Enshittification: Why Everything Is Getting Worse, How Corporate Greed Is Ruining the Digital World, and What We Can Do About It
The Strange Feeling That Everything Is Getting Worse
Have you ever noticed that the internet does not feel as good as it used to?
Google Search once felt like a revolutionary tool that could find almost anything within seconds. Today, searching for a simple answer can mean navigating sponsored results, SEO-driven articles, shopping recommendations, advertisements, AI-generated content, and pages that seem designed more for search engines than human beings.
Social media platforms once helped people connect with friends, discover interesting ideas, and share their experiences. Now, many of them increasingly resemble advertising machines, where algorithmically selected content competes for attention and personal relationships become secondary to engagement metrics.
Online shopping promised convenience, competitive prices, and an almost limitless selection. Yet consumers increasingly encounter sponsored listings, artificial discounts, confusing product recommendations, counterfeit concerns, and sellers struggling to remain visible without paying for promotion.
Streaming services promised an alternative to expensive television subscriptions. Instead, consumers now face multiple subscriptions, rising prices, advertising tiers, disappearing content, and fragmented entertainment libraries.
Even products that once represented convenience and technological progress sometimes seem deliberately designed to frustrate the people using them.
There is a word for this phenomenon: enshittification.
The term, popularised by technology writer Cory Doctorow, describes how digital platforms gradually deteriorate as companies shift their priorities from serving users to extracting increasingly greater economic value from them.
But enshittification is more than a complaint about annoying advertisements, expensive subscriptions, or declining product quality. It describes a deeper economic and technological problem: the transformation of successful services into systems that increasingly exploit the very people and businesses responsible for their success.
It helps explain why so many popular digital services seem to become worse precisely when they become powerful enough that people cannot easily leave them.
And perhaps most importantly, it raises an uncomfortable question: Are companies still trying to build products that people love, or have they become more interested in extracting money from people who have nowhere else to go?
1. What Exactly Is Enshittification?
Enshittification is the gradual deterioration of a product, service, or digital platform because its owners increasingly prioritise profit extraction over the value they provide to users and business customers.
The term was popularised by Cory Doctorow in his January 2023 essay, The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok, although he had begun developing the concept in 2022.
Doctorow describes a characteristic three-stage process through which digital platforms decline.
First, a platform provides an excellent experience to attract users.
Second, after building a substantial user base, it changes the experience to benefit advertisers, sellers, publishers, and other business customers.
Third, once these business customers also become dependent on the platform, the company begins extracting greater value from them as well.
Eventually, the platform attempts to capture as much economic value as possible while leaving just enough usefulness to prevent users and businesses from abandoning it.
This is the central idea behind enshittification.
It is important to understand that the concept does not simply mean that a company increases its prices or introduces advertisements.
Businesses are entitled to make profits. They need revenue to pay employees, maintain infrastructure, develop new products, and reward investors.
The problem begins when a company’s ability to make money becomes increasingly disconnected from its ability to create value.
Instead of improving the product, the company discovers that manipulating the relationship between users, suppliers, advertisers, and competitors can be more profitable.
The result is a gradual shift from creating value to capturing value.
2. The Three Stages of Enshittification
Cory Doctorow’s framework is particularly useful because it explains how a service can begin as something genuinely valuable and gradually become an exploitative business environment.
Stage One: Make the Product Wonderful for Users
Every successful platform needs users.
When a new digital service enters the market, it usually faces an important challenge: convincing people to try something unfamiliar and abandon existing habits.
To overcome this challenge, companies frequently provide unusually attractive experiences.
They might offer free services, convenient features, excellent customer support, low prices, generous benefits, or innovative technology.
Consider the early experience of Google Search.
Its simple interface, speed, and relevance made it dramatically more useful than many competing search engines. People began using it because it helped them find information efficiently.
Similarly, early Facebook offered an accessible way to connect with friends and maintain social relationships. Amazon attracted customers through convenience, extensive product selection, and competitive pricing.
At this stage, the company has a powerful incentive to make users happy.
The better the experience, the more people join.
The more people join, the more valuable the platform becomes.
A large user base also attracts advertisers, sellers, publishers, developers, and other businesses that want access to those users.
However, something important happens during this period.
