Doctorow’s book is a deeply informed critique of tech monopolies, surveillance, and corporate overreach. The subject is urgent and well-researched. Doctorow's depth of knowledge of the tech industry is impressive. For me, the term he has coined and is so enamored with - enshittification and its many neologisms, appears again and again throughout the book. It's repulsive and childish - overused to the point of distraction. Not to mention the book's disgusting cover.

Having said that, he certainly has a great depth of knowledge of big tech and its insidious methods to generate profits. This isn't news to most of us, but the degree to which these methods are revealed is illuminating and informative. Though I'm well versed in the tech industry myself, I came away with new knowledge. This subject should be well understood by all of us who engage with these corporate entities. I first encountered many of these devious methods of control in the documentary 'The Social Dilemma' - Doctorow updates us here and investigates to an even greater degree and is a very capable guide.

His ideas for solutions were less convincing - expecting capitalist corporations or their enablers to abandon these methods, which are so successful at generating profits is futile. He mentions the obvious solution - don't use the services of these companies. He then explains why it's difficult for users to do that - to pull away from Google, Amazon, Facebook - many have done just that, but not enough to matter. They're too entrenched in our modern world. Yet boycotting IS the only solution, at least on an individual basis.

It's an interesting topic, but in a world with more serious concerns, these complaints are largely “champagne problems”—luxury issues in a world shaped by profit, and enabled by billions who support these entities day after day and will continue to do so.

Credit to Doctorow for pulling the curtain way back and exposing the insidious methods used by these platforms and corporations and the technical methods used to deceive and control us. Recommended for that reason. But for me, his obsession with his precious neologism does him a disservice as a journalist.

While the advice section- the what we can do to reverse the enshittification of our technology - is very heavily policy oriented and probably not all that helpful for most readers who might otherwise be interested in this book, the rest of it is great. I got to read this e-arc on a rickety Netgalley reader, an app within their site, because the annoying and barely adequate work-around to make the Netgalley files work on a Chromebook using some variation on an Adobe product suddenly no longer works with whatever new formatting accompanied the changes that made the new reader app an option. I have been reading arcs off and on for many years now, and it is almost funny and really sad how hard it is for modern companies to put timed e-arc files into arc-readers' virtual hands in a simple, easy to use format that actually works. Having to reload the page every few hours does not count as 'easy to use'.
So, this was a perfect book to be reading while grumbling over the tech changes to reading Netgalley arcs, and of course I am reading and posting feedback using a crappy computer, only a few years old, but with one of those stupid batteries in it that expands after a while, just like the one in the computer before this one actually, so the companies involved in making Chromebooks either cannot figure out how to make computers with batteries that don't expand and threaten to crack their computer's casing after a year or so, or they don't see that issue as a problem worth fixing. And of course, we have a nifty new internet service, using modern tech, that almost brings our internet to a speed and reliability equal to what it seems like we had ten years ago. Ok, maybe on a good day the speed is better, but only on a good day. Surely modern technology should be far better than this. Doctorow's book explains pretty convincingly what is going on, and that yes, our tech could be, and should be better, but is not because companies benefit from not providing better services and products.
I was disappointed that the last section really was more abstract and policy oriented, so that aside from joining a union and maybe making use of any laws that get passed to fix your own tech devices, it is hard to come out of this book with much of a game plan for what to do about any of this. The book also gets a bit repetitive, again especially noticeable in the last third of the book, so perhaps this last section was really not as inspired as the rest. Still, overall this is a good book, and one I have been recommending to all my friends. No doubt I'll be hearing about it from them once this book is published, and at least some of them can make more use of the politics and policy aspects of the last part, maybe.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I wasn't familiar with Cory Doctorow's work, but I had heard of the concept of "enshittification" and, as someone who is old enough to remember what the internet was like, I jumped at the chance to understand how and why things had changed, and the thesis that we users *can* do something about it (well...). My impressions are those of someone who read this book and not any previous articles that the author might have based it on - if you have, maybe the book won't have anything new to tell you, I don't know.

It presented the information in a very clear and accesible way for those of us with just a passing knowledge of tech, using concrete case studies and examples (which abound) and a writing style that felt friendly but not annoying. The structure was fun, too: the author treats enshittification as a disease, so it's divided in four parts that explore its history, its pathology, its epidemiology, and its cure.

Like Code Dependent: Living in the shadow of AI, reading this filled me with rage at the fact that a bunch of greedy millionaires with a fragile ego get to decide the worst ways to ruin our lives, our economies, our planet, and the very ways in which we take part of society in an endless pursuit of profit, aided by our own governments, which should be looking after *us*.

