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[PyConUS2025] Enshittification and the Path to a New Good Internet: Cory Doctorow
Lecturer
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He maintains the daily blog Pluralistic.net and has authored numerous works, including the recent novels Picks and Shovels and The Bezzle (sequels to Red Team Blues), the solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, and the nonfiction volume The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. Earlier books encompass the Little Brother series, Chokepoint Capitalism, Red Team Blues, and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Doctorow co-founded the UK Open Rights Group, serves as a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and Visiting Professor of Computer Science at the Open University, and holds a Visiting Professorship of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science. Born in Toronto, he resides in Los Angeles. He was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2020, received the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award in 2022, the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity in 2024, and honorary doctorates from York University and the Open University. His professional site is craphound.com and his X handle is @doctorow.
Abstract
Cory Doctorow examines the concept of enshittification—the progressive degradation of digital platforms—and situates it within broader economic, legal, and technological structures. Drawing on examples ranging from nursing labor apps to Google search, he argues that platform decay arises not from technological inevitability or novel forms of corporate malice but from deliberate policy choices that dismantled four traditional disciplining forces: competition, regulation, interoperability, and labor power. Doctorow contends that reversing these choices can restore a functional digital commons and enable a “new good internet” capable of supporting collective resistance to larger crises.
The Anatomy of Enshittification and the Mechanism of Twiddling
Doctorow opens by redirecting expectations away from a conventional critique of online platforms toward an unexpected domain: nursing labor. A January 2025 report from the Groundwork Collective documented the rise of three dominant “Uber for nursing” applications—ShiftKey, ShiftMed, and CareRev—that allocate shifts through opaque algorithmic pricing. Before offering a wage, these platforms purchase a nurse’s real-time financial data from brokers. Nurses carrying substantial or delinquent credit-card debt receive systematically lower offers because desperation reduces reservation wages. Doctorow presents this practice as paradigmatic of enshittification: a three-stage process in which platforms first court end users with high-quality service while locking them in, then degrade the user experience to extract value for business customers, and finally extract remaining surplus for themselves until only a minimal residual value keeps both sides attached.
He illustrates the sequence with Google. In its early years the company minimized advertising and invested heavily in engineering, producing superior search results while simultaneously purchasing default placement across browsers, operating systems, and carriers—expenditures that eventually rivaled the cost of acquiring an entire Twitter every eighteen months. Once users were locked in, Google increased the proportion of advertising and rendered ad labels ever more subtle, enriching publishers and advertisers at the expense of searchers. When growth plateaued at roughly 90 percent market share, internal documents revealed a deliberate decision to degrade result quality so that users would issue multiple queries, thereby multiplying ad impressions. Concurrently Google entered collusive arrangements such as “Jedi Blue” with Meta to rig advertising markets against publishers. The contemporary search results page—dominated by AI-generated material, barely labeled advertisements, and SEO spam—exemplifies the terminal stage of enshittification: a “homeopathic residue” of utility sufficient only to prevent mass defection.
The technical enabler of these shifts is what Doctorow terms “twiddling.” Because modern platforms rest on Turing-complete machines, they possess effectively infinite adjustable parameters. Prices, rankings, recommendations, and wages can be altered on every interaction according to real-time data. Algorithmic wage discrimination, the term coined by legal scholar Veena Dubal, is merely one instance of twiddling applied to labor markets. Uber pioneered a similar technique with drivers: initially elevated offers induce acceptance of rides; subsequent micro-adjustments gradually erode compensation below sustainable levels once drivers have incurred sunk costs such as vehicle purchases. Digitization converts what would have been prohibitively labor-intensive wage theft into an automated, low-cost process.
Doctorow rejects the popular maxim that “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” Payment confers no protection. Apple’s simultaneous introduction of a third-party tracking opt-out and a secret first-party advertising surveillance system demonstrates that even customers who pay a premium can be productized. In the nursing example, nurses, patients, and hospitals are all subject to extraction. Enshittification productizes anyone who can be productized; dignified treatment is not a loyalty perk exchanged for money rather than attention.
