Enshittification: Why Everything Is Getting Worse, How Big Tech Is Exploiting Its Users, and Whether We Can Save the Internet
An in-depth investigation into the gradual decay of digital platforms, the economics of corporate greed, the disappearance of user-friendly technology, and the growing struggle to reclaim control over our digital lives.
The Strange Feeling That Everything Is Getting Worse
Have you ever noticed that the internet doesn’t feel as good as it used to?
Google Search once seemed like a remarkably efficient way to find information. Today, searching for something simple can mean navigating advertisements, sponsored results, SEO-manipulated pages, AI-generated content, and websites designed more to capture attention than to provide useful information.
Facebook once helped people stay connected with friends and family. Today, users frequently encounter advertisements, recommended posts, sponsored videos, influencer content, and algorithmically selected material from people they have never met.
Instagram began as a relatively simple photo-sharing platform. It increasingly resembles an advertising and entertainment marketplace.
Amazon once promised convenience, competitive prices, and an enormous selection of products. Finding genuinely useful products among sponsored listings, imitation goods, questionable reviews, and competing sellers can be considerably more complicated.
Even products that we purchase outright are increasingly becoming services that require subscriptions, internet connections, and continuous payments.
This is not simply nostalgia. It is not necessarily that people have become less patient or that technology has stopped improving.
Something deeper is happening in the relationship between technology companies and the people who depend on their products.
There is a name for this phenomenon: Enshittification.
The term describes how digital platforms gradually deteriorate after becoming powerful enough to exploit the very users and businesses that helped them succeed.
It captures a particularly frustrating feature of modern capitalism: companies can create genuinely useful products, attract millions of customers, establish near-essential positions in people’s lives, and then gradually make those products worse because their customers have nowhere convenient to go.
The result is an internet that becomes increasingly commercialised, manipulative, expensive, inconvenient, and hostile to the people who use it.
The concept was popularised by British-Canadian author, journalist, and digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow, who coined the term in 2022. It has since become a widely recognised way of describing the deterioration of digital services.
In 2023, the American Dialect Society selected it as its Word of the Year. Its popularity reflects something important: millions of people recognise the experience, even if they previously lacked a word to describe it.
But enshittification is more than a catchy internet expression. It is a criticism of how economic incentives, corporate concentration, technological dependency, and weakened competition can combine to produce a digital environment that increasingly works against its users.
1. What Exactly Is Enshittification?
Enshittification is the gradual deterioration of a product, service, or digital platform after it has established a sufficiently strong position in the market.
It describes a situation in which a company initially prioritises customer satisfaction to attract users but gradually shifts its priorities towards advertisers, business partners, investors, and ultimately its own financial extraction.
The defining feature is that the deterioration is not necessarily accidental.
A platform may have the technical ability to provide a better experience. It may understand exactly what its customers want. It may even have been built around these principles.
But once the company becomes sufficiently powerful, it can discover that making the experience worse does not necessarily make customers leave.
Why?
Because customers have become dependent on it.
Consider a simple example.
Imagine a new social media platform that offers:
- No advertisements.
- A chronological feed.
- Easy communication with friends.
- No unnecessary notifications.
- Complete control over privacy settings.
- A simple and enjoyable experience.
People join because the platform is genuinely useful.
After several years, millions of people depend on it. Their photographs, conversations, professional networks, communities, and social relationships are all concentrated there.
The company now has something much more valuable than a popular application: it has control over a network that users cannot easily abandon.
It begins introducing advertisements, manipulating recommendations, restricting features, charging for previously free services, and collecting more personal information.
Users complain, but most remain.
The platform has discovered an uncomfortable truth: people do not necessarily leave a service simply because it becomes worse.
Sometimes, they stay because leaving would cost even more.
That is the foundation of enshittification.
2. Cory Doctorow’s Three Stages of Enshittification
Cory Doctorow’s most important contribution is his explanation of how platform deterioration happens in stages.
His framework identifies three broad phases.
Stage One: Make the Product Excellent for Users
The first stage is about attracting people.
A company introduces a product that solves a real problem, offers convenience, or provides something that existing competitors cannot.