While the final part ("The cure") gave me some hope, it was mostly in a "this is all bound to fall apart eventually" way. And there are governments doing something, to be sure, but... there really isn't much that we, as users, can do. Not to mention that the legislation that gets passed under the argument of doing something often ends up doing something worse, like the current thing the EU is doing of asking for facial recognition in order to "protect" users (the author doesn't mention this case specifically, but does talk about this issue, particularly when it comes to the EU).

I will also say that I learned many things that made me glad to be living in the Global South, because to some extent I am able to screw over so much of this bullshit when I'm not able to pay for any of these services anyway. There were some things that made me want to ask my USAmerican friends if they're okay, because it's just... how. How. do y'all live like that. How does it get to a point where not only there are no free health care but also a company gets to rent out rooms and staff and charge you MORE? Insane, despairing.

As a final note, I did find the book quite repetitive in places, not in a reiterative way that was useful, but actually repeating the exact same thing in different places, so I hope it gets a final revision. Other than that, I'd really recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.

I received an ARC of this from the publisher. Joke's on you, I preordered his last two books!

Doctorow was the perfect person to write this book. I mean, he did coin the term and all, but the symptoms of Enshittification have been a constant theme in his novels for years. The story Unauthorized Bread in Radicalized is informed by printer makers forcing users to use proprietary, expensive cartridges in the real world.
Doctorow makes the case that Enshittification is not just another word for capitalism, and while I'm still not entirely sure if I entirely agree or find that distinction meaningful, there's a great deal that I enjoyed about this book.

In the first part, we have a few case studies, and he comes with *receipts*. One thing that he brought up with twitter that really stuck out to me is that Twitter basically just used to be an API that anyone could build a client for before they enshittified it and completely locked it down. In the earlier days of Twitter, one of my favorite ways to look at tweets wasn't on the website at all, but a Firefox extension!
Another one of the case studies that resonated with me is Amazon. It used to be an extremely convenient way to purchase nearly anything. Now, it's an active struggle for both users and vendors - we users have an incredibly hard time finding what we want and are being steered to more expensive products, and vendors are not getting their items served to people looking for them unless they pay Amazon a bribe. It's a far cry from the place that so many people, myself included, made our first stop for shopping because of the ease and price. Amazon gets to reap the benefits of making it worse for everyone because who's going to compete?

In the second section of the book, Doctorow goes into the pathology for enshittification. The Zero Interest Rate Policy that the United States underwent is discounted somewhat quickly here. One could also kind of quibble as to whether ZIRP ended in 2022, or if it ended in 2015 and started again after the pandemic started. Personally, I'm still inclined to think that ZIRP was important to set the stage for enshitiffication to take place, whereas Doctorow thinks that may just be *accelerating* it. I do agree that it is just as much a labor, competition, and regulation issue as he makes his case about in the book. That is a big reason I enjoyed reading this - when you're in the sphere of podcasts and blogs and forums that are discussing this phenomenon, the labor and competition components are frequently overlooked.

The third part is the "epidemiology". You're likely already familiar with the consequences of enshittification - in my case, I can't use a Firefox extension or any other third party client to look at Twitter anymore. Uber gets to break labor laws and circumvented cab regulations worldwide because they did it with an app (for more on this, I'd recommend checking out Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac). You can't repair tractor because John Deere's computer said no. You can maybe get your phone fixed now because of the lobbying work of activists for right to repair laws. There are some more grisly examples that I've left out.

The last part is "The Cure" which is in part the least satisfying part of the book. It's unclear how much the FTC is going to work its antitrust powers under Trump's regime, though there are some glimmers of hope as they've kept cases against Google going. People are increasingly open to platforms that are at least somewhat decentralized (Mastodon has a decent following of users, though one might find it a lackluster replacement for Twitter. Bluesky promises to be decentralized like Mastodon but isn't in a meaningful way yet.). The EU is putting into place regulations against platforms and going after big tech - except in cases where they're easing off it to dance with Trump's tariff demands. There's kind of just a Trump-shaped problem at this end of the book, really. There was a decent amount of momentum under Biden and now it's unclear where any of this is going to go. It's a mixed bag for labor too - seems like there's never been more energy in the labor movement in recent memory, but membership is still declining.

On the whole, I recommend this book. I certainly have my nitpicks, but the case studies are great and it helps establish how we got here and what might be our way through.

