built in. Ads are showing up on refrigerators. And on and on… Why is this happening? Corporate greed and a lack of anyone in government willing to do something about it.

Doctorow posits that thanks to decades of lax or even nonexistent enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, too many industries have been allowed to fall under the control of too few companies, removing their incentives to act in the customer’s best interest. He quotes Lily Tomlin’s popular satirical character Ernestine, an operator for the onetime Bell phone monopoly, who says as their slogan, “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.” That many modern corporations have seemingly adopted just that attitude won’t come as a shock to many, but the degree to which they’ve been allowed to grow to a point where they feel that they can act with such impunity might.

While his ability to amuse the reader as he angers them keeps the material actually pleasurable to read, he still wisely ends the book with some notes of optimistic activism. You can probably guess what options we have as far as doing something about the problem (stop using bad products, elect government officials who will take action) and it’s easy to wonder just how effective they might be, but it does make the reader feel like at least they can do something. And if everyone did at least a little, we might be able to avoid living in a world where our toilet demands a recurring bank charge to activate the flushing “feature”. A must-read for our current era. ★★★★★