It might provide the service free of charge, charge very little, or subsidise it through other business activities.
The objective is to build a large user base.
Examples include:
- Google making information easier to find.
- Facebook making online social networking accessible.
- Amazon making online shopping convenient.
- Instagram making photo sharing simple.
- Uber making it easier to arrange transportation.
At this stage, the company benefits from making customers happy.
Users recommend the service to friends, invite others, and gradually incorporate it into their everyday lives.
The platform becomes more valuable as its network grows.
This is particularly important for network-effect businesses: the more people use a service, the more useful it becomes to everyone else.
For example, a messaging application with ten users is relatively limited. A messaging application used by millions of people becomes difficult to replace.
The company is effectively building an ecosystem of dependency.
Stage Two: Make the Product Worse for Users to Benefit Business Customers
Once the platform has attracted a sufficiently large audience, its priorities begin changing.
Advertisers, merchants, publishers, developers, and other commercial partners become increasingly important.
The company starts transferring value away from ordinary users towards businesses willing to pay for access to the platform.
Consider social media.
Initially, a person might open Facebook and see updates from friends, family members, and communities.
Over time, the platform may increasingly prioritise sponsored posts, advertising, recommended videos, and commercially valuable content.
The user’s experience becomes less personal.
The platform is no longer simply connecting people. It is monetising their attention.
Businesses initially benefit because they can reach enormous audiences.
However, this arrangement can create a new dependency.
A small business might build its customer base through Facebook or Instagram. It invests time in developing followers, publishing content, and communicating with potential customers.
Eventually, organic reach becomes less reliable.
The business discovers that reaching the very audience it helped build increasingly requires advertising expenditure.
The platform has effectively converted access to an audience into a commercial product.
Stage Three: Make the Product Worse for Businesses Too
The third stage is where the extraction becomes particularly aggressive.
By this point, both users and business customers may be dependent on the platform.
Ordinary users struggle to leave because their social connections, information, and habits are concentrated there.
Businesses struggle to leave because their customers are concentrated there.
The platform can now increase advertising prices, introduce additional charges, restrict visibility, change commercial terms, and extract more value from its business customers.
A company that previously depended on organic visibility might now have to purchase advertising simply to maintain its existing customer reach.
An online seller may face higher fees or additional platform requirements.
A developer may find that previously available integration capabilities have become restricted or expensive.
The platform’s position has changed fundamentally.
It is no longer simply providing infrastructure that helps different groups interact.
It is increasingly collecting economic value from its control over those interactions.
The ultimate beneficiaries are often the platform’s owners and shareholders, while users and businesses receive a progressively smaller share of the value they collectively create.
This three-stage framework is central to understanding Doctorow’s argument.
3. Why Does Enshittification Happen?
Enshittification is not adequately explained by saying that companies become greedy.
Businesses have always wanted to make profits. The more important question is why some companies can increase extraction without losing their customers.
Several economic and technological mechanisms help explain this.
A. Monopoly Power and Lack of Competition
Competition is one of the strongest forces encouraging companies to maintain quality.
If a business offers poor customer service, unreasonable prices, or an inferior product, customers can move to a competitor.
But competition becomes less effective when one company controls an essential market.
Imagine that everyone you know uses the same messaging application.
You might dislike its advertisements, privacy policies, and unnecessary features. But moving to another application does not automatically move your friends and family with you.
You cannot independently recreate your social network elsewhere.
The same problem appears in online marketplaces, search engines, operating systems, and social networks.
When alternatives are weak or incompatible, the competitive pressure to maintain quality declines.
This is why market concentration matters so much.
B. Network Effects
Network effects occur when a product becomes more valuable as more people use it.
Messaging services, social networks, marketplaces, and professional networking platforms benefit enormously from this phenomenon.
However, network effects can also create barriers to entry.
A new social network may offer better privacy and a cleaner interface, but convincing millions of people to abandon their existing networks is difficult.
A new marketplace may offer lower fees, but sellers need buyers, and buyers need sellers.
This creates a coordination problem.
People might collectively prefer an alternative while individually finding it inconvenient to switch.
Consequently, an established platform can continue operating even when its competitors offer a better experience.
