Enshittification

1. Enshittification: The Inevitable Decay of Digital Platforms

It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast.

A universal phenomenon. Enshittification describes the predictable degradation of online services, from beloved social media to essential e-commerce platforms. This isn't random decline but a systematic process where platforms extract value from users and businesses for their own benefit. The digital world is merging with the physical, meaning this decay now impacts our homes, cars, and workplaces.

Three predictable stages. The process unfolds in distinct phases, starting with a period of user-centric growth. Platforms initially attract users by offering valuable, often subsidized, services. Once a critical mass of users is locked in, the platform shifts its focus to business customers, extracting value from users to benefit advertisers or sellers. Finally, the platform turns on its business customers, clawing back all remaining value for its shareholders and executives, leaving a "giant pile of shit" for everyone else.

Case studies abound. This pattern is evident across major platforms.

• Facebook: Started by subsidizing user feeds, then abused users for advertisers and publishers, eventually squeezing both to enrich itself.
• Amazon: Lured users with low prices and Prime, then exploited sellers with junk fees and cloned products, ultimately raising prices for everyone.
• iPhone: Initially offered a secure, curated experience, then used its walled garden to control app developers and spy on users for its own ad business.
• Twitter: Began as an open API, then under new ownership, rapidly stripped value from users and businesses, leading to a mass exodus of advertisers and a degraded experience.

2. The Erosion of Competition Fueled Corporate Monopolies

Fifty years later, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer, most industries are now dominated by five or fewer global companies.

Antitrust's long slumber. For decades, the "consumer welfare standard" theory of antitrust law, which prioritized low prices over market structure, allowed unchecked corporate consolidation. This led to an "orgy of mergers and acquisitions," where major rivals combined and smaller companies were swallowed, creating highly concentrated industries. The lack of competitive discipline meant companies could prioritize profits over quality without fear of repercussions.

Predatory tactics. Monopolists actively suppressed competition through various means. Amazon, for instance, famously burned $200 million to drive Diapers.com out of business, sending a clear message to other potential rivals: sell out or be crushed. Google spent billions annually to ensure its search engine was the default on every platform, effectively signaling to innovators that there was no point in trying to build a better search tool.

Innovation stifled. The absence of competitive pressure allowed companies like Google to prioritize revenue extraction over product quality. Internal documents revealed Google deliberately worsening search results to force more queries and show more ads. This shift from technical excellence to profit maximization became possible only when the fear of losing market share to a superior competitor was eliminated.

3. Regulatory Capture: When Laws Bend to Corporate Power

The most common tactic used to flout regulation is to break the law with an app and then insist that the law hasn’t been broken at all, because the crime was committed with an app.

Monopolies weaken oversight. Concentrated industries, with their vast profits and cozy executive networks, easily overcome the collective action problem that hinders smaller firms. They can collude to present a unified front to regulators, effectively capturing the agencies meant to oversee them. This leads to both underregulation for the capturing industry and overregulation for its rivals.

"It's not a crime if we do it with an app." This rhetorical sleight of hand allows tech companies to bypass established laws.

• Uber: Claims it's not an employer because it directs workers via an app, avoiding labor protections.
• RealPage: Uses an app to "recommend" minimum rents to landlords, effectively price-fixing without legal accountability.
• Arise: Classifies call center workers as independent contractors, forcing them to pay for training and equipment, and penalizing them for quitting, all managed through an app.

Algorithmic exploitation. Digital platforms use "twiddling"—continuous, invisible adjustments to prices, wages, and rankings—to extract value. Uber's algorithmic wage discrimination, for example, offers different pay rates to drivers based on their past behavior, subtly lowering overall wages. TikTok's "heating tool" artificially boosts certain creators to lure them onto the platform, then withdraws support, leaving them dependent. This obfuscation makes it nearly impossible for individuals to detect or challenge the exploitation.

4. The Death of Self-Help: IP Law Criminalizes User Control

When the Big Tech companies say, "It’s impossible to run code of your choosing on a computer we’ve sold you," what they’re really saying is "It’s illegal to run code of your choosing on that computer."