If you read one nonfiction book this year, make it this one. If you, like me, want to know why using the internet feels more frustrating and more baffling than it did before, (I'm 30) then read this book. If you enjoy Cory Doctorow's fiction and are wanting to get into his non-fiction work, start here. I learned a lot about how the business of the internet actually hurts its users. A thing it really, REALLY, shouldn't be doing. It also gave me things to say to people about why digital rights are important for all of us. It's been a minute since a book has lit a fire under me like this. Read this if you know the internet and its infrastructure are important but aren't sure why. Read this book if you want the internet to be better for everyone.

Overall, Doctorow's argument is spot on. The book expands on his initial writing on enshittification and offers plenty of examples of the process in action. Doctorow makes sense of the nagging frustration that today's tech—from social media, to artificial intelligence, to search, to commerce platforms—engenders.

He also offers fairly concrete ideas for preventing enshittification on a policy level while fighting back on the judicial level. Thinking about practical, if politically risky, solutions is one of Doctorow's strengths.

As with many books in the "books based on blog posts" subgenre of criticism, this book has a lot of filler. I have a pretty high tolerance for padding, but the wordy prose and constant references to previous pages got old.

Finally, the book concludes on an odd note. Doctorow references Audre Lorde and one of her most well-known quotes: "For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." While he acknowledges that "Audre Lorde is far smarter than I am about nearly everything," he goes on to say this idea is "manifestly wrong." This is such an odd and unnecessary inclusion.

First, all of Doctorow's policy proposals can be put in the Not the Master's Tools bucket.

Second, what's the point of even including this paragraph? It adds nothing to his conclusion aside from namedropping a Black lesbian feminist who would have faced brutal online harassment even on Doctorow's "old good internet," no enshittification needed.

Third, just a few paragraphs later, he quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. as a way to set up his punchy ending. This only serves to make the Lorde reference feel more tokenized than it already did. Thus, the conclusion reads as though Doctorow got to the end of the book before realizing he should check some DEI boxes.

This book offers an important framework for rethinking the tech industry and the policies we use to regulate it. It's a shame it ended in such a weird place.

In this important book, Doctorow explains how the Internet has become such a horrible place. Digital platforms have followed a trajectory that lures users, then lures advertisers, then lures profits by degrading their experience over time. The book provides detailed examples and ideas on how to fix it. The book makes such a strong case that I've already seen the term "enshittification" show up in other places to describe the phenomenon. Worthwhile reading.

This is a great book if you feel like everything is getting worse, losing quality, and generally things aren’t what they used to be. This dives into the concept of “enshittification”; essentially, the idea that things are being manufactured to be of worse quality while charging consumers the same or more. It’s a concept I never had the term for but have seen its effects more and more frequently. Honestly, this should be required reading for everyone. I will 100% be adding this book to my physical library.

Thank you NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and most importantly Cory Doctorow for the eARC of Enshittification.

I've been lover of Mr. Doctorow's works for many years and was incredibly excited to read Enshittification and was not disappointed. His expertise and intimate familiarity with the intersection of technology, sociology, and cultural evolution is clear and well-wedded with his signature wry wit and biting humor. It's certainly not one of his fictional works - if you're looking for that, don't bother - but if you want a tone and perspective that is clearly Doctorow and a biting analysis of the situation we find ourselves in as a society, give it a read.

If you're fed up about feeling like everything online is getting worse and working against you, Enshittification is going to tell you why. How big SoMe platforms draws us in before they sell out to investors for big bucks, eventually making the user experience worse.

This book solidified the experience that something is changing and it is affecting the user. I was not losing my mind over nothing.

On another side, there's only so much tech history and talk I care about and this got a bit too nieche for me after a few chapters. I read the ones that interested me the most and returned for the last at the end.

To conclude, there were parts of this book that I enjoyed and found interesting to learn about and others that lost my interest. Overall, a book worth taking the time to explore - if so just to become aware of how enshittification is impacting us as users - even if you may not be that far into the tech field and like all of it.

I've been following Cory Doctorow online for quite some time and read a lot of his fiction, so I was very excited and grateful to receive an ARC from Farrar, Straus and Giroux via NetGalley!

This is a very important topic to me. I also yearn for the days of “the old, good internet”, not to mention constantly watching aghast as social media companies and other platform owners squeeze every last penny and second of attention out of their end users, employees, business customers and advertisers. I've seen a few other ARC reviews mention the snarky tone of the writing - I think actually it's exactly the right tone for this subject and we should all be at least as mad about it as Doctorow is.

