Richard Gillis

🤖 Briefing: How digital platforms degrade over time

Note: 🤖 indicates the following material is derived using Chat_UP, Unofficial Partner's language model trained on our podcasts and newsletters.

Enshittification is Cory Doctorow's term to describe the cyclical degradation of online platforms. The central thesis is that the decline of digital services is not an accident or a result of corporate incompetence, but a deliberate, multi-stage process driven by a policy environment that has eliminated the traditional disciplines of competition, regulation, and user empowerment.

Enshittification follows a predictable three-stage lifecycle:

1. Attract End Users: Platforms begin by offering a high-quality, valuable service to attract a large user base, often at a loss.
2. Attract Business Customers: Once users are locked in (e.g., through social graphs or high switching costs), the platform degrades the user experience to benefit business customers (e.g., advertisers, publishers), who are then also locked in.
3. Extract Value for the Platform: With both users and business customers captive, the platform extracts all surplus value for itself and its shareholders, leaving only a "mingy homeopathic residue" sufficient to keep participants from leaving.

This process is not the fault of uniquely "bad CEOs" but is an effect of a systemic failure. Doctorow identifies the erosion of four key disciplines that once prevented this behavior: competition, regulation, self-help (interoperable technology), and a principled workforce. The most potent weapon in dismantling these disciplines has been the expansion of intellectual property law, particularly the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which criminalizes the creation of tools that allow users to modify their own devices and services, thereby eliminating interoperability as a competitive check on platform power.

Case studies like the intentional degradation of Google Search, Amazon's monopolization of the audiobook market via Audible, and the proliferation of "pain-point pricing" in hardware demonstrate this theory in action. The proposed solution is not individual consumer choice but large-scale, structural policy change. Doctorow points to a recent and unprecedented global surge in antitrust enforcement as a hopeful sign that a broad, cross-sectional movement against oligarchic control is beginning to succeed, even before it has a unified identity.

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The Theory of Enshittification

A Precise Technical Definition

Coined by Cory Doctorow, "enshittification" describes the specific, predictable process by which digital platforms decay. While used colloquially to mean "things getting worse," its technical meaning refers to a deliberate cycle of value allocation and extraction endemic to digital intermediaries.

"I coined it with a very precise technical meaning, uh, a meaning that relates to the specific contours of how digital platforms go bad."

The Three-Stage Cycle of Platform Decay

Platforms, defined as intermediaries connecting two or more groups (e.g., buyers and sellers on Amazon, drivers and riders on Uber), decay in three distinct stages.

This model refutes the common axiom, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Doctorow provides numerous examples, from advertisers on Facebook to traders on Robinhood, where paying customers are abused just as readily as non-paying users once they are locked in.

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The Central Question: Why Is This Happening Now?

The phenomenon of enshittification is not attributed to the moral failings of individual executives like Mark Zuckerberg. Doctorow notes that platforms were often better stewards under the same leadership in earlier eras. The change is not in the people, but in the environment.

"Mark Zuckerberg is smart enough to be the cause of enshitification. He is the effect. There is a Mark Zuckerberg shaped sociopathic hole in the digital fabric that was put there by policymakers."

The core argument is that the policy environment has been deliberately altered to favor enshittification by removing the disciplines that once constrained corporate behavior.

The Four Lost Disciplines

1. Competition: Decades of lax antitrust enforcement have allowed tech giants to buy or crush potential competitors, eliminating market pressure to provide good service. The "acquihire" model, where startups aim for acquisition by a giant rather than building a sustainable business, is a symptom of this.
2. Regulation: A shift in regulatory philosophy, particularly the "consumer welfare" standard adopted in the Reagan era, assumes monopolies are efficient and self-correcting. This has led to regulatory capture and a failure to enforce existing laws, even when companies openly admit to anti-competitive behavior.
3. Self-Help (Interoperability): The ability for users and third parties to modify or build upon a service to "disenshittify" it. This powerful check on platform power has been systematically dismantled by intellectual property laws.
4. A Powerful Workforce: The presence of "Tron Pilled" employees—those who believe in the mission to "fight for the user"—who could resist internal directives to harm users has diminished.

Case Studies in Enshittification

The Intentional Degradation of Google Search

Google's decline is presented as a textbook case of deliberate enshittification driven by the need to show perpetual growth to markets.

• Monopoly Creation: A 2024 federal court ruling found that Google illegally procured and maintained its 90% search market share through anti-competitive deals, such as paying Apple over $20 billion annually to be the default search engine.
• The Growth Imperative: Once a company achieves market saturation, it can no longer grow at the rate markets expect of a "growth company." This threatens its high stock valuation (price-to-earnings ratio), which in turn affects executive compensation and the ability to acquire other companies with stock.
• The Internal Conflict: Leaked emails from a DOJ lawsuit reveal a conflict between Pragavar Ragavan, who was in charge of search revenue, and Ben Gomes, a long-time engineer focused on quality. Ragavan's solution to the growth problem was to intentionally worsen search results by disabling features like spell-checking and synonym searches. This forced users to search multiple times, doubling or tripling the number of ad impressions and creating artificial "growth."
• The Kaggi Revelation: A paid search engine called Kaggi provides results "like Google used to be." It was later revealed that Kaggi is primarily a front-end for Google's own search results, which Kaggi's small team simply re-ranks. This serves as definitive proof that Google's decline is a choice. As Doctorow states, "Google sucks because Google wants to suck."