Universality vs. control. Modern computers are "Turing-complete," meaning they can run any valid program. This inherent flexibility is a double-edged sword: it enables innovation but also allows users to modify devices in ways manufacturers dislike. To prevent this, companies use intellectual property (IP) law to legally restrict what users can do with their own property.

DMCA 1201: The "digital lock" law. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 1201 criminalizes bypassing "access controls" for copyrighted works. This allows manufacturers to embed software (a copyrighted work) in their products, making it illegal to:

• Use third-party ink cartridges in HP printers.
• Repair cars with non-manufacturer-approved parts (VIN locking, parts pairing).
• Access features on a SNOO Smart Sleeper bassinet without a monthly subscription.
• Move purchased ebooks or audiobooks to a different platform (DRM).

Felony contempt of business model. This legal framework transforms user modifications into serious crimes, punishable by hefty fines and prison sentences. Companies like Adobe leverage cloud software and IP to unilaterally change terms, as seen when they demanded a subscription for Pantone colors or sought to use customer artwork for AI training. This ensures that even if a product is owned, its functionality remains under the manufacturer's control, enabling continuous rent extraction.

5. The Decline of Tech Worker Power: From Vocation to Vulnerability

But today, after devastating layoffs, the line once held by tech workers has broken.

Vocational awe's double edge. Historically, tech workers enjoyed immense power due to scarcity, leading companies to foster a "mission-driven" culture with lavish perks. This "vocational awe" motivated long hours but also instilled a sense of ownership, making workers resistant to "enshittifying" products they poured their souls into. Google's "Don't be evil" ethos, for example, was fiercely defended by its engineers.

Uprisings and concessions. Early Google walkouts and protests against projects like Dragonfly (censored Chinese search) and Maven (AI for drone strikes) demonstrated worker power. These collective actions forced management to back down, leading to policy changes and executive resignations, including the end of binding arbitration for sexual harassment claims. This period showed that workers could hold the line against ethical compromises.

The axe falls. However, this power was temporary. As growth slowed, tech companies prioritized shareholder demands, leading to massive stock buybacks (e.g., Google's $70 billion buyback) followed by unprecedented layoffs (260,000 in 2023, 100,000 in early 2024). This eliminated labor scarcity, shattering worker power and replacing "vocational awe" with fear. Executives openly celebrated these layoffs as a way to discipline the workforce, signaling a shift from collaboration to absolute control.

6. Technofeudalism: The Triumph of Rent Over Productive Profit

Varoufakis’s technofeudalism thesis holds that, in the years after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, tech was transformed from a primarily profit-seeking enterprise to a primarily rent-seeking enterprise.

Capitalism vs. feudalism. Economist Yanis Varoufakis argues that tech firms have moved beyond capitalism, where income is derived from profit (investing capital, paying workers, selling products), into "technofeudalism," where income comes from rent (owning essential "factors of production" and charging others to use them). In capitalism, profits are fragile and subject to competition; in feudalism, rents are stable and extracted from a captive populace.

Platforms as rentiers. Tech giants control critical digital infrastructure and markets, allowing them to extract rents.

• Amazon: Rents search placement ($38 billion/year) and delivery services to merchants, who have no choice but to comply.
• Apple/Google: Charge 30% commission on all app sales and in-app purchases, leveraging their control over mobile operating systems.
• Uber: Controls the connection between drivers and riders, extracting rent even as drivers struggle.

Monopoly and monopsony. Platforms aspire to both monopoly (powerful seller) and monopsony (powerful buyer). Uber, for example, used billions in subsidies to dominate urban transport (monopoly over riders) and then used its power to drive down driver wages (monopsony over drivers). This dual power allows them to squeeze both sides of their two-sided markets, prioritizing rent extraction over fair exchange.

7. Antitrust is Back: A Global Resurgence Against Corporate Giants

Antitrust is global, but it’s especially powerful in the United States, thanks to a mix of both government and private action.

A new anti-monopoly era. After decades of neglect, antitrust enforcement is experiencing a global revival, driven by a "neo-Brandeisian" movement. This shift recognizes that corporate bigness itself is a threat, leading to a surge in investigations, lawsuits, and new regulations worldwide. This movement is a direct response to the widespread "enshittification" of the economy.

