Here is how 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.
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Here is how 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.
Pluralistic: Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital (20 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us wish we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.
Pluralistic: The web is bearable with RSS (07 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Never let them tell you that enshittification was a mystery. Enshittification isn't downstream of the "iron laws of economics" or an unrealistic demand by "consumers" to get stuff for free.
Pluralistic: The enshittification multiverse (27 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's official: you have my consent and enthusiastic blessing to apply "enshittification" to things that aren't digital platforms! Semantic drift is good, actually:
Pluralistic: You can’t fight enshittification (31 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life.
Pluralistic: The specific process by which Google enshittified its search (24 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:
Pluralistic: The moral injury of having your work enshittified (25 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:
Pluralistic: Tiktokification shall set us free (17 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Mark Zuckerberg has a problem with your friends: they're the reason you signed up to use his platform, but they stubbornly refuse to organize your socialization to "maximize engagement." Every time you and your friends wrap up a social interaction and log off, Zuckerberg loses revenue.
Pluralistic: Ad-tech is fascist tech (10 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:
Pluralistic: Ad-tech is fascist tech (10 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:
Pluralistic: Understaffing as a form of enshittification (23 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
At root, enshittification can only take place when companies can move value around. Digital tools make it easier than ever to do this, for example, by changing prices on a per-user, per-session basis, using commercial surveillance data to predict the highest price or lowest wage a user will accept:
Enshittification Arises from Enclosure: Open Protocols refuse both - Identity Woman
I am posting this on the first full day of Decentralized Web Camp on July 9th, 2026. TLDR: Infographic! Doctorow named what we’re all feeling Cory Doctorow gave us the word: enshittification and a description of a pattern that keeps happening. His original framing, from his January 2023 Pluralistic post: “First, they are good to […]
Pluralistic: Who Broke the Internet? Part II (13 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" is my new podcast for CBC about the enshittogenic policy decisions that gave rise to enshittification. Episode two just dropped: "ctrl-ctrl-ctrl":
Digital products and services are getting worse – but the trend can be reversed
A new report from the Norwegian Consumer Council shows how enshittification affects both consumers and society at large. Luckily, it‘s possible to turn the tide.
Essay: How do you describe TikTok?
The automatic culture of the world's favorite new social network.
Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's safe to say that the past couple of years have been good ones for me publishing-wise, thanks to a string of international bestsellers, both novels (Picks and Shovels) and nonfiction (Enshittification, Reverse Centaur), as well as plenty of awards and accolades: