Morning Brew Daily
What is “Enshittification” of Tech Companies? With Author Cory Doctorow
24 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Good morning for Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how the internet became enshitified.
Neil, that's actually not a curse word. It's the brainchild of today's guest, Cory Doctorow. It's Wednesday, December 24th. Let's ride. Let's ride.
Merry Christmas Eve, everyone. For our final podcast before you unwrap your presents, we're bringing you a chat with someone who will change the way you think about the internet. Cory Doctorow is a prolific author and internet scholar who coined the term enshitification to describe the decay you experience every day on platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
He has just come out with a book that explains how and why enshitification happens and what can possibly be done about it.
Now, forewarning, you're going to hear a lot of words that are reminiscent of bowel movements, but as Corey will explain, it's the perfect word for describing what everyone on the internet feels right now, which is things just feel a little bit worse these days. But first, a word from our sponsor, Public. Neil, I gotta tell you something.
I know you're the one who ate the rest of my bagel out of the fridge. For the last time, that wasn't me. What I wanted to tell you was about public. You know how on public you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, and crypto, but now they have generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.
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Chapter 2: What does 'enshittification' mean in the context of tech companies?
Corey, thank you so much for joining us.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
All right. So the first question I had after I read your wonderful book is, how the heck did you come up with this term? Were you sitting on the toilet one day and you thought, ah, brain blast, there is something here?
No, it's both less exciting and sort of more contingent than that. So I work for a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We're sort of the leading digital rights group in the world. And I've been there for 25 years. And getting people to care about digital rights, it's hard, right?
Because you're asking them to care about things that are abstract and far in the future and technical. you know, you can just like wait until their lives have been destroyed by technology and then they'll care about it. But you'd ideally like to raise the salience while there's still time to do something about it. Right.
So I have just spent a couple of decades coming up with words and concepts and framing devices and metaphors and similes and whatever. And in this case, I was on vacation with my family in Puerto Rico and we had rented a little cabin in a cloud forest and it was serviced in probably by microwave, uh, internet.
And one of the reasons that's improbable is that if you know one thing about microwave internet, the one thing everyone knows is that it doesn't go through clouds. And I remind you, we were in a cloud forest. And so before we would drive down into town, which was a couple hours away, there are a couple little towns we could go.
We try and look up on TripAdvisor which restaurant to go to, whether it was open, that kind of thing. And you'd load like 20 TripAdvisor tabs, and they just time out because there's like 75 trackers on TripAdvisor, and it would load about 40 of them and then just die. And the only thing in the window would be what's called the favico.
It's the little icon that goes in the tab, and it would just fill the whole screen, like a high-res vector image of the TripAdvisor logo. So in a fit of pique, I tweeted, has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most enshitified website I've ever used. And people did what you're doing. They kind of polite chuckle.
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Chapter 3: How did Cory Doctorow come up with the term 'enshittification'?
Now you get to this stage that they've been shooting for, this equilibrium where all the available value has been harvested. But it's very brittle, this equilibrium, because you get one live stream mass shooting or Cambridge Analytica scandal, people bolt for the exits, shareholders pound the company's stock, and the founders and the executives, they panic.
Although being technical people, they have a technical term, they call it pivoting. And so Mark Zuckerberg arises from his sarcophagus one morning and says, you know, hearken unto me, brothers and sisters, for I've had a vision.
I know that I told you that your future would consist of arguing with your most racist uncle using this primitive text interface that I created to non-consensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergraduates.
However, in this vision, I have realized that the true future is one in which I transform you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character so that I can imprison you in a virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old dystopian, cyberpunk, satirical novel that I call the metaverse. And that's the final stage of machinerication.
The platform is now a giant pile of shit.
Is in shitification quantifiable? Like, do you have some sort of empirical metric or is it just an instinctual sense that this has gotten worse? Like, is there a way if I just log into a random website and I look around and I do I have this epiphany over like, oh, yeah, this is definitely in shitified because I see X, Y or Z.
So now you're getting into the theory part of it, right? Not the descriptive part. Because obviously we didn't invent greed in the middle of the last decade. So something changed that caused these companies to start doing this extraction. And my theory is that what changed is that...
We have this, as I say, in shitogenic policy environment, that our policymakers took decisions in living memory after being warned about the consequences that had the outcome of making it so that when companies mistreat you or mistreat their suppliers or their business customers, that rather than losing in the market by having their profits decline, their workers depart, their customers jump ship, that they gain in the market, they do better.
And so in shitification is not just when a platform goes bad, it's when a platform goes bad and does well. And so you could see two platforms, both of which were doing bad things to you. But I would argue that it's not really in shitifying unless they thrive as a consequence, right? If they fail as a consequence, well, that's just how the market works, right?
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Chapter 4: What are the stages of enshitification in tech platforms?
And then hiring the guys in green eye shades to like change the ledger to mark down their pay packet was just not practical. So the digitization of nursing is,
has made it possible to enshitify nursing, not in the loose colloquial sense of things getting worse because of greed and a lack of market discipline and regulation, but in the specific technical sense of taking advantage of the technical characteristics of platformization to victimize nurses by eroding their wages.
Okay, we're coming up on time here. So I want you to kind of finish the process for us. What is the solution for insignification? What is the cure, as you put it in your book?
Yeah. So the thing that's going to disappoint you when I say this is that it's not a thing you can do as a person, right? You can't just like shop your way out of the monopoly.
Chapter 5: How do companies lock in their users during enshitification?
It's like trying to recycle your way out of a wildfire, right? These are not individual decisions. The reason billionaires want you to vote with your wallet is their wallets are thicker than yours and they're not very numerous as individuals. So the only kind of election they can win is the one where you vote with dollars instead of people. And so you're not going to like
make your consumption choices change this by all means, like make consumption choices that make you happy patronize your local bookstore instead of Amazon or like get off Twitter and onto Mastodon or blue sky, if that's what you prefer, but don't think that it's going to make a systemic change.
If you want to make a systemic change, you have to be part of a movement that changes the policy environment because it is the policy environment that gives rise to this, you know, Elon Musk is not smart enough to be the cause. He's the effect, right? If Elon Musk overdoses on ketamine tonight, there'll be a succession battle of 12 horrible big balls.
And whoever emerges victorious will be indistinguishable from Elon Musk. So we need to change the policy environment. And the way you do that is by getting involved with groups that work as a polity. So as I said, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF.org. You can visit that website and find out how to get involved with EFF's causes.
But in your state, you will have local political organizations, mutual aid groups, labor groups, groups that are fighting concentrated corporate power and the corruption that creates the enchatogenic policy environment. That's where you've got to start. And I know it's a big lift, but you're going to like it because being part of a group is amazing.
It means that instead of just like watching TikTok on a Saturday, you got a picnic to go to or a thing where you're feeding the hungry people in your neighborhood or just a party down at the union hall. And so, um,
It sounds like a big lift because we had a lobotomy 40 years ago when we were convinced that we were just individuals and not part of groups, but it feels so good to be part of a group and you'll discover that too.
Now, someone who's hearing you talk for the first time or reading your book might get the impression that you are a Luddite, very anti-technology. And so I am curious, what is your relationship with technology? I mean, you've been a blogger for a very long time, early adopter of the internet, working in the digital space for longer than we've been, we've been alive.
So I'm just curious at a personal level, like what is your, what is your view of technology?
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