Users gradually build their lives around the platform.
They accumulate photographs, messages, contacts, purchasing histories, playlists, followers, professional relationships, and personal preferences.
The platform becomes more than a product. It becomes part of their everyday infrastructure.
This creates dependency.
And dependency becomes the foundation for the next stage.
Stage Two: Make the Platform More Attractive to Business Customers
Once a platform has attracted millions of users, it becomes an extremely valuable marketplace.
Advertisers want access to its audience. Sellers want to reach its customers. Publishers want visibility. Businesses want to communicate with potential buyers.
The platform now has something valuable to sell: access to the attention, behaviour, and purchasing power of its users.
At this point, the company’s priorities begin to change.
Instead of concentrating primarily on improving the user experience, it increasingly focuses on making the platform more profitable for business customers.
This might involve introducing more advertisements, giving commercial content greater visibility, changing recommendation algorithms, prioritising sponsored listings, or offering businesses preferential access to users.
Initially, these changes may be relatively harmless.
Users see a few advertisements. Sellers pay small fees for additional visibility. Publishers accept new commercial arrangements.
But over time, the balance can shift dramatically.
Organic content becomes harder to discover. Advertisements occupy more space. Search results become increasingly commercialised. Recommendations serve the platform’s monetisation strategy rather than the user’s original intention.
The platform is no longer simply helping people find what they want.
It is increasingly deciding what people should see based on what generates revenue.
The important distinction is that the platform is now willing to sacrifice some user satisfaction to increase its value to business customers.
Stage Three: Extract Value From Everyone
The third stage is where enshittification becomes most visible.
By this point, both ordinary users and business customers have become dependent on the platform.
Users have their communities, relationships, and digital identities inside it.
Businesses have invested money, employees, marketing budgets, advertising strategies, and customer acquisition systems into it.
Leaving becomes expensive.
The platform therefore has greater freedom to change its terms.
It can increase advertising prices, raise commissions, reduce organic visibility, introduce additional fees, restrict access to previously available features, or demand more money for the same level of exposure.
Sellers may discover that maintaining their sales requires increasingly expensive advertising.
Creators may discover that reaching their existing followers requires paid promotion.
Advertisers may find that the platform charges more for access to an audience they helped build.
Ordinary users may encounter more advertisements, less relevant recommendations, and fewer useful features.
The company captures a larger share of the economic value generated by everyone else.
This is the final stage of Doctorow’s model: the platform attempts to maximise extraction from both sides of the marketplace.
It may continue growing financially even while the experience becomes progressively worse.
The service survives because leaving is difficult, not necessarily because customers remain satisfied.
3. Why Do Companies Deliberately Make Their Products Worse?
At first glance, this behaviour seems irrational.
If customers dislike a product, why would a company continue making it worse?
Shouldn’t dissatisfied customers simply move to competitors?
In a genuinely competitive market, that is often what happens.
But digital markets have several characteristics that make this process more complicated.
Network Effects
Network effects occur when a service becomes more valuable as more people use it.
A messaging application is useful because your friends and family are already using it.
A professional networking platform is valuable because your colleagues, employers, and professional contacts are there.
A marketplace attracts buyers because it has sellers, while sellers join because it has buyers.
This creates a powerful competitive advantage for established platforms.
A new competitor may offer better features, stronger privacy, and a more attractive interface, but users may refuse to move because their existing communities are not there.
The result is a market in which popularity itself becomes a barrier to competition.
Switching Costs
Switching costs are the practical, financial, and emotional costs associated with leaving a service.
Imagine moving away from a social network where you have spent ten years building relationships.
You might lose access to old photographs, conversations, professional contacts, communities, and followers.
Moving to another platform does not automatically transfer those relationships.
The same problem exists in digital entertainment.
Someone who has purchased hundreds of digital books or accumulated years of playlists may discover that moving to another service is difficult or expensive.
Businesses experience similar problems.
A seller who has built a successful business around an online marketplace cannot simply abandon it without potentially losing customers and revenue.
These switching costs reduce the pressure on companies to maintain high standards.
Data Lock-In
Digital platforms collect enormous quantities of user-generated information.
This includes preferences, browsing histories, photographs, purchasing records, messages, behavioural patterns, and other personal data.