C. Switching Costs and Digital Lock-In
Switching costs are the practical, financial, technical, and emotional expenses associated with moving from one service to another.
They are not always obvious.
Consider the information people accumulate over years:
- Photographs and videos.
- Personal conversations.
- Purchased digital content.
- Contacts and professional relationships.
- Business reviews and customer histories.
- Files and documents.
- Personal preferences and account configurations.
Leaving a platform may mean losing access to some of these things.
Even when downloading personal information is technically possible, transferring it into another service may be difficult.
This creates digital lock-in.
The more expensive it becomes to leave, the more freedom the platform gains to change its conditions.
D. The Advertising Business Model
Advertising is not inherently harmful.
It can finance useful services and allow people to access products without paying directly.
The problem arises when advertising becomes the dominant economic objective.
A platform that earns money by displaying advertisements has an incentive to increase the number of advertisements people see.
This can encourage:
- More time spent on the application.
- More frequent visits.
- More notifications.
- More personalised recommendations.
- More sponsored content.
- More collection of behavioural information.
The user’s attention becomes an economic resource.
The distinction is important.
A platform designed primarily to help people accomplish something asks:
“How can we help users achieve their objectives efficiently?”
An advertising-driven platform may increasingly ask:
“How can we keep users engaged for longer?”
These objectives are not always compatible.
A user might want to find an answer in two minutes and leave.
The platform may have a financial incentive to keep that user engaged for twenty minutes.
E. Shareholder Pressure and Short-Term Financial Targets
Publicly traded corporations operate under expectations of financial performance.
Investors frequently expect continued revenue growth, improved margins, and increasing shareholder returns.
When a platform has already captured much of its potential market, attracting new customers becomes harder.
Management may then focus on extracting more money from existing customers.
This can mean higher prices, more advertising, subscription charges, reduced customer support, or lower investment in product quality.
However, it is important to distinguish an economic incentive from an inevitable outcome.
Not every company that seeks profitability will degrade its services. Competition, reputation, regulation, and long-term customer relationships can encourage businesses to preserve quality.
The critical issue is whether a company has sufficient market power to impose deteriorating conditions without losing its customers.
4. Real-World Examples of Enshittification
The concept becomes easier to understand when applied to services that people use every day.
Google Search: When Finding Information Becomes Harder
Google became successful by making information accessible.
Its search engine helped users find relevant websites quickly and efficiently.
For many years, its simplicity was a major competitive advantage.
But modern search increasingly involves commercial competition for visibility.
Users encounter advertisements, sponsored listings, SEO-optimised pages, affiliate marketing, and content produced primarily to attract search traffic.
AI-generated summaries and answers are also changing how search results are presented.
These developments do not automatically mean that every search result is poor. Google’s technology continues to improve in important ways.
Nevertheless, they raise a serious question:
Is the search engine optimised primarily to help users find the best information, or to maximise commercial value from the search process?
The two objectives can overlap, but they can also conflict.
Facebook: From Social Networking to Attention Monetisation
Facebook’s original appeal was straightforward: connect with people.
Its social graph made it easier to communicate, share photographs, organise communities, and follow friends.
As the platform developed, advertising became increasingly central to its business model.
The experience evolved towards a mixture of personal updates, suggested content, sponsored posts, videos, recommendations, and commercial material.
Users may increasingly encounter content selected by recommendation algorithms rather than content deliberately shared by their friends.
This changes the character of the service.
The platform may still be useful, but its original purpose is no longer necessarily the dominant organising principle of the experience.
Instagram: The Commercialisation of Social Media
Instagram began as a relatively simple platform for sharing photographs.
Its development illustrates how successful digital products can evolve into broader commercial ecosystems.
Shopping, influencer marketing, sponsored posts, video recommendations, and advertising have become important parts of its experience.
The consequences are not uniformly negative. Creators and businesses can reach audiences they could not otherwise access.
However, users who primarily want to see updates from people they follow may find that their feeds increasingly contain material selected for engagement and commercial value.
This is one of the clearest everyday illustrations of the tension between a platform’s original purpose and its monetisation strategy.
Amazon: When the Marketplace Becomes the Product
Amazon’s original appeal was its enormous selection, convenience, and competitive pricing.
