Enshittification - by Cory Doctorow (Hardcover)

About the Book

Enshittification: it's not just you--the internet sucks now. Here's why, and here's how we can disenshittify.

Book Synopsis

Enshittification: it's not just you--the internet sucks now. Here's why, and here's how we can disenshittify it.

We're living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.

Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution.

When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say "things are getting worse." He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better).

The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users--and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die.

Doctorow's argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror.

Here, now, in Enshittification the book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and--most important--how they can be undone.

Review Quotes

"Remember when the internet was young and alive, vibrant and accessible and free? Cory Doctorow does, and he knows what's gone wrong―and he sees a way forward. This is a magnificent book."
--James Gleick, author of Chaos and The Information

"Cory Doctorow is a genuine tech hero. He has encapsulated here much of what's going wrong with the internet, and he suggests how the spirit of the original internet might be brought back. This is a great book for those of us hoping to make things better for everyone.""
--Craig Newmark, founder of Craiglist

"Punchy, pungent, and utterly compelling. Enshittification will change the way you see the world, and just might change the world itself. You simply must read it."
--Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist

"Big Tech does not just plunder your data. It does not merely rob you of your privacy. It does something far, far worse. You know it. You feel it. But you won't be able to put your finger on it until you have read Enshittification. Then you will know and, more important, you will
stand a better chance of resisting."
--Yanis Varoufakis, author of Technofeudalism

"Cory Doctorow brilliantly diagnoses how our digital commons became a wasteland of extraction and surveillance. But his greatest contribution is showing us the escape routes, reminding us that the internet's promise isn't lost, its merely captured. We built it once; we can build it again, better."
--Audrey Tang, Taiwan's cyber ambassador and first digital minister

""With his hallmark clarity and energy, Cory Doctorow lays out how tech monopolies innovated ways to disregard, abuse, and suck dry their users. We must heed Doctorow's no-bullshit account of how to
fight back."
--Jathan Sadowski, author of The Mechanic and the Luddite

"Enshittification explains the exploitation that changed the internet and our lives. Doctorow gave us the word to describe how these companies immiserate humanity on a planetary scale."
--Edward Snowden

"I always love Cory's shit, but Enshittification is not only a smart, funny, and refreshingly furious screed on how tech has betrayed us all--but also a bracing, daringly optimistic plan for how we can free ourselves from awfulness."
--John Hodgman

"Cory Doctorow spells out why our experience online keeps getting worse -- and what we can do to turn this around. Enshittification is an essential read to understand today's digital economy."
--Rohit Chopra, Former Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

"The steady decline of the technology you use every day isn't just in your imagination--and in Enshittification, Cory Doctorow explains how we got here. Witty, incisive, and urgently relevant, this book reveals how we can reclaim our digital lives from the forces that have degraded them."
--Molly White, editor of Web3 Is Going Just Great and Citation Needed

About the Author

Cory Doctorow is a Canadian, British, American blogger, journalist, and activist. For more than twenty-three years, he has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on campaigns to further and safeguard our human rights online. He was coeditor of the weblog Boing Boing for nineteen years and now maintains a daily(ish) newsletter at Pluralistic.net. He has written more than thirty books, including nonfiction books like this one, many science fiction novels, collections of short stories and essays, young adult novels, graphic novels, and even a picture book. Born in Toronto, he now lives in Burbank, California. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws by York University and an Honorary Doctor of Computer Science from the Open University. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and was awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. He holds visiting professorship and research appointments at MIT, the University of North Carolina, Cornell University, and the Open University,