Enshittication, a review

Enshittification was the 2023 word of the year, coined by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow, to describe when a product degrade because the priority of the business is not to make it better. It’s also the eponymous title of his 2025 book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

The English language hardcover sold in Canada is black with the 💩 emoji. This is just the book cover, but it’s bold. This is the copy I read.

The book started as a bunch of essays, but then Doctorow expanded these to turn them into a book. Enshittification touches a broad spectrum of what we call “tech” products and services, either physical of digital.

There are four parts:

• Natural History: Facebook, Amazon, iPhone and Twitter as case studies.

• Pathology: How did we get there?

• Epidemiology: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, HP, Uber, and many others are subjects of the enshitticationm, and both customers and workers end up at the end of the stick.

• The Cure: we can be done about it? Touching the DMCA particularly out of the US where DMCA-like legislation what basically bullied into by US trade representative, fixing labour, and fixing regulatory capture and lack of enforcement.

On overall, you get a detailed view of the power of “big tech”, their influence on business practices, and how things are getting worse. Tech is the weapon of the enemy, in a world of technofeudalism.

Doctorow is on a mission, a mission to make us aware that this is not good. Not good for us, not good for the worker. It’s just good for the few at the top who reap the massive profits.

It is a book that any politicians that want to regulate businesses and tech should have read and understood. If they still feign not understanding then maybe they should be shown the door.

It lays down clearly what’s happening. I might be biased as I already knew of many of these, but it did connect the dot and lead to a lot of “of course!”.

A must read. And if you crave for more, Doctorow daily writings on his own Pluralistic are well worth adding to your RSS feeds. As well as his many other books.