But large marketplaces face an inherent conflict between commercial incentives and the quality of recommendations.
Sponsored listings can receive prominent placement.
Sellers compete for visibility.
Customers may have to navigate numerous similar products, advertising, and potentially unreliable reviews.
The broader concern is that the marketplace may increasingly prioritise the seller’s ability to pay for visibility rather than the customer’s ability to identify the most suitable product.
Uber: The Changing Relationship Between Platforms and Workers
Ride-hailing platforms initially attracted customers through convenience, availability, and competitive pricing.
They also attracted drivers through access to customers and relatively flexible earning opportunities.
As platforms mature, their relationships with both sides can become more complicated.
Customers may face changing prices, fees, and service conditions.
Drivers may experience changing incentives, commissions, and platform rules.
This is not proof that every change in a ride-hailing business represents enshittification. Market conditions, operating costs, and competition also matter.
Nevertheless, the example demonstrates how a platform controlling access between two groups can acquire considerable bargaining power over both.
5. Enshittification Is No Longer Limited to the Internet
One of the most disturbing developments is that the underlying business model is spreading beyond traditional digital platforms.
Products that were once straightforward purchases increasingly depend on software, subscriptions, cloud infrastructure, and remote authorisation.
Subscription-Based Ownership
Imagine purchasing a car with features physically installed in it.
You reasonably assume that those features belong to the product you purchased.
But what happens when the manufacturer requires an additional subscription to activate or remotely control certain functions?
The customer has purchased the hardware but may not have permanent control over every capability.
The same problem can affect smart-home devices, digital software, connected appliances, and other internet-dependent products.
The economic relationship changes from ownership to continuing permission.
The Decline of Repairability
Modern devices increasingly depend on proprietary software, specialised components, digital authentication, and manufacturer-controlled repair systems.
This can make independent repair difficult.
A product that could previously be repaired by replacing a component may now require authorised software access or expensive manufacturer services.
The consumer becomes dependent on the original manufacturer long after the initial purchase.
Streaming Services and the Fragmentation of Entertainment
Streaming platforms initially attracted users by offering convenient access to enormous entertainment libraries.
But as the market became more competitive, content became fragmented across multiple subscriptions.
Users may need several services to access the films and programmes they want.
Prices, advertisements, content availability, and account-sharing policies also change.
The promise of convenience can gradually turn into a complicated collection of recurring expenses.
The common thread is not simply that companies charge money.
It is that consumers can lose control over products and services they previously expected to use on their own terms.
6. The Psychological Cost: What Happens to Users?
Enshittification is usually discussed as an economic or technological problem.
But its consequences extend into everyday human behaviour.
Digital platforms increasingly mediate how people communicate, learn, work, remember, shop, and understand the world.
When these platforms deteriorate, the effects are not limited to inconvenience.
The Destruction of Attention
Many digital platforms compete for attention.
Infinite scrolling, autoplay, personalised recommendations, notifications, and rapidly changing content can encourage people to spend more time online than they intended.
The broader regulatory concern is that the design of a platform can influence how people allocate their attention.
A service that once helped people communicate can become an environment that constantly competes for their time.
Information Overload
More information does not necessarily mean more knowledge.
When useful material is mixed with advertisements, misleading claims, low-quality content, sensationalism, and automated material, users must spend additional effort determining what deserves attention.
The cost is cognitive.
People must continually filter, evaluate, compare, and verify information.
Loss of Trust
When advertisements look like ordinary content, recommendations appear commercially motivated, and search results become harder to interpret, users gradually lose confidence in digital services.
They begin questioning whether a recommendation exists because it is genuinely useful or because someone paid for its placement.
This undermines the credibility of the entire information environment.
The Erosion of Autonomy
Perhaps the most serious consequence is the gradual loss of control.
Users may no longer decide what appears in their feeds, how their information is used, which products are recommended, or which features remain available without additional payments.
A service that once responded to the user’s intentions increasingly attempts to shape those intentions.
This makes enshittification more than a complaint about annoying advertisements.
It becomes a question about human autonomy.
