Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It by Doctorow, Cory

Enshittification: It's not just you-- the internet sucks now. It's been enshittified. That was no accident, and it's not gonna fix itself. Here's how we'll disenshittify it so we can have a new, good internet.

We are all living through the Enshittocene--the Great Enshittening--a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are being turned into gi- ant piles of shit. It's frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.

The once-glorious internet has degenerated into "platforms" that rose to dominance because they delivered convenient and delightful services efficiently and reliably. But once we were locked in, the tech bosses turned on us, relying on our dependency even as their services got worse and worse. The platform bosses did the same to the companies that had flocked to their services to sell stuff to us. Once we were all locked in--businesses and users--the tech companies stripped out all utility, save the bare minimum needed to stave off total collapse.

In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow shows us where the problem comes from: not the iron laws of economics, or the great forces of history, but specific policy choices made by powerful people. These are choices that can be undone. Enshittification is a diagnosis, and it is a cure.

Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 09/01/2026
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.43w x 0.94d
ISBN: 9781250448194

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,