Over time, this information makes a service more personalised and useful.
But it can also make leaving more difficult.
Even when users can download some of their information, transferring it into another service may be impossible or impractical.
The user technically has the freedom to leave, but the practical experience of leaving can be extremely inconvenient.
Market Concentration
Competition is one of the strongest forces encouraging companies to improve their products.
When customers can easily switch between alternatives, companies have to work harder to retain them.
But when a small number of powerful companies dominate an industry, the competitive pressure becomes weaker.
In some markets, a handful of companies control access to customers, advertising, distribution, infrastructure, or essential digital services.
This can give established platforms significant bargaining power.
The result is an environment where a company may discover that extracting more value from existing customers is easier than attracting new ones through genuine improvements.
4. Real-World Examples of Enshittification
Enshittification becomes easier to understand when we examine how the concept applies to familiar digital services.
Not every criticism of these companies proves deliberate enshittification. However, their business models and changing user experiences illustrate several mechanisms identified by Doctorow.
Google Search: From Finding Information to Navigating Commercial Content
Google Search transformed the internet by making information easier to discover.
Its early appeal came from a relatively straightforward promise: enter a question and receive useful results.
For many years, the experience felt remarkably efficient.
However, modern search increasingly involves advertisements, shopping placements, search-engine-optimised content, comparison pages, and other commercial material.
Many websites are now designed primarily to attract search traffic rather than provide genuinely useful information.
This creates a difficult environment for users.
A person searching for an independent product review may encounter pages filled with affiliate links. Someone looking for a simple explanation may have to navigate several paragraphs of repetitive material before reaching the actual answer.
The underlying problem is the growing tension between two objectives.
One is helping users find the most relevant information.
The other is generating advertising revenue and maintaining commercial relationships.
These objectives can coexist, but they do not always point in the same direction.
When monetisation becomes dominant, search quality can suffer.
Facebook: When Relationships Become Advertising Inventory
Facebook originally became popular because it helped people maintain relationships and share experiences.
Its network effects made it extraordinarily powerful.
As its audience expanded, the platform became increasingly valuable to advertisers.
Advertising and algorithmic content selection became central parts of its business model.
The user’s News Feed consequently evolved beyond a simple chronological collection of posts from friends.
The platform increasingly determined which content deserved attention.
This created new incentives.
Content that generates engagement can become commercially valuable, even when it is controversial, repetitive, emotionally manipulative, or less relevant to the individual user.
Users may spend considerable time on the platform without necessarily receiving the same quality of social interaction that originally attracted them.
The experience becomes less about maintaining relationships and more about competing for attention.
Amazon: When the Marketplace Becomes Pay-to-Play
Amazon built its reputation around convenience, competitive pricing, extensive product selection, and fast delivery.
For customers, it became an enormous digital marketplace.
For independent sellers, it became a powerful distribution channel.
However, marketplace dependence creates an important imbalance.
Sellers rely on Amazon to reach customers, while Amazon controls many of the rules governing visibility, ranking, advertising, fees, and access.
Sponsored listings can compete with organic search results. Sellers may need to spend more on advertising to maintain visibility.
As more businesses compete for the same customer attention, advertising can become an increasingly important cost of doing business.
This can create a situation where sellers pay the marketplace to reach customers who are already shopping on that marketplace.
The commercial relationship changes.
Instead of simply providing a place where buyers and sellers meet, the platform increasingly controls the conditions under which sellers can reach buyers.
YouTube: The Monetisation of Attention
YouTube revolutionised online video.
It provided creators with an accessible publishing platform and viewers with an enormous library of entertainment, education, music, and independent content.
Its growth created an ecosystem involving creators, advertisers, viewers, and media companies.
However, monetisation has increasingly shaped the viewing experience.
Advertisements, subscription tiers, content policies, recommendation systems, and creator revenue arrangements influence how people interact with the platform.
Viewers may encounter interruptions unless they pay for an ad-free experience.
Creators must navigate changing monetisation rules and compete for algorithmic visibility.
Advertisers compete for access to audiences.
The result is a complicated marketplace in which the interests of viewers, creators, and advertisers do not always align.
The broader enshittification question is whether the platform’s commercial priorities are increasingly taking precedence over the quality of the experience it originally promised.