7. The Hidden Victims: Small Businesses, Creators, and Independent Publishers
Ordinary consumers are not the only people affected.
Small businesses and independent creators can become particularly vulnerable because digital platforms often control access to their audiences.
Consider a small business that builds an Instagram following of 100,000 people.
It spends years creating content, responding to customers, developing its reputation, and building a community.
Then the platform changes its recommendation algorithm.
Its organic reach falls.
The business discovers that its previous audience is no longer reliably accessible without advertising expenditure.
The audience may still exist, but the business no longer controls its access to it.
The same problem affects independent publishers.
A newspaper, blog, or educational website may receive substantial traffic from search engines and social platforms.
When algorithms change, its traffic can collapse even if the quality of its content remains unchanged.
This creates a fundamental imbalance.
The creator produces the content.
The audience supplies the attention.
The platform controls the distribution.
The platform can change the rules.
The result is a digital economy in which independent businesses may build their livelihoods on infrastructure they neither own nor control.
This dependency makes it difficult to negotiate fair commercial conditions.
8. Artificial Intelligence: Is the Next Stage of Enshittification Already Here?
Artificial intelligence introduces another dimension to the problem.
AI has enormous potential to improve productivity, research, education, healthcare, creativity, and access to information.
But the technology can also be incorporated into business models that prioritise monetisation over usefulness.
Consider the following possibilities.
AI-generated information overload: The internet becomes flooded with automatically generated articles, videos, product descriptions, and social media posts. Finding genuinely useful material becomes more difficult.
Search becoming less transparent: AI-generated answers increasingly mediate access to information. Users may receive summaries without understanding which sources were selected, excluded, or prioritised.
Subscription fragmentation: Companies introduce premium AI features, impose usage limits, and divide functionality across increasingly expensive subscription tiers.
Reduced human support: Businesses replace customer service representatives with automated systems that may be unable to resolve complicated problems.
Data extraction: AI systems depend on enormous quantities of information, creating continuing debates about consent, copyright, privacy, and the commercial use of personal data.
There is also an important distinction between improving a product through AI and using AI as a justification for making a product worse.
A genuinely useful AI feature can save people time and effort.
An unnecessary AI feature can add complexity, introduce errors, and make ordinary tasks harder.
The technology itself is not the problem.
The incentives governing its deployment matter.
9. Is Enshittification Inevitable? An Important Economic Debate
Although Cory Doctorow’s framework is influential, it should not be treated as an unquestionable economic law.
There is a meaningful academic debate about whether platform deterioration is inevitable.
Economists examining the enshittification thesis have highlighted the possibility that market dominance enables platforms to exploit their position. However, they have also challenged the idea that dominance automatically causes a platform to deteriorate.
Platform decay can sometimes result from intense competition rather than insufficient competition.
This distinction matters.
For example, companies competing aggressively for advertising revenue may introduce more advertisements or engagement-driven features even when they face substantial competition.
In other circumstances, a dominant company may continue offering an excellent service because its reputation, customer loyalty, and long-term commercial interests depend on maintaining quality.
Therefore, the more precise argument is that enshittification becomes particularly likely when businesses have the ability and incentive to extract value without facing sufficient consequences from dissatisfied users or commercial partners.
It is a structural risk, not an unavoidable destiny.
10. How Can Enshittification Be Stopped?
Recognising the problem is important, but recognising it alone will not change the economic structures that produce it.
Cory Doctorow’s argument emphasises restoring competition, reducing technological lock-in, and giving users greater control.
Several practical measures could help.
A. Stronger Competition Laws
Governments need to examine whether dominant platforms are abusing their market positions.
Competition policy should address practices that prevent smaller businesses from entering markets or prevent consumers from switching services.
Breaking up companies is not necessarily the only solution.
Enforcement can also address exclusionary conduct, unfair commercial arrangements, and restrictions that prevent competitors from developing viable alternatives.
B. Interoperability
Interoperability means that different digital services can communicate or work together.
For example, users should not necessarily have to abandon all their existing relationships simply because they want to move to another messaging service.
Similarly, transferring photographs, documents, contacts, and other personal information should be straightforward.
Interoperability reduces the power of companies to trap users inside closed ecosystems.