Global coordination. The European Union, with its Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), has led the charge, imposing massive fines on tech giants and mandating interoperability. The UK's Digital Markets Unit (DMU) provides deep technical studies that inform EU actions, demonstrating cross-border cooperation. This global approach means that a successful case against a tech monopolist in one country can be recycled and applied in many others, creating a powerful domino effect.

US leadership under Biden. The Biden administration initiated a significant antitrust renaissance, appointing aggressive enforcers like Lina Khan (FTC) and Jonathan Kanter (DOJ). Their efforts led to:

• Blocking numerous mergers (Nvidia, Lockheed Martin).
• Successful lawsuits against Google (app store, advertising market).
• New merger guidelines addressing labor and privacy.
• Agency-wide initiatives to promote competition across various sectors.
  This demonstrated that political will, even against powerful corporate interests, could drive meaningful change.

8. Empowering Regulation: Administrable Rules for a Better Internet

A right-to-exit rule moves scarce moderation resources to the most serious cases, gives the targets of online abuse immediate relief (and thus punishes tech platforms for failing their users), and gives communities a way of overcoming the collective action problem of deciding whether to leave a platform, and when and where to go.

Beyond "fixing" platforms. Instead of trying to force platforms to be "nicer" (which often requires more surveillance and control), the focus should shift to making platforms less powerful and easier to leave. Effective regulation must be "administrable"—easy to spot rule-breaking and easy to agree on violations. Fact-intensive rules, like those for content moderation, are often ineffective due to their complexity and the sheer volume of potential violations.

The "right-to-exit" solution. A highly administrable policy is to mandate that social media platforms facilitate users' painless departure.

• Mastodon example: Users can easily export their followers, following lists, and blocks, then import them into a new server, maintaining their social graph.
• Benefits: Reduces switching costs, empowers users to leave abusive environments, and punishes platforms for poor moderation.
• Administrability: Regulators only need to verify if the platform provided the necessary data, not delve into complex content moderation decisions.

End-to-end for services. Extending the internet's "end-to-end principle" (delivering data efficiently and reliably without interference) to services would curb intermediary power.

• Email: Providers must deliver all messages from subscribed senders, preventing "premium" delivery fees.
• Social Media: Feeds should show all posts from followed accounts, not prioritized ads or "boosted" content.
• Search: Results should prioritize relevance, not paid placement.
  This simple rule combats fraud and ransom demands, forcing platforms to facilitate connections rather than steer them for profit.

9. Reviving Self-Help: Interoperability as a Shield for Users

Interop is a fast, reliable way to fix, unbrick, improve, and adapt the technology we own.

User empowerment. Interoperability, the ability of different systems to work together, is a powerful anti-enshittification force. It allows users to modify, repair, and adapt their technology, bypassing manufacturer-imposed limitations. This provides immediate relief from enshittified products and services, without waiting for slow-grinding legal processes.

Right-to-repair movement. This grassroots movement is gaining traction, pushing for laws that mandate access to diagnostic tools, parts, and repair information.

• State-level victories: Colorado's powered wheelchair repair law and Oregon's electronics repair law ban parts pairing and other DRM, preventing manufacturers from criminalizing independent repair.
• Global impact: EU mandates like the USB-C charger port force global changes, as manufacturers find it too costly to produce different models for different markets.
  These laws challenge the notion that manufacturers retain control over products after sale.

Adversarial interoperability. Users and third-party developers can reverse-engineer products to create compatible alternatives or enhancements.

• Beeper Mini: A teenager reverse-engineered Apple's iMessage to bring secure messaging to Android, forcing Apple to eventually adopt the RCS standard.
• Benefits: Creates competition, provides immediate user benefits (e.g., privacy, functionality), and imposes costs on companies that choose enshittification.
  To truly empower users, anti-circumvention laws like DMCA 1201 must be repealed or reformed to allow "tools exemptions," enabling skilled third parties to create and distribute interoperable solutions.

