A friend is upset because you didn’t “like” a photo from her last trip, but the truth is you haven’t even had a chance to see it. Instead of displaying it on your feed, Instagram prioritized showing you ads for food.
Upon logging onto X, the cascade of posts with the heading “for you” includes a paid user launching into a pro-Nazi rant. You click to report it, but the content moderation system doesn’t work. And, to make matters worse, the Nazi actually earns money from the interaction.
There was a time when social media was useful for connecting with like-minded people, coordinating charitable initiatives, strengthening friendships, or forging romantic relationships. In recent years, however, these spaces have become more hostile, and not only because of hate speech, which social media giants are increasingly less willing to combat. Something seems to have broken down in the functionality of the internet, between Facebook’s erratic algorithm and Google search results now headed by fabricated, AI-generated content and sponsored ads (while the correct response to your query is buried at the bottom of the page).
In 2022, the Canadian-born writer and activist Cory Doctorow – a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a former observer delegate to the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – coined a term for this phenomenon: “enshittification.” Named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society in 2023 and by the Australian Macquarie Dictionary in 2024, it encapsulates both a clear description of the accelerated decline of these social media platforms and – as Doctorow writes – an analysis based on three key elements: “It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once.” The 54-year-old compiled his thoughts on the subject in a book, titled Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025).
In his book, he studies the cases of Facebook, Amazon, Twitter (now X) and Apple products from the perspective that doctors use to study pathogens: he “explore[s] the epidemiology of enshittification.” Doctorow establishes four phases to this:
1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.
“I’m thrilled to see the term spreading,” he tells EL PAÍS via video call. “It may not always be used exactly as [I] intended [it to be], but I think it’s great that people are finding that the term offers a way to express unease and frustration with things that are all interconnected. Beyond the unique characteristics of digital companies, the same old lack of competition [in the monopolistic sense], weak regulation, as well as limited bargaining power for workers lead to the problems that we have with all kinds of services.”
So, why are social networks, which are supposedly based on friendship, showing us less and less content from our friends? “Even though [friendship is] what keeps you on Facebook and Twitter, for Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk (the respective owners of both platforms, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp in the former’s case), their asset – [which consists of] your “friends” – is actually a burden, because [maintaining] your friendships doesn’t involve staying [online] as long as possible watching ads,” he reasons. “That’s why they’re jealous of TikTok and its algorithm, because it’s different with content creators. A creator can’t pay rent or buy food if you don’t watch their content, so they organize everything they do and dedicate every hour they can to figuring out how to keep you interested. The owners of traditional platforms are trying to get users to primarily watch content creators, because if your friends [log off], maybe you will, too.”
The writer is skeptical that these practices are linked to the much-discussed social media addiction. “One of the problems with the addiction narrative is that it makes people feel powerless and tech companies seem more powerful, like evil wizards manipulating our dopamine [levels],” he reflects. “That’s why it’s even more incredible to see how these [digital] platform owners self-destruct by taking something so valuable and important to people — people who confuse love of their friends with an addiction to Mark Zuckerberg’s network — and throwing it away, because they’re so greedy; they just want you to spend more time [on their apps].”
The fact that content creators sometimes receive poor or unfair compensation for what they produce is an example of the third phase of “enshittification.” This is when social media platforms, having already abused users, then go ahead and abuse those who do business with them. This happens with influencers via the exorbitant commissions that Amazon and Apple charge for third-party product transactions, and with advertisers, who have long suspected fraud when, upon withdrawing their Facebook ad budget, they noticed that the impact on sales barely changed… it was as if their advertising had never reached their target audience in the first place (or perhaps no one at all).
The positioning of mediocre products above those that users actually want, or above those that are popular, also calls into question the effectiveness of search engines, which, not so long ago, seemed more refined.
In this sense, artificial intelligence (AI) has proven to be a major accelerator of the decline in quality. Platforms are putting all their eggs in the AI basket, because it means dividing the pie among even fewer people. For instance, a fake artist generated by AI isn’t going to complain about how little they’re getting paid by Spotify, a company that, in turn, will be happy to pit its simulated songs against the work of real musicians, in order to devalue them.
