In her song “Bitter Ender” Mary Chapin-Carpenter claims that, “Nothing changes—it’s the same old shit.” But Cory Doctorow would beg to differ.
Doctorow, a science fiction author and special advisor in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believes that new forms of stuff have emerged of late.
In his latest book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, he explores the bad behavior of Big Tech.
He begins by spelling out a four-step playbook that tech platforms have adopted to enrich themselves at the expense of their users and business customers. One example of the playbook in action: Facebook.
Step One: Facebook treats their users well.
In its early years, Facebook urgently needed to expand its user base, so it made a striking promise: “Come to Facebook, where we will never spy on you.”
In doing so they distinguished themselves from MySpace, a social media site that many subscribed to at that time. The number of people on Facebook soared.
Step Two: Facebook mistreats their users in ways that benefit their business clients.
Facebook offered advertisers the chance to set up targeted advertising based on the data they’d assembled about their users. In effect, they quietly reneged on their earlier pledge to never spy on those who logged onto the site.
At the same time the company let publishers know that they’d show users things they’d never asked to view. Publishers could now post snippets of articles on Facebook and include a link to their website content.
Although this was a boon to the publishers, it detracted from the original Facebook experience.
Phase Three: Facebook mistreats business clients to benefit their own bottom line.
Over time, Facebook raised the price that they charged companies to send ads to targeted users. However, it got sloppy about who they sent the ads to and reduced the number of posts from individuals and groups that users wanted to follow.
Advertisers were soon shelling out billions for ads being sent outside their target audience. Facebook users now scrolled through lots of content that they didn’t want to see.
Phase Four: Facebook devolves into crap.
Facebook tried, in vain, to create a new source of income: a digital landscape called the Metaverse—something that doesn’t serve the needs of Facebook users and that never gained traction. Mark Zuckerberg phased it out earlier this year—perhaps because he noticed, as Doctorow suggests, that it was crap.
Doctorow traces a similar decline in the quality of Google’s search engine.
The company’s search feature had cornered 90 percent of the market, but Google’s leadership wanted to reap more financial benefits from that product.
Their scheme: to boost the number of times that users needed to search for the information they were after. The bigger the number of searches, the more ads Google could show on search-results pages—and the weightier the firm’s bottom line.
Google also devised ways of collecting more cash from its business customers, in part by collaborating with Facebook to tinker with the ad market. Their goal: “to raise the price of ads while delivering a lower share of the revenue to the publishers who ran those ads.”
Here Doctorow draws on Yanis Varoufakis’ insights in his book Technofeudalism.
Varoufakis argues that, in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, Big Tech stopped earning most of its money via profits and morphed into a “primarily rent-seeking” model.
Nowadays the lion’s share of Big Tech’s profits comes from such rents.
Amazon now rents search placement to business clients and rakes in $38 billion annually. Apple and Google, for their part, get even more money via rents, swiping 30 cents from every dollar that comes their way on an app.
So what can be done to clean these 21st century Augean stables?
In the book’s final section Doctorow describes the sorts of legislation and regulation that could be put in place to resurrect the original, user-friendly internet—including anti-trust enforcement and privacy laws. He also shows how some nations have started moving in this direction.
He exudes optimism about such a path forward, but it’s clear that such a cleanup would be a lengthy process.
More Than Just Tech Companies
Despite all of the ground that the book covers, it also misses some of the digital world’s moral turpitude.
By focusing on the major tech companies, Doctorow fails to adequately explore shady business practices by smaller actors.
A February 2025 article in the German magazine Dein Spiegel probes one such scheme.
Its author examines how some unscrupulous individuals have churned out children’s books using AI tools.
They haven’t undergone editorial fine-tuning, and it shows in their occasionally lifeless style, writing that’s often riddled with grammatical errors, and narrative inconsistencies—not to mention the shabby quality of the illustrations.
Nothing in their descriptions on Amazon reveals that they’ve been produced this way. And yet, when they’re advertised on Amazon, such books are often labeled as bestsellers—something that clearly helps them to sell better.
How does that work?
Amazon’s platform offers books in various categories, and authors can select which category their works should appear in.
Thus such AI-generated children’s literature can and does appear in such Amazon categories as “Geography Textbooks” and “Energy Technology.” Should they sell more copies than their rivals in that category—which may not be all that tough, given that these are niche topics—they’ll earn a profitable bestseller label for their efforts.
A step-by-step guide on Instagram has explained how the scam works.
One wonders how many similar shenanigans are now going in the darker corners of internet commerce—and how much digital shit Doctorow has thus neglected to take into account.
When the internet burst onto the scene, it was greeted with a sense of promise and hope. That’s now changed, and the 2026 internet inspires far less optimism.
All of which brings Wendell Berry to mind. Toward the end of his 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” he writes that “I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.”
Is Berry’s grim assessment of digital technology’s limitations valid? Or can something akin to Doctorow’s blueprint for a better, people-friendly internet be realized? Only time will tell.