X: The Transformation of a Social Network
Twitter was once widely used for real-time conversations, breaking news, professional networking, and public discussion.
Its value came partly from the diverse communities that developed around it.
Following its acquisition and subsequent transformation into X, the platform underwent substantial changes to its verification system, subscription model, content moderation approach, and recommendation environment.
These developments illustrate how users’ experiences can change dramatically when control over a major communication platform is concentrated in the hands of its owner.
The larger issue is not whether every individual change is necessarily bad.
It is that users who have built their communities around a platform have limited influence over the decisions that reshape those communities.
5. Enshittification Is Not Limited to Social Media
One of the most important aspects of the concept is that it extends beyond conventional social media platforms.
The same economic incentives can appear in many industries.
Streaming Services
Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and other streaming platforms initially attracted customers by offering convenient access to large entertainment libraries.
Over time, consumers have experienced changing subscription prices, different advertising tiers, content fragmentation, and the removal of programmes from catalogues.
Instead of paying for one convenient entertainment ecosystem, customers may need multiple subscriptions to access the content they want.
This does not mean every price increase or licensing change is enshittification.
But when convenience decreases while costs and commercial restrictions increase, the underlying concern becomes relevant.
Smartphone Ecosystems
Modern smartphones are deeply integrated into people’s personal and professional lives.
App stores, operating systems, payment systems, cloud services, and digital subscriptions create powerful ecosystems.
Once users have invested in a particular ecosystem, moving elsewhere may involve losing purchases, changing devices, transferring data, and learning new systems.
This can give platform owners considerable control over developers and consumers.
The more difficult it becomes to leave, the greater the possibility that the ecosystem can impose unfavourable conditions.
Food Delivery and Ride-Hailing
Platforms connecting customers with restaurants, drivers, and delivery workers also demonstrate the dynamics of platform dependence.
Initially, these services attract users through convenience, discounts, and competitive pricing.
They also attract workers and businesses by offering access to a large customer base.
As the platform becomes established, the balance of power can change.
Restaurants may face commissions and promotional costs. Drivers may encounter changing incentives and operating expenses. Customers may face delivery fees, service charges, and higher prices.
Research published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations in 2025 examined platform decay in the gig economy using interviews with long-term ride-hailing and grocery-delivery workers.
The researchers identified mechanisms including transferring operating costs to workers, changing work demands, and weakening workers’ bargaining power.
This demonstrates that platform deterioration is not merely a question of whether an application has become less pleasant to use.
It can also affect livelihoods and working conditions.
Digital News and Online Publishing
The internet once promised to create new opportunities for independent journalism.
Publishers could reach readers without relying entirely on traditional media distribution systems.
But many digital publishers became dependent on search engines and social media for traffic.
Changes to recommendation algorithms, advertising systems, and search visibility can therefore have serious consequences.
A publisher may invest years building an audience and then experience a dramatic reduction in traffic after a platform changes its distribution priorities.
This creates a dangerous dependency.
The publisher produces the content, but another company controls access to the audience.
6. The Psychological Cost: Why Enshittification Changes Human Behaviour
Enshittification is usually discussed as an economic or technological phenomenon.
But its consequences are also psychological.
Digital services increasingly compete for limited human attention.
Their commercial success may depend on how long users remain engaged, how frequently they return, and how much information they reveal.
This creates incentives to design experiences that encourage repeated interaction.
Infinite scrolling, autoplay, personalised recommendations, notifications, and emotionally engaging content can make digital services difficult to put down.
These features are not automatically harmful. They can also improve convenience and help people discover interesting material.
The problem emerges when engagement becomes more important than user well-being.
A platform may benefit financially from keeping people scrolling even when they are no longer enjoying the experience.
Users may open an application intending to spend five minutes and find themselves still browsing an hour later.
They may encounter increasingly polarising content because emotional reactions produce engagement.
They may begin comparing their lives with carefully selected images of other people’s lives.
The service continues generating activity, but the relationship between activity and satisfaction becomes weaker.
This creates an important distinction:
A platform can become better at capturing attention while becoming worse at providing value.
That is one of the most troubling dimensions of enshittification.
