Enshittification describes a common life cycle of online platforms: first they are genuinely good to users, then they start favoring business customers, and finally they squeeze both sides to extract maximum value for themselves. In the early phase, services like search engines, social networks or marketplaces feel open, useful and even community‑driven, often running at low margins or even losses to attract people and content. As they grow, investor pressure and lack of real competition push them to monetize more aggressively through ads, data extraction, paywalls, dark patterns and algorithmic manipulation, which slowly erodes trust and user experience.
Doctorow links this pattern to structural problems such as monopoly power, weakened regulation, loss of interoperability and declining worker leverage in Big Tech, arguing that platforms behave this way because nothing meaningfully stops them. Examples often cited include cluttered search results dominated by ads, social feeds filled with sponsored or AI‑generated content, and marketplaces that secretly disadvantage independent sellers in favor of the platform’s own products. In this sense, enshittification overlaps with “dead internet” discussions: as automated systems, recommendation engines and synthetic content flood platforms, the web feels less human, less trustworthy and more like a closed marketing machine, even if this is driven more by incentives and business models than by a single conspiracy. The idea has become a shorthand for explaining why so many people experience today’s internet as noisy, extractive and oddly empty at the same time.
