Facebook is full of AI slop. X is full of “free thinkers” peddling conspiracies. Google’s search results are telling us to eat rocks. More and more, it feels like the internet has gone bad.
There’s an increasingly popular theory about why: “enshittification.”
The term, coined in 2022 by the author, journalist and activist Cory Doctorow, refers broadly to the deterioration of services (especially online) as a result of giant companies extracting maximum profits from their customers. In a 2023 essay for Wired, Doctorow laid out the basic arc of enshittification, or the process by which platforms die:
“First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
In other words: Products are good when they first hit the market, because companies need to lock in as many consumers as they can to achieve the huge scale they desire. Once everyone’s using the product, the company refocuses on creating value for business partners, padding its profit margins and letting the product corrode. Eventually, the company maxes out what it can extract from its business partners, too, and the whole thing fades into obsolescence.
Once you wrap your head around the idea, you start to see enshittification all around — not only online, but across the economy, in services that have been picked over by private equity (see: vet clinics, nursing homes, prisons, countless other industries) or in the products peddled by highly concentrated industries (ahem, Boeing).
The Australian dictionary Macquarie even crowned enshittification the 2024 word of the year, noting its power to capture “what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment.”
On Tuesday, shortly after Meta’s CEO announced a widely criticized plan to dispense with fact-checkers, I spoke with Doctorow about the future of social media and how enshittification can help us make sense of our collective online angst.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nightcap: Could you give me your your cocktail-party-level introduction to “enshittification”?
Cory Doctorow: I think of enshittification as a theory about what happens when you have power without consequence.
We have increased the power available to large firms for a long time by reducing our antitrust enforcement, allowing mergers, predatory pricing, all the conduct that allows firms to get very big. That’s been across the board, not just with tech.
Nightcap: What does that look like, in real life?
Doctorow: There’s a law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that makes it illegal to break digital rights management. So for example, if Audible (which is owned by Amazon) sells you one of my audiobooks, they require that it have digital rights management that locks it to Audible’s platform forever — you can’t unlock it, quit Audible and take your books with you.
And if I give you a tool to jailbreak the audiobook so you can go somewhere else, I commit a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.
So even though I am the rights holder to that work, Amazon, the intermediary who sold you the work, has more intellectual-property rights to that work than I do.
This is a law that is oriented around allowing these large firms to wield regulation against competitors, against their own workforce and against their users so that they can maintain power. It’s a collapse of discipline — they don’t have to worry about their workers, they don’t have to worry about regulators. And they bought all their competitors.
Nightcap: Meta would seem like a kind of textbook case of enshittification. Facebook used to feel like a premium service, but the last few years it’s felt like it’s lost the plot.
Doctorow: Meta is a great example because they go through this pretty neat set of stages… They had this very straightforward value prop, which was like, just tell us who matters to you, and we’ll show you everything they post. And their pitch to the general public was, Facebook is like MySpace, but we won’t spy on you.
Nightcap: Right, that feels very much like aughts-era Facebook, when we could all just see our friends and enjoy the virtual connection. What changed?
Doctorow: Facebook at a certain point goes to publishers and says, create a Facebook page, post short excerpts to it, don’t worry about how many people follow you — we’re going to recommend it to users. So we’re going to show users things that they never asked to see in order to take some value away from them and give it to publishers.
You see the same thing with advertisers. Facebook not only offers to use surveillance data to benefit advertisers in the form of targeting, but they also invest heavily in anti-ad-fraud and in services to advertisers. So if your ads are not performing, they’ll help you figure it out, but also, if someone’s ripping you off, they’ll help you get your money back.
And so you see the users getting locked in by each other. They’re providing so much value to each other that they can’t bring themselves to leave, even as the service is getting monotonically worse.
And that’s as far as I think a lot of people take it — "Facebook’s got a mind control ray, they’re hacking your dopamine loops, and you can’t escape Facebook and they’re gonna sell you to advertisers."
The evidence for "hacking your dopamine loops" is pretty thin. There’s much better evidence that people just care about their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, and so they stay there.
Nightcap: Your theory adds a third step here, where Facebook also turns its back on advertisers, too?
Doctorow: Right, once the advertisers were fully committed to a Facebook strategy, advertising got way more expensive and the amount of ad fraud you got was crazy. So the advertisers are getting screwed, the publishers are getting screwed, the end users are getting screwed.
Nightcap: I’m not asking you to look into a crystal ball here, but if you had to speculate, what’s next for Facebook or other decaying platforms?
Doctorow: Zuckerberg is insulated from the consequences of making bad choices until he’s not, right? Until things reach a breaking point, and then he tends to panic. Tech calls these panics “pivots,” but they’re just the outcome of being the CEO of a company that posts anemic growth or even a contraction in its user base and sees [Wall Street] just go nuts on you.
First, it was the Metaverse… which is like a not-very-successful video game that they spent billions on. Zuck could do that because he controls the majority of the voting shares and because he had huge cash reserves.
And now we’re seeing these weird announcements that they’re going to have AI -generated users who are going to interact with you. This is, again, a visibly terrible idea.
It could be a way to continue to post growth if users will tolerate it. But the equilibrium that Zuck has shot for, with Facebook and with Instagram, has been a service that is nearly so bad that people want to leave.
The anthropologist danah boyd describes how in the last days of MySpace, she could see how when one person who a lot of people talk to would leave, then a whole bunch of people would follow. It wasn’t the only reason they were there, but it was the last thing keeping them there, and then, boom, the bottom falls out and the net just starts to unravel.
This is where Facebook is. They are trying to maintain this equilibrium where they extract enough that they keep their shareholders happy, but not so much that people leave. They’re now at the end of a long run of extremely bad choices. I’m not shorting Meta stock, but I think that they are on the path to becoming a kind of zombie — something like MySpace is today. You know, MySpace still exists. You can go to MySpace. It’s just AI-generated slop and and spam.
(Note: Meta didn’t respond to Nightcap’s request for comment.)
Nightcap: How are you feeling about the future of tech?
Doctorow: In terms of the future of enshittification, these platforms that have hollowed themselves out, where there’s just no value left in them except this kind of awful lock-in. It’s the old “we go broke a little, and then all at once.”
I do think there is reason to be hopeful. As a science fiction writer, I know that prediction is a mug’s game. But as an activist, I’m like, well, you take the weakest flank where you can make the biggest strategic advance, and you march on that flank. And there are a lot of weak flanks in global big tech.
I’d say the last one is the potential for an alliance between people who are angry about other kinds of monopolies, because it’s not just tech — people are really angry about grocery monopolies and oil monopolies, sea freight monopolies, eyeglass monopolies. One company, EssilorLuxottica, owns every eyewear brand you’ve ever heard of and every eyewear store you’ve ever shopped at, and they make more than 50% of the lenses, and they own EyeMed, the largest insurer in the world, and they’ve raised the price of glasses 1,000% in the last decade.
(EssilorLuxottica didn’t respond to Nightcap’s request for comment.)
So people are pissed off about monopolies. And if they can make a coalition, it’ll be like when we discovered the word “ecology” in the ’70s — we realized that just because you care about owls and I care about the ozone layer, it doesn’t mean we’re not caring about the same thing. Every time you see the world change all of a sudden, it’s because a new coalition has popped up.