C. Data Portability and the Right to Exit
Users should be able to take their information with them when they leave a platform.
This includes meaningful access to personal information, files, communications, and other data that can reasonably be transferred.
However, portability must be practical, not merely theoretical.
A downloadable file that cannot be imported into another service does not provide genuine freedom.
D. Stronger Privacy Protection
Companies should not be able to treat personal information as an unlimited commercial resource.
Privacy protections can reduce the incentives for excessive surveillance and behavioural advertising.
Users should have meaningful choices about what information is collected, how it is used, and with whom it is shared.
E. Repair Rights and Digital Ownership
Consumers should have stronger rights to repair devices, use purchased products, and maintain access to functionality without unreasonable manufacturer restrictions.
When people purchase physical products, they should not automatically become permanently dependent on the manufacturer’s subscription decisions.
F. Transparent Algorithms
Users deserve greater clarity about how recommendation systems influence the information they see.
Platforms should provide meaningful controls over their feeds, including the ability to choose chronological or otherwise less personalised experiences where appropriate.
Transparency should also extend to advertising and commercial recommendations.
G. Better Consumer Protection
Governments need to challenge manipulative interface designs, hidden fees, deceptive subscription arrangements, and misleading claims about free services.
The objective should be to ensure that consumers can make informed decisions without being manipulated into unnecessary purchases.
11. India’s Connection to Enshittification
Enshittification is particularly relevant to India because digital platforms have become deeply integrated into everyday economic and social activities.
India’s digital ecosystem includes online shopping, digital payments, social media, food delivery, ride-hailing, online education, entertainment streaming, and app-based services.
Millions of people depend on these services for communication, employment, education, and commercial activity.
This creates enormous opportunities, but it also creates vulnerabilities.
The Digital Marketplace
Small sellers increasingly depend on online marketplaces to reach customers.
They may face competition for sponsored visibility, platform commissions, changing policies, and restrictions on customer relationships.
The concern is that a marketplace can become an unavoidable intermediary rather than simply a convenient place to conduct business.
Online Education
Students increasingly depend on digital educational platforms.
The distinction between genuinely free educational material and services that require personal information, subscriptions, or additional purchases can become unclear.
Consumer-protection authorities in India have been taking action against manipulative digital practices.
These cases demonstrate how problems associated with digital commercialisation can translate into concrete consumer-protection concerns.
Social Media and the Creator Economy
Indian creators, influencers, journalists, and small businesses increasingly depend on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.
Changes to recommendation systems, monetisation eligibility, advertising policies, and content distribution can directly affect their livelihoods.
A creator may invest years building an audience without having meaningful control over how that audience receives their content.
The Importance of India’s Regulatory Response
India already has legal and regulatory frameworks addressing consumer protection, data protection, electronic commerce, and manipulative digital practices.
The challenge is ensuring that these frameworks remain effective as business models and technologies evolve.
The Consumer Protection Act, 2019, and the Central Consumer Protection Authority’s 2023 Dark Patterns Guidelines provide important foundations for addressing manipulative online interfaces.
The larger objective should be to create a digital economy in which innovation and profitability do not come at the expense of consumer freedom.
12. Dark Patterns: The Everyday Tools of Digital Manipulation
Enshittification often operates through a collection of small interface decisions that individually appear insignificant.
These are commonly called dark patterns.
They are design techniques that manipulate, mislead, or pressure users into taking actions that may not reflect their actual preferences.
Common examples include:
Confirm shaming: Making people feel guilty for declining an offer.
Forced action: Requiring users to provide unnecessary information or complete unrelated steps before accessing a service.
Basket sneaking: Adding products, donations, or additional charges without clear consent.
Hidden costs: Revealing important fees only towards the end of a purchase.
Difficult cancellation: Making subscriptions easy to purchase but unnecessarily complicated to terminate.
Interface interference: Making the preferred commercial option prominent while obscuring alternatives.
These practices are particularly effective because they exploit human psychology.
People are busy. They do not always read every condition. They may simply click the most visible option to complete a task.
Over time, the digital experience becomes less about facilitating decisions and more about steering decisions.