7. The Economic Logic Behind the Problem: Value Creation Versus Value Extraction
To understand why enshittification happens, it is necessary to distinguish between two economic activities.
Value creation occurs when a company develops something that makes people’s lives better.
Value extraction occurs when a company increases its share of the economic benefits generated by customers, workers, suppliers, or business partners.
Both activities can exist in the same business.
A company that develops a genuinely useful product creates value. It then earns money by selling that product.
This is a normal and necessary part of the economy.
However, problems emerge when value extraction increasingly replaces value creation.
Consider a hypothetical digital marketplace.
In its early years, the marketplace charges sellers a modest commission and offers buyers convenient access to products.
As it becomes popular, more sellers join.
Eventually, sellers depend on the marketplace for a substantial portion of their revenue.
The marketplace then increases commissions and introduces paid advertising requirements.
Sellers cannot easily leave because their customers are concentrated there.
The marketplace begins generating more revenue without necessarily improving its underlying service.
Its financial performance may improve even as the economic experience of its participants deteriorates.
This is the difference between growing through innovation and growing through market power.
A healthy business should ideally become more valuable because it creates better products, more efficient systems, and improved customer experiences.
An enshittified business increasingly becomes more profitable because its customers have fewer alternatives.
8. Why Does Competition Sometimes Fail to Stop Enshittification?
Traditional economic theory often assumes that consumers can discipline companies by choosing competing products.
If one business raises prices or reduces quality, customers can move elsewhere.
But digital markets complicate this assumption.
Imagine that a messaging platform has 500 million users.
A new competitor enters the market offering better privacy, fewer advertisements, and a more attractive interface.
Even if the competitor is technically superior, existing users may hesitate to move.
Why?
Because their friends, family members, colleagues, and communities remain on the original platform.
The competitor must convince millions of people to change simultaneously or develop a way for communities to communicate across platforms.
This is a substantial obstacle.
A similar situation occurs with digital marketplaces.
A seller cannot easily abandon the largest marketplace if that platform provides access to the majority of potential customers.
The same logic applies to search engines, app stores, professional networks, and other digital infrastructure.
In these markets, consumers may technically have alternatives without having meaningful alternatives.
This distinction is crucial.
Competition is not simply about the number of companies operating in a market.
It is also about whether customers can realistically switch between them.
9. Is Enshittification Inevitable? The Counterargument
Although Cory Doctorow’s framework explains many troubling developments, it should not be treated as an economic law.
Not every declining product is the result of deliberate corporate exploitation.
Some products become worse because maintaining them becomes more expensive.
Others face technical limitations, changing consumer preferences, increased competition, or difficult business conditions.
A platform that initially offers free services may eventually need to introduce subscriptions or advertising to remain financially sustainable.
A company may remove an unpopular feature because it is expensive to maintain or rarely used.
An increase in prices does not automatically prove that a business is exploiting customers.
Economist Paul Belleflamme’s 2025 analysis of the enshittification thesis argues that some of Doctorow’s mechanisms are economically persuasive but challenges the idea that platform dominance necessarily leads to inevitable decline.
Dominant platforms can continue creating value. Furthermore, deterioration can sometimes result from intense competition rather than excessive market power.
This is an important qualification.
The real issue is not whether a company makes money or whether its products change.
The issue is whether users and business customers retain meaningful choices, whether the company continues creating value, and whether its market position allows it to impose increasingly unfavourable conditions.
Enshittification is best understood as a powerful explanation of a recurring pattern, not a universal explanation for every disappointing product.
10. How Enshittification Affects India
The concept has particular relevance in India, where digital platforms have become central to shopping, communication, entertainment, payments, education, transportation, and business.
India’s rapidly expanding digital economy has created enormous opportunities for consumers and entrepreneurs.
At the same time, it has created new forms of dependence on private digital infrastructure.
E-Commerce and Small Businesses
Platforms such as Amazon and Flipkart provide Indian sellers with access to customers across the country.
For a small business, this can be transformative.
A seller operating from a relatively small town can reach customers in major metropolitan markets without building an independent distribution network.
However, dependence on a marketplace can also create vulnerabilities.
Sellers must navigate platform commissions, advertising costs, ranking systems, logistics requirements, return policies, and changing commercial conditions.