The history and explanations of each topic are really helpful, and most people who are comfortable using technology as a consumer will understand the implications and analogies. I like the mix of very cautionary tales and the potential for hopefulness. As a UK reader, it was great to have US policies and laws explained, and still have plenty of content about Europe and the UK included (plenty of big tech companies are headquartered in the US, but this is a global issue, after all).

As an avid blog/Mastodon follower, I've encountered portions of this book in blog posts before, but the familiar material is brilliantly tied together, cross-referenced, and expanded upon.

Do yourself a favour and read this book and follow Cory's blog. Get mad about enshittification. Take your privacy and security seriously. Start using decentralised services and pushing back on big tech while we wait for watchdogs and legislators to do their work.

4.5 stars. I found out about Doctorow's "Ensh*ttification" speech just last year & found it on-line = it really summed up to me everything that is going on right now. Very happy to read a copy of his longer and more detailed new book that details more of what it is, why it is & if anything can be done. Really good read - very easy to read a chapter or two a day as it's well-organized and the info flows well. Highly recommend to those who are frustrated by the insanity of our daily lives. My thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for my advance readers copy - really appreciated the opportunity the review it early.

Cory Doctorow launches into specific ways major social media companies have deliberately made their products shittier and the warped reasoning behind it. He tries his best to give hope but unfortunately this was finished right around the time that Trump got elected and kind of sent any hope of government backed improvements down the toilet. Doctorow will at least make you laugh as you realize the scale of the insanity and monopoly that tech companies have tried to wrangle. If you don't like snark, though, note that the tone might get old quick.

Cory Doctorow as certainly a satirical and blunt way of speaking the truth about the way the internet turned out to be. For the Generation which lived through the innocent beginnings, the first financial winter following the dotcom bust and the enshittifying bloom in the following spring, this is an eye opening, funny and at times sad account on the shift from digital altruism to full American capitalism.

However sad, it is still a very entertaining story.

I haven't read anything by the author before and was attracted by the theme, I like tech and the intersection between it and human life and with a title like this, who wouldn't want to read it? Doctorow mentions some things I did know and some other stuff that made me so angry that id there was a possibility (aka money and privilege) I'd choose to never use the internet.
The only beef I have with the author is his recommendations of alternative tech platforms or apps - there is nothing that can force these new platforms to act the same as the ones that already have a monopoly (because the economic system is the problem and the model for how these companies are managed) except laws and policy, which the book also mentions (another plus).
Let's hope that more people read this book and others like it and there are new policies for a better control of monopolies.
Thank you to the publisher (FSG) and to Netgalley for kindly intermediating the ARCs.

Good information, I would have enjoyed more some infographics as the material is quite dry on its own.

The Advanced Review Copy (ARC) was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Interesting book. I definitely agree with the broad theory and uts explained well and convincingly. Clearly eyed and great at both diagnosing the problem and suggesting real potential solutions.

After a while the snarky tone got old but the writer is quite funny generally. At times he speaks with an absolute certainty which risks invalidating arguments (e.g. asserts his assumed reasons are the reasons for certain behaviour but correlation is not always causation). And gets repetitive towards the end - hence 4 not 5 stars.

Enshittification by Cory Doctorow--I love many of Cory Doctorow's other fiction works, from the Little Brother trilogy to Makers to Radicalized. In general, he takes a leftist, mildly libertarian approach to analyzing tech, science, and the future. In Enshittification, he lays out a comprehensive look at why things are bad--and getting worse--with respect to products and services we use daily. From lock-in for tech ecosystems and markets to every service moving to subscription and persistent revenue, Doctorow convincingly makes the case that there's a better way. He fleshes out an optimistic look at the current legal and regulatory landscape while discussing core principles he believes we should strive for: namely competition, regulation, interopability, and worker power. It's an interesting book, the biggest question I'm personally left asking is if it's already too late. I did receive a review copy of this book, and it comes out in October. Thumbs up.

I have long followed Cory Doctorow and am a big fan of his essays. This Enshittification expands on his two pamphlets The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, just to name the most recent ones. Obviously I agree with everything he writes while sometimes not understanding how it works, but I have never been a techhead, so I rely on those who understand more than I do.

Seguo da tempo Cory Doctorow e sono una grande fan dei suoi saggi. Questo Enshittification amplia i due pamphlet The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation e How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, solo per citare quelli piú recenti. Ovviamente sono d'accordo con tutto quello che lui scrive pur non comprendendone a volte il funzionamento, ma io non sono mai stata una techhead, quindi mi affido a chi ne capisce piú di me.

I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.