Policy Origins and the Collapse of Disciplining Forces
Platforms were not born enshittified. Early Google, the original iPhone, and early Facebook delivered genuine value. Doctorow insists that the transformation resulted from policy decisions enacted within living memory by identifiable actors who were warned of the consequences yet faced no subsequent accountability. These decisions dismantled four constraints that once moderated corporate behavior.
The first constraint is market competition. Classical antitrust, exemplified by Senator John Sherman’s 1890 legislation, sought to prevent the emergence of “autocrats of trade.” Beginning in the 1980s, Chicago-school economics inverted this logic, treating monopolies as presumptively efficient. The result was concentrated markets across pharmaceuticals, hospitals, insurance, beer, athletic shoes, and professional wrestling. Mark Zuckerberg’s internal memo that “it is better to buy than to compete,” followed by the unchallenged acquisition of Instagram, exemplifies the new orthodoxy. Hospital consolidation, itself a defensive response to pharmaceutical mergers, left nurses and patients exposed to monopsonistic power and algorithmic wage platforms.
The second constraint is regulation. Concentrated sectors readily capture their regulators. A sector of one hundred firms is a rabble; a sector of five is a cartel capable of coordinated lobbying. Doctorow cites the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority, previously an effective investigator of technology monopolies, whose leadership was replaced by a former Amazon executive. In the United States, the last comprehensive federal privacy statute dates to 1988—the Video Privacy Protection Act—leaving data brokers free to sell financial dossiers that enable wage discrimination against nurses.
The third constraint is interoperability. In the physical world, interoperability requires careful standardization; in software it is nearly free because any valid program can be executed. Ad blockers, alternative ink cartridges, and tools that reveal hidden tips for DoorDash drivers are all forms of adversarial interoperability that discipline platforms. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Section 1201, however, criminalizes the circumvention of access controls, converting reverse engineering into a potential felony. Parallel anti-circumvention provisions were exported through trade agreements to Europe, Canada, and elsewhere. Consequently, apps—websites wrapped in digital rights management—became preferred over open web interfaces, and independent repair of tractors, ventilators, and automobiles became legally hazardous.
The fourth constraint is labor power. Technology workers historically enjoyed scarcity-based leverage without formal unionization. They could refuse to implement degrading features and simply change employers. Mass layoffs since 2023—half a million jobs—and simultaneous executive bonus increases have eroded that leverage. The current enthusiasm for AI coding tools is, in Doctorow’s view, driven less by productivity gains than by the prospect of replacing workers who might otherwise resist enshittification.
Pathways Out of the Enshittocene
Because enshittification is the product of specific policy choices rather than technological destiny or inevitable historical forces, those choices can be reversed. Doctorow surveys an emerging global antitrust revival that is largely bipartisan and independent of billionaire funding. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, parallel statutes in Australia, Japan, South Korea, and even China, and coordinated enforcement actions demonstrate renewed vigor. Market studies produced by one jurisdiction are readily adapted by others, creating a multiplier effect.
Regulatory capture can be mitigated by shifting enforcement away from captured national venues (for example, moving GDPR claims out of Irish courts). Right-to-repair legislation in Europe and Canada remains partially frustrated by residual anti-circumvention rules, yet the political opportunity now exists to repeal those rules. Doctorow argues that any jurisdiction willing to legalize reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and independent app stores would instantly become a technology export powerhouse. A Canadian app store charging a three-percent transaction fee rather than thirty percent would raise authors’, musicians’, and software developers’ revenues by roughly twenty-five percent overnight. Diagnostic tools priced at one hundred dollars per month rather than ten thousand dollars per manufacturer would attract global demand. The resulting competition would simultaneously lower costs for users worldwide and attack the most profitable lines of business of the largest American technology firms.
Doctorow situates these technical and legal interventions within a larger polycrisis—climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, and xenophobia—whose perpetrators have weaponized centralized platforms. The “insidete” was purpose-built for such co-option: giant corporations willing to trade a habitable planet for modest tax advantages, default algorithmic feeds, and government-backed intellectual-property barriers to exit. Yet the architecture was chosen, not inevitable. A new good internet combining the technical self-determination of the early web with the accessibility of Web 2.0 services remains possible. Such an internet would enable coordination and mutual aid in the face of cascading crises. Doctorow closes with the injunction that the community must build it.