Critique of Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification"

You notice it everywhere. You joined a social media network like Facebook, enticed by keeping in touch with family and friends. Now you rarely see them, because your newsfeed is flooded with unsolicited advertisements from unknown personages and companies. Later you search for a product on Amazon, as you have done hundreds of times through the years. At first Amazon seems not to have it, displaying Temu™-fied knock-offs or other variations at higher prices. You need to scroll way down to find the product you seek, despite your very specific search query.

If you are on the business side of an app like X (formerly Twitter), maybe you publish ads through the platform, only to find that your ads are being shown not to people you targeted but uninterested users whom the platform identified for God-knows-why. Maybe you drive for DoorDash or Über, only to find that the more you work, the less money your trips yield as gasoline and maintenance steadily increase.

None of these are coincidental, and the above cases are merely the iceberg’s tip. The process by which e-commerce becomes less valuable yet more indispensable is painstakingly deconstructed in Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025). As former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s operations in Europe, Doctorow compiled this work from a series of essays which he had authored on his own blog in 2023. This latest work is a must-read if you want to understand commerce in the digital age. Specifically, you learn how e-commerce is slowly eroding value from customers, workers, advertisers and service/commodity providers, and what steps can be taken to recover what we were originally promised from the advent of e-commerce.

It all starts simple enough. Let’s say a company called Garlicaria launches an app to bring together those who grow and process garlic with people who use and love this seasoning (and honestly you may want an app’s distance between you and people who love garlic too much!). Customer X, a restaurant, subscribes and commits to purchase at least 1500 raw cloves per month at $300. Farmer Y cultivates garlic, so he commits to supply Customer X’s order at $100. That leaves Garlicaria with a spread of $200, and it’s only getting started.

As thousands more customers subscribe, Farmer Y triples the acreage devoted to garlic. After a while, Garlicaria tells Farmer Y that it’s “updating” the agreement’s terms; instead of 1500 raw cloves for $100 (Customer X’s order), it wants them for $70. Farmer Y seethes to lose 30% on this transaction, but after tripling his tillable acreage devoted to garlic, he can’t afford to lose this relationship. As for Customer X, Garlicaria tells him it will now need $330 for those 1500 raw cloves per month, and since paying $30 more per month is easier than establishing a new relationship with an untested entity, Customer X simply accepts the price hike. Thus, Garlicaria has extracted an additional $60 in value from a customer and a supplier.

This is enshittification in a nutshell, and it gets so much worse. Doctorow ventures to show us these commercial exchanges’ labor side and how e-commerce is grinding labor into the dust. In the foregoing example, this would be harvesters working around the clock under flood lights, outfitted with biokinetic sensors which train the AI-driven bots being imminently manufactured to replace them. For the garlic’s transportation from farm/processor to customer, this would be the industrious deliverer whom Garlicaria classifies as a 1099 “freelancer” whilst the company twiddles in real-time the relationship’s minutest details, proving that the deliverer is anything but free.

The good news is that if affected market participants play their cards correctly, disenshittification is also possible (Doctorow grants permission to use the book’s title and its derivatives as terms of art). For example, if automotive buyers in solidarity flatly reject any models which require monthly subscriptions for built-in functionalities like heated seats, horsepower, or even EV battery charge (e.g., Tesla’s Model Y), then manufacturers will take due notice when models without such paywalls sell at higher prices, as is already happening. If labor in affected industries coalesces, it may be able to unionize and through collective bargaining improve working conditions. Perhaps most importantly, if legislatures pass measures to universalize Right to Repair and portability, the citizenry will benefit immensely from greater market leverage whereby costs can be reduced, to say nothing of overall satisfaction from not having to “lose everything” by migrating between tech brands and services when these become abusive.

Critique in Two Directions

Where Doctorow goes astray is in the problem’s identification. He writes, “I am no true believer in markets as the best arbiter of how our society should work, who should be in charge of it, and how its productive capacity should be organized,” but this is misattribution. True capitalism enjoys no benefit from governmentally imposed protectionism in the form of anti-circumvention law such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) § 1201, which makes it a felony to access a device or application’s code for the purpose of changing it. Progressivist President Bill Clinton ratified this law in 1998 to combat digital piracy via reverse engineering, but like most of what government does, this was mere pretense for the tech lobby to enlist government as the racket’s enforcer. This “digital lock” has led to arrangements such as expensive on-brand laser printers for home offices which disable themselves if a user attempts to insert a compatible and more affordable generic ink, or a John Deere® tractor which requires a service technician at $200/hour to replace a minor gasket since the farmer-operator may not legally access the on-board diagnostic coding.

What Doctorow bemoans is in fact of case of corportatism, an unholy alliance between government and special interests, such as the tech lobby. In a purely capitalist economy, government protects all market participants’ rights to property and contract, not just the industrialists at the expense of everyone else.

Fortunately, government can fulfill its proper function by keeping the playing field level. A memorable instance of this was the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, which another progressivist president, Barack Obama, ratified in 2014. Before this legislation, if a cellular carrier like Verizon Wireless activated a line for a customer, whether the customer paid off the supplied smartphone through financing or purchased the handset outright, the DCMA artificially prevented that smartphone from switching to rival networks, even if compatible. Worse yet, the DCMA in effect allowed the carrier to hold the customer’s phone number hostage, such that switching carriers would entail losing contact with family, friends and employment. Thanks to this statute (Pub. L. No. 113-144, 128 Stat. 175), customers regained an ownership interest in devices which they had purchased, and in their own numbers, making them portable across rival carriers.

Yet Doctorow recognizes the risk in overreliance on government. As he writes, “Monopoly is a flywheel; Big companies subvert politics, paving the way for corrupt practices and anticompetitive mergers.” Regulatory agencies have notoriously become a revolving door through which industry insiders enter to rig the system in their favor, and from which regulators exit into cushy jobs in the industries they had gingerly regulated.

Doctorow inveighs against the tech brahs like Peter Thiel and (especially) Elon Musk who are ensconced in the current administration, but society would be no better under the thumb of Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey, who during the pandemic in 2020-2021 made decisions to suppress information circulating on that platform which – as was subsequently proven – may have saved tens of thousands of lives in terms of coping with C0vid. Society is no better off under the thumb of Google’s CEO Sundararajan “Sundar” Pichai, who in 2016 allowed his platform’s algorithms to prioritize Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s political ads over those of the Republican rival Donald Trump, amounting to an unreported in-kind contribution to Clinton’s campaign worth millions of dollars, as Dr. Robert Epstein detailed in his testimony to the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee in July 2019.

If nothing else, Doctorow corroborates the notion that there are no silver bullets for improving our Republic and its economy. Relief will not come alone from some President, the judiciary, the legislature, organized labor nor consumer advocates. If enshittification is to be killed, then we all have to surround Caesar and poke some holes in that toga!

And if the progressivist author can learn to identify correctly the underlying issue of corporatism, then surely there’s some hope for us Libertarians. Too often we deal in ideological absolutes and argue positions on principle, which leaves a trap into which Libertarians can fall on this subject. We may end up arguing against governmental intervention in the digital/electronic marketplace on grounds of undue interference in the free market, without realizing that this market is anything but free.

That is a topic for a post on its own, which will follow shortly. In the meantime, readers are strongly encouraged to check out Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, to put yourselves on notice about the biggest theft (after inflation) happening right now under our noses in cyberspace.