A business that receives most of its orders from one marketplace may find it difficult to negotiate with that marketplace.
The larger the dependence, the greater the potential imbalance.
Food Delivery Platforms
India’s food-delivery market has created new opportunities for restaurants and consumers.
Platforms such as Zomato and Swiggy provide restaurants with digital visibility, ordering infrastructure, and delivery networks.
But restaurant owners must also consider commissions, promotional spending, discount arrangements, packaging expenses, and platform-related costs.
For smaller restaurants, the challenge is particularly significant.
The platform can become an essential source of customer acquisition while simultaneously increasing the cost of reaching those customers.
This is precisely the kind of relationship that makes platform power worth examining.
Digital Advertising and Content Creators
Indian content creators increasingly depend on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram to build audiences and generate income.
A creator may spend years developing a following.
But visibility depends partly on recommendation algorithms and platform policies.
A change in distribution can reduce reach even when the creator’s content has not changed.
This creates uncertainty for independent creators, educators, journalists, and small media businesses.
It also highlights why building an audience on a platform is not the same as owning that audience.
Digital Payments and Platform Dependence
India’s digital payments ecosystem, particularly the Unified Payments Interface, demonstrates a different model of digital infrastructure.
UPI has become an important part of everyday transactions because it provides an interoperable payment system across participating banks and applications.
Its significance lies partly in the fact that users are not restricted to one single private payment platform to transfer money.
Interoperability can reduce dependency on individual applications.
This offers an important lesson: digital systems can be designed in ways that preserve competition and user choice rather than concentrating all control within one company.
The Broader Indian Challenge
India needs a digital economy that encourages innovation while protecting consumers, workers, small businesses, and independent creators.
The objective should not be to prevent companies from earning profits.
It should be to ensure that economic success does not give platforms unlimited power over the people and businesses that depend on them.
A competitive digital economy requires more than access to technology.
It requires meaningful alternatives.
11. How Can Enshittification Be Stopped?
Recognising enshittification is important, but recognition alone cannot reverse it.
The solution requires changes in regulation, technology, business practices, and consumer behaviour.
1. Make It Easier to Leave Platforms
One of the strongest protections against platform exploitation is the ability to leave.
Users should be able to transfer their photographs, contacts, messages, files, purchasing histories, and other relevant information into alternative services.
Data portability can reduce switching costs.
However, portability must be practical rather than theoretical.
Downloading a collection of files that cannot be imported into another service is not sufficient.
The objective should be to make switching genuinely convenient.
2. Promote Interoperability
Interoperability means that different digital systems can communicate and work together.
For example, users of different messaging services could communicate without being forced to use the same application.
Similarly, businesses should not be unnecessarily restricted to one dominant marketplace or payment ecosystem.
Interoperability reduces the power of platforms to hold users and businesses captive.
It also makes it easier for new competitors to enter established markets.
3. Strengthen Competition Laws
Competition authorities need to examine how powerful digital platforms use their market positions.
This includes investigating exclusionary practices, anti-competitive acquisitions, discriminatory marketplace arrangements, and restrictions that prevent customers from accessing alternatives.
Regulation should focus on preserving meaningful competition rather than simply penalising successful companies.
The objective is to prevent companies from turning popularity into permanent economic control.
4. Protect Consumer Rights
Consumers should receive clear information about subscription costs, advertising arrangements, automatic renewals, cancellation procedures, and significant changes to digital services.
Businesses should not be allowed to hide important commercial conditions behind confusing interfaces or deliberately complicated cancellation systems.
Transparent pricing and genuine cancellation rights help restore bargaining power.
5. Support Independent and Decentralised Platforms
The internet does not have to depend entirely on a handful of enormous companies.
Open-source software, decentralised networks, community-operated services, and independent digital platforms offer alternative models.
Services based on open standards can make it easier for users to move between providers.
Decentralisation is not automatically a guarantee of quality or fairness, but it can reduce dependence on a single corporate gatekeeper.
6. Give Users Greater Control Over Algorithms
Users should have meaningful choices about how information is presented to them.
For example, platforms could offer chronological feeds, transparent recommendation settings, and greater control over personalised advertising.
A person should not have to accept an algorithmically optimised experience simply to use a basic service.