The War on Self-Help: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

The ability of users to engage in "self-help" through interoperable products (e.g., ad blockers, third-party accessories) is the most powerful deterrent to enshittification. This has been systematically criminalized.

• The Power of Interoperability: Because all modern computers are "Touring complete" universal machines, it is always technically possible to create a tool to improve or alter a digital service. Doctorow calls this the "11-ft disenshittifying ladder" for every "10-ft pile of shit."
• DMCA Section 1201: This 1998 law makes it a felony—punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine—to circumvent a "digital lock" (DRM).
• Consequences:
  • Apps vs. Web: Ad blockers are common on web browsers. However, they are illegal for mobile apps because apps are wrapped in DRM. This is why companies are "so horny" for users to switch from their websites to their apps.
  • Hardware Lock-in: The DMCA extends beyond software to any device with a chip. This enables companies to use DRM to block third-party replacements for products like printer ink cartridges, GE refrigerator water filters, and more.
  • The Adobe Pantone Case: Adobe used its cloud-based software to remove support for industry-standard Pantone colors, breaking users' old design files unless they paid a new, separate $21/month fee directly to Pantone. This transfer of cost from corporation to customer was only possible because the software was locked down.

Chokepoint Capitalism: The Audible Monopoly

Amazon's subsidiary, Audible, controls over 90% of the audiobook market and uses DRM as a weapon to maintain this "chokepoint."

• Mandatory DRM: Audible forces all publishers and independent authors to wrap their audiobooks in its proprietary DRM as a condition of sale.
• Permanent Lock-In: Because of the DMCA, it is a felony for anyone—including the original author and copyright holder—to create a tool that would allow a customer to move their legally purchased audiobooks to a competing platform.
• Hostage Libraries: A customer's library, potentially worth thousands of dollars, becomes a switching cost that locks them into the Audible ecosystem forever. This gives Amazon absolute power over creators and consumers. The penalty for creating a conversion tool is more severe than for pirating the book or even robbing a delivery truck at gunpoint.

The Human Cost: Pain-Point Pricing

The combination of mass surveillance and locked-down technology enables a new business model: identifying and monetizing human desperation.

• Definition: Using surveillance data ("telemetry") to identify the most critical features of a product, remove them, and then sell them back to the user as an upsell at a moment of vulnerability. A Delta Airlines CEO described this as pricing "around your pain points."
• Examples:
  • Smart baby monitors that wall off essential notifications (e.g., "your baby woke up") behind a new monthly subscription fee.
  • Subprime auto loans that include devices to remotely disable a car's ignition or blast ear-splitting debt collection demands through a second audio system.
  • Mobile phone lenders in India that use undeletable spyware to disable a user's most-used apps one by one if a payment is missed.

Solutions and a Path Forward

Doctorow is clear that individual action and consumer choice are insufficient solutions. The problem is structural and requires a collective, political response.

Strategies for Creators

While acknowledging the limits of individual advice, Doctorow suggests creators should focus on mitigating lock-in.

• Understand Platform Motives: Platforms treat you well out of fear of you leaving, not out of sentimentality.
• Resist Lock-in: Be wary of platform features (like Substack's recommendation engine) that increase dependence, even if the core asset (like an email list) remains portable.
• Practice Digital Hygiene: Regularly export all data (e.g., download your mailing list weekly) to maintain the option of leaving.
• Explore Alternatives: Consider platforms like Ghost, which may offer more favorable terms and greater control, particularly if self-hosted.

Structural Solutions for Society

The only effective solution is to restore the disciplines that prevent enshittification through collective political action.

• Reject Consumerism as Politics: "Voting with your wallet" is a losing strategy, as the wealthiest always have more votes. Change requires acting as a polity, not as individual consumers.
• Join a Movement: Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and its local affiliates provide a structure for coordinated action on digital rights and policy.
• A Hopeful Turn: There is an unprecedented global wave of antitrust activism. Regulators in the US, Canada, UK, EU, China, and elsewhere are challenging corporate power in ways not seen in living memory. This is evidence that public pressure is working.
• The "Ecology" Analogy: Like the environmental movement before the term "ecology" unified disparate causes (saving owls, protecting the ozone layer), people fighting against various forms of oligarchic control are part of a single, powerful movement. Recognizing this shared struggle is the key to victory.

"Something has changed in the way that the public conceives of its relationship to power. And it is creating a tailwind that is causing politicians to act in ways that we have not seen them act in living memory... the only way to explain it is that the people are starting to win."