13. What Can Ordinary Users Do?
Although structural reforms require government action and competitive alternatives, individuals are not entirely powerless.
There are several practical steps people can take.
- Avoid depending entirely on a single platform for important information and communication.
- Maintain independent backups of photographs, documents, and personal files.
- Use independent websites, newsletters, and alternative information sources rather than relying exclusively on social media feeds.
- Review application permissions and disable unnecessary data collection.
- Cancel subscriptions that no longer provide sufficient value.
- Avoid assuming that sponsored recommendations are necessarily the best options.
- Support independent creators and businesses through channels they control.
- Prefer services that offer data portability, transparent pricing, and meaningful user controls.
- Report deceptive interfaces and misleading commercial practices.
- Avoid building an entire business around a single platform’s algorithm.
These measures cannot eliminate enshittification, but they can reduce individual dependence and make switching easier.
14. The Bigger Philosophical Question: Who Does Technology Actually Serve?
At the heart of enshittification lies a much larger question.
What is technology supposed to accomplish?
Technology should expand human capabilities.
It should make communication easier, information more accessible, education more affordable, commerce more efficient, and everyday life more convenient.
The original promise of the internet was particularly powerful because it lowered barriers to participation.
A small business could reach international customers.
An independent writer could publish without needing a traditional media organisation.
Students could access educational resources from anywhere.
People could communicate across geographical boundaries.
But when a handful of companies control the infrastructure through which these activities take place, the relationship changes.
The internet becomes less like an open network of opportunities and more like a collection of privately controlled commercial territories.
Access depends increasingly on the rules established by the owners of those territories.
This raises important questions about power, ownership, freedom, and accountability.
If a platform becomes essential to modern communication, should its owners have unlimited authority to change its conditions?
If a business builds its livelihood through a platform, should that platform be able to change commercial rules without meaningful accountability?
If consumers purchase connected devices, how much control should manufacturers retain over those products?
These are not merely technological questions.
They are questions about the distribution of economic and social power.
15. The Future: Will the Internet Become Better or Worse?
The future of the internet will depend on the choices made by companies, consumers, developers, and governments.
There are reasons for concern.
Advertising-driven business models continue to influence the design of digital products.
Artificial intelligence is changing how information is created and distributed.
Subscription-based models are expanding.
Large technology companies control substantial digital infrastructure.
But there are also reasons for optimism.
Open-source software continues to provide alternatives to proprietary systems.
Independent platforms are experimenting with different approaches to online communities.
Privacy-focused products are challenging surveillance-based business models.
Regulators are increasingly examining the effects of platform design, market concentration, and consumer manipulation.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act is an important development. Its framework requires major platforms to assess and address systemic risks, including certain risks to users’ rights and well-being.
The debate is gradually moving beyond whether platforms should remove illegal content.
It is also examining how platforms themselves are designed, how they influence behaviour, and whether their commercial incentives create wider social harm.
The central challenge will be translating these concerns into enforceable rules that protect users without unnecessarily restricting innovation.
We Should Not Have to Accept Worse Technology
Enshittification gives a name to something that millions of people have experienced but struggled to explain.
It describes the gradual transformation of useful products into systems that increasingly prioritise extraction over service.
The problem is not that businesses want to make money.
The problem is that some businesses become so powerful, and their customers so dependent, that they can make their products progressively worse without facing sufficient consequences.
Users see more advertisements, less control, higher prices, weaker privacy, and increasingly complicated experiences.
Small businesses find themselves paying to access audiences they helped create.
Creators become dependent on algorithms they cannot control.
Consumers discover that products they purchased may require continuing subscriptions or manufacturer permission.
Meanwhile, the companies controlling these systems can continue generating substantial profits.
But none of this is inevitable.
A healthy digital economy requires competition, meaningful consumer choice, privacy, interoperability, transparency, and the ability to leave one service without losing everything accumulated inside it.
Technology should serve people, not turn people into resources to be endlessly monetised.
The greatest promise of the internet was that it could make the world more connected, accessible, and democratic.
That promise is worth defending.
And perhaps the most important lesson of enshittification is this:
A company should not be allowed to confuse the fact that people depend on its product with the belief that people are satisfied with it.