10. Restoring Labor Power: Unions as the Ultimate Defense

Throughout labor history, there’s only ever been one mechanism that working people could use to protect their pay and working conditions, through times of labor scarcity and labor supply: unions.

The "shitty technology adoption curve." New, exploitative technologies are first inflicted on the most vulnerable populations (prisoners, gig workers) before gradually moving up the privilege gradient to affect everyone. Tech workers, once pampered, are now facing the same precarity as warehouse workers and drivers, as their scarcity-based power erodes.

Unions: The enduring solution. While tech workers enjoyed temporary power from scarcity, unions offer the only sustainable mechanism for protecting wages and working conditions. Despite decades of decline, union favorability and interest are surging globally. The challenge lies in revitalizing unions and empowering new leadership.

A new labor movement. Recent successes, like the UAW's transformation under Shawn Fain, demonstrate the potential of organized labor.

• UAW's strategy: Harvard grad students helped reformers win leadership, leading to a simultaneous strike against the Big Three automakers and significant contract gains.
• General strike vision: Fain advocates for all US union contracts to expire in 2028, enabling a potential general strike during the next presidential election, a powerful tactic against corporate and political power.
  Unions can fight not just for wages but also for broader justice issues, including disenshittification, by making user and community interests part of their bargaining demands.

11. Cyberspace Everting: Enshittification Spreads to the Physical World

Software isn’t eating the world; it’s enshittifying it.

The Internet of Shit. William Gibson's concept of "cyberspace everting" describes how phenomena once confined to computers are now manifesting in the physical world. The "Internet of Things" has become the "Internet of Shit," where everyday objects are digitized, networked, and thus made susceptible to enshittification.

Twiddling in meatspace. Electronic shelf labels in grocery stores, for example, allow prices to be changed thousands of times a day, enabling dynamic pricing and rent extraction similar to online platforms. Loyalty cards, once offering discounts, now often serve to charge a premium for privacy, as basic prices rise for those who don't surrender their data.

Automotive enshittification. Cars are now "computers in fancy cases," equipped with surveillance technology and designed for rent extraction.

• Subscription features: Tesla pioneered charging monthly fees for features like heated seats or even battery functionality.
• Subprime loans: Remote kill switches and constant surveillance were first normalized in cars sold to the poorest, most desperate borrowers.
• Data harvesting: All new cars collect private information, sold to data brokers, and their systems block third-party repair and parts.
  From bassinets to insulin pumps, physical goods are becoming "inkjet printers"—designed to be extractive, with features downgraded or bricked remotely, forcing users into subscriptions or costly repairs.

12. The Global Fightback: An Unprecedented Movement for Change

There has never been a global movement like the one that is surging today.

A confluence of crises. The world is experiencing a simultaneous surge in market consolidation and the "everting" of cyberspace, leading to widespread enshittification. This has sparked a global, grassroots movement against corporate power, uniting diverse groups concerned about inequality, corruption, pollution, labor abuses, and discrimination.

International cooperation and recycling. The global nature of tech monopolies means that successful antitrust cases and regulatory blueprints from one country (e.g., UK's DMU studies informing EU fines) can be "recycled" in others. This reduces the cost and complexity of challenging tech giants, empowering smaller nations to act. Even China, viewing its tech giants as state competitors, has implemented anti-monopoly measures.

Political will from the ground up. The antitrust renaissance under Biden, despite its recent setbacks under Trump, demonstrated that popular rage against corporate abuse can translate into significant policy action, even against the preferences of the wealthy. This "political will" is a powerful, unfunded force driving change.

The path forward. The cure involves restoring the four disciplinary forces:

• Competition: Through vigorous antitrust enforcement and breaking up monopolies.
• Regulation: With administrable rules that weaken platforms and prioritize user rights.
• Interoperability: By repealing anti-circumvention laws and empowering users and third parties to modify their devices.
• Labor Power: Through strong unions that fight for workers' rights and broader societal interests.
  The fight is ongoing, but the unprecedented global awareness and coordinated action offer hope for a new, good internet and a more equitable world.

Last updated: November 15, 2025