Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It - Cory Doctorow - ★★★★.½

AUTHOR & NARRATOR: Cory Doctorow

GENRE: Tech Nonfiction

PUBLICATION DATE: October 7, 2025

RATING: 4.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: An engrossing exposé on the enshittification of the internet and all its components over the last few years. Well-researched with substantial and concrete examples. Informative without getting too techy. Don’t be fooled by the cover; this is a serious and scary book. Much recommended.

Canadian author Cory Doctorow has been an internet activist for more than twenty-five years. He has worked on digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics, among other themes, and has actively lobbied for liberalising copyright laws. Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification’ in a blog post in 2022, to indicate the process by which online products and service gradually decay in quality until they are *shit*. While the concept was already being spoken of, his term caught on and became a widespread neologism, chosen as the ‘Word of the Year’ by The American Dialect Society in 2023.

Enshittification is a word that needn’t be explained at first glance. If I tell you that social media has been enshittifed, you would know what I mean without requiring a definition of the verb. However, this book make me realise that enshittification goes far beyond what it suggests at surface level, and despite that farcical tone thanks to its poopy premise, is actually a worrisome concept.

This book is informative in an all-pervasive way. Many who aren’t active on social media might think that they are better off. Well, they are… But are they entirely safe? Not at all, and this book proves why.

Doctorow begins this book with a background on ‘enshittification’ and goes on to elaborate upon the various ways in which the term is relevant to every single one of us who uses the internet. He substantiates every claim he makes with solid real-world examples. Some were the expected guilty parties such as Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Twitter; some entries were a bit more surprising at least to me. (Case in point: Apple and Uber.)

Those of us on social media (Not counting Goodreads as SM, even though I know its current owner Amazon is utter 💩) already know the difference in how our feeds were when SM just started vis-à-vis the doomscroll of sponsored trash that we see these days. Doctorow explains this degradation through a proper sequence of events that applies to all mega tech corporations, whether through computers or smartphones, websites or apps, tech devices or household gadgets. Wherever there is the internet, there is enshittification in some way or the other.

What makes the book even better is the author’s approach towards the topic. Though the content is tech-intensive by its very nature, Doctorow makes it as accessible as possible. Every term is explained, and every action of the companies mentioned herein is evaluated in a way that makes sense not just to tech-savvy readers but to general users as well. He even adds in humour wherever possible. These remarks are somewhat snarky in tone, but I think that is the best match for the vibe of the book.

I also love how fearless the author is in his declarations. His insightfully scathing remarks about the current US president’s destructive corporate and glocal policies had me virtually whooping. In a world where most content is moderated to suit the rich and powerful, such a filter-free tone is refreshing.

The book isn't limited to the US alone, but as most of the global mega corporations are headquartered in the USA, a major chunk of it is US-centric. But this shouldn’t be used as a deterrent. After all, no matter where we are in the world, we still use the same internet, and whether our countries are mentioned or not, most governments are the same when it comes to surveillance.

As an avid reader and a reluctant social media user (Goodreads is my only happy online space these days), I assumed that at least half of the topics dealt by the author would be familiar to me. I was so wrong! I have read two other books related to social media – Sarah Frier’s “No Filter: The inside Story of Instagram” (An investigative nonfiction about Instagram) and Sarah Wynn-Williams’ “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism”(A memoir-cum-exposé of the author’s years at Facebook.) Both these books were impactful at least to some extent. But they would have been scary only to those who still believed idealistically in the goodness of social media. Doctorow’s book reaches far, far beyond these books, and shows us how much surveillance of our lives is constantly going on, even if we aren’t online. If you have ever wondered how your phone shows you ads for toilet paper when you were only talking about it verbally with your family member, you will learn the reason from this book. The whole thing is scary!

Does the book fulfil the promise of the tagline and also tell us what we can do about enshittification? It does. Is it an easy process? No. Will it help? Hah! Are you really that gullible?

The only negative is that the content gets repetitive at times. But repetition does lead to better retention (and in this case, hopefully to awareness and online safety as well), so I won't hold this against a book that is otherwise so educational.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at 10 hrs 17 min, is narrated by the author himself. He is a masterful narrator, and as he says, who better than the author himself to know how to voice the book as he envisioned it? The audio version is hence a great way of experiencing this book.

Overall, I thought I already knew a lot about this subject but this book taught me even more. I am already careful about what I reveal on social media. This book might just make me paranoid of the whole internet!

Definitely recommended to anyone who wishes to know how much of our personal content isn't personal anymore, whether by choice or by compulsion or by sheer unawareness. This isn't a flawless book, but its information is more than enough to overcome the hurdles. Don’t allow that scatological title to turn you off. After all, you already know we are living in shitty times. Might as well read a book that acknowledges this.

4.5 stars, rounding up wherever applicable for the audio version and in solidarity with the message.