The ability to choose how content is organised is an important part of digital autonomy.
7. Protect Workers and Independent Businesses
Platform regulation must also consider the people who provide services through digital marketplaces.
Drivers, delivery workers, restaurant owners, sellers, publishers, and creators should have fairer bargaining conditions.
A digital platform should not be able to transfer every operational risk to workers and small businesses while retaining most of the economic power.
Fair contracts, transparent fees, predictable policies, and appropriate worker protections are essential.
12. What Can Ordinary Internet Users Do?
Although large-scale reform requires institutional action, individuals are not completely powerless.
There are several practical ways to reduce dependence on platforms.
Avoid relying on a single platform for everything.
Keep independent copies of important photographs, documents, contacts, and personal information.
Build relationships outside social media.
Maintain direct contact with friends, customers, and professional communities instead of depending entirely on platform-based connections.
Choose alternatives where practical.
Explore independent search engines, privacy-conscious communication tools, alternative browsers, and services that support data portability.
Pay attention to subscription traps.
Review recurring subscriptions and cancel services that no longer provide sufficient value.
Support independent creators directly.
Where possible, subscribe to newsletters, purchase products directly, attend events, or support creators through independent channels.
Think carefully before becoming dependent on a platform.
For businesses and creators, building an independent website, maintaining a mailing list, and developing direct customer relationships can reduce the risks of sudden algorithmic changes.
Question convenience when it comes at the cost of control.
A service may appear extremely convenient while gradually making it harder to move elsewhere.
Convenience is valuable, but independence is valuable too.
13. The Future of the Internet: Can We Return to a Better Digital World?
The internet was originally celebrated as an environment that could reduce barriers between people, businesses, institutions, and information.
It created opportunities for individuals to publish their ideas, develop businesses, share knowledge, and build communities without requiring permission from traditional gatekeepers.
Digital platforms expanded these possibilities enormously.
However, the concentration of power within a small number of major technology companies has created a new generation of gatekeepers.
These companies increasingly control how people discover information, communicate, purchase products, access entertainment, and conduct business.
The central question is whether the internet will remain an open environment where people can move freely between services or become a collection of privately controlled ecosystems that users cannot realistically escape.
Artificial intelligence introduces another dimension to this discussion.
AI-powered search, recommendation systems, content generation, and digital assistants could make online experiences dramatically more useful.
But they could also create new forms of dependence.
If a small number of companies control the infrastructure through which people access information and complete everyday tasks, those companies may acquire even greater influence over the digital economy.
The challenge is therefore not simply to develop more advanced technology.
It is to ensure that technological progress improves human freedom, productivity, and access to information rather than making people increasingly dependent on a small number of powerful corporations.
The future of the internet will depend partly on whether societies can preserve competition, interoperability, privacy, and meaningful user choice.
When Companies Stop Serving People and Start Exploiting Their Dependence
Enshittification gives a name to something millions of internet users have experienced without necessarily understanding its underlying causes.
It explains why familiar platforms can become less useful despite becoming more successful.
It explains why advertisements increasingly compete with genuine information, why sellers feel compelled to pay for visibility, why creators struggle with changing algorithms, and why consumers sometimes find themselves paying more for services that offer less convenience.
The most important insight is that a company’s success does not necessarily mean its customers are receiving greater value.
A platform can become more profitable while becoming less useful.
It can become more popular while becoming less trustworthy.
It can become more powerful while becoming less accountable.
This is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of enshittification.
The companies that initially attract people by providing convenience, freedom, and value may eventually use the dependence created by that success to extract more money and control.
But this outcome is not inevitable.
Competition, interoperability, consumer protection, data portability, independent alternatives, and stronger bargaining rights can help prevent digital platforms from becoming unavoidable tollbooths.
The question is not whether technology companies should make money.
They should.
The question is whether they should be allowed to become so powerful that they can continuously reduce the quality of their services without fearing that users, workers, or businesses will leave.
A healthy digital economy should reward companies for making people’s lives better.
It should not reward them simply for making it harder for people to escape.
The internet was supposed to connect people and expand their choices. It should not become a system in which every connection turns into another opportunity for someone else to extract rent.
That is the deeper meaning of enshittification, and understanding it may be one of the first steps towards demanding a better digital future.