“The professions [that are the first to be] absorbed by AI are [the ones that are tied to] companies that aren’t concerned with doing a good job,” the essayist notes. “Poor quality content, poor quality advertising, poor quality music, poor quality emails… it’s like doing homework. We’ve standardized education so much that the goal isn’t learning, but rather the completion of formal requirements, meaning that it’s easy to grade using the same criteria. And the way to do that is to eliminate qualitative aspects… even though writing, without qualitative aspects, is garbage. If the analytical or creative component doesn’t matter, why not just ask AI to do it?”
Technofeudalism and democracy
For Cory Doctorow, what’s happening with the internet is indicative of a large-scale systemic problem. In his book, he cites U.S. President Donald Trump as an example of the political debasement of power. “Trump is the product of a two-party system in which campaign finance controls have been dismantled and the party bureaucracy has essentially taken control of the primaries, which means that you don’t really have a choice. In Trump’s first election, the Democrats’ slogan was ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who,’ meaning, ‘no matter how bad we are, vote for us because Trump is worse.’ Our politicians should aspire to more than that.”
The activist ironically remarks that he often refers to the president as “Comrade Trump,” because he’s accelerating the end of the American empire faster than any communist leader could have ever imagined. Now that the United States no longer seems like a reliable partner, there’s greater international reluctance to contract with its technology companies. “He’s made it clear that the best way to guarantee national security is to distance oneself as much as possible from the U.S. and its products. Trump has realized that he can order American companies to [blacklist] his geopolitical rivals. The judge who sentenced Bolsonaro in Brazil lost his Microsoft account and the court’s working documents. [Trump] did the same to the president of the International Criminal Court, in retaliation for issuing a genocide arrest warrant against Netanyahu. If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn’t need to send tanks; he can simply shut down all the major Danish companies, ministries and households.”
False dilemmas – masked by a supposed freedom of choice – have direct implications for mobile operators. In 2021, Apple enabled a checkbox prompt for its users to opt out of their data being tracked by apps like Facebook. An overwhelming 96% of iPhone owners checked it. “That’s what happens when you give people real choices, when you see their preferences, [instead of] just [offering them] the least bad of several terrible options,” Doctorow celebrates. “But the kicker is that Apple secretly activated surveillance on iPhones, so that they could spy on their customers in order to run their own targeted advertising network, because they were competing with Facebook.”
“When a company does something and doesn’t tell you,” he continues, “it’s not because they don’t want to spoil the surprise: it’s because they know you’d hate it. And our [political and economic leaders] are increasingly doing things they know you’d hate but you simply don’t have a choice.”
Enshittification analyzes how rent-seeking is also being consolidated in the digital realm, through (among other things) a perverse use of the very concept of ownership. If a user decides to break with Amazon and close their account, they lose the license to read even the ebooks that they already purchased through the service. The limited interoperability of Apple devices has been the subject of strong criticism, as the firm is seen as confining its users to a closed ecosystem and limiting their rights as consumers. These platforms act as large landlords: in addition to the percentages that they receive from sales, services like Amazon and Google earn billions by renting out search engine placements.
Doctorow refers to the notion of “technofeudalism,” coined by the economist Yanis Varoufakis. The former Greek finance minister warns in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023) that technology has become a tool geared toward rent-seeking, with tech giants controlling the means of production and leasing them to real, productive businesses.
“Sometimes, I say that capitalists hate capitalism because they want to live in a world where they’re insulated from risk; [they prefer a] world of rentiers,” the Canadian thinker affirms. “Technofeudalist companies transfer the risk to their workers. If you’re an Uber driver, you have no control over how many people will use your services. Uber decides the price, advertising budget, frequency of alerts and how the app works… but if you don’t get enough rides, you’re the one who goes hungry.”
Despite everything, the author resists succumbing to defeatism. He believes that recent initiatives (especially within the European Union, but also some significant ones enacted during Joe Biden’s presidency in the U.S.) to regulate these companies and curb monopolies can pave the way for a return to the “good, beloved internet” that we once enjoyed. “As someone who’s skeptical of markets, and as someone who believes that states should play a much stronger role in how companies are organized and in what they can do, I think competition is good. [But] in a [truly] competitive market, companies cannot conspire to control their regulators, as Silicon Valley does. According to the very principles of capitalism, if we obtain high-quality goods and services, it’s because of companies’ fear of competition.” The less fear… the more enshittification.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
