We are all fluent in the language of the internet now, which is to say we can read a consent screen at 20 paces. The sentence always opens the same way. We care about your privacy. Then comes the flood: partners, legitimate interests, performance cookies, social media pixels, audience measurement.
Somewhere, off to the side, a faintly apologetic button invites you to manage preferences. The larger, shinier one asks you to accept. This ritualised exchange has nothing to do with customer care. It is a choreography of resignation.
Cory Doctorow has given this feeling a name: enshittification. In his new book, he argues that digital platforms get worse in a predictable sequence. First they are excitingly new and easy to use. Then they become more solicitous towards their business customers at the expense of their users. Finally they are only good to themselves.
At the end, no one is happy except the shareholders – who are very happy indeed. You don’t need a degree in computer science or business theory to recognise the pattern. You only need to open your phone.
Doctorow is a novelist, essayist and digital rights activist who has been writing about this stuff for more than two decades. Of all the many words he has pumped out over the years, it is “enshittification” that caught fire.
It seems to sum up a current mood, a sense of promises broken, not just in technology but in culture and politics too. Netflix costs more for less; search results feel like an obstacle course; our feeds are flooded with AI slop. Even public life appears to obey the same gravity: initial idealism, rapid consolidation, then a weary acceptance that things will go on getting worse.
Doctorow is not a neutral observer. He is an advocate for the right to tinker with these networks. He fought digital rights management when it was still sold as polite handcuffs for pirates rather than an all-purpose device for corporate control. His fiction, most famously Little Brother, took the same argument to a different audience. Don’t accept defaults; systems have edges and those edges can be pried open.
Enshittification extends that sensibility to the entire stack. It is not a mystery illness; it is an economic strategy. The early stage is loss-leading generosity that flattens competition. Then the platform begins to twiddle the knobs. Prices for users nudge up; visibility for creators nudges down; ads multiply.
Finally, once users and business customers are trapped, the platform strip-mines both. Advertisers pay more for worse outcomes; sellers pay to rank on the shelf space they themselves stocked. The feed fills with unchosen video; the search box becomes a toll booth.
The obvious response is exit but Doctorow is too seasoned to believe any mass exodus will take place. He points instead to structural change: antitrust enforcement that stops companies buying the competitive future; interoperability that makes it possible to leave without losing your social graph; data protection rules that have real teeth.
The EU has made a start, he says. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) may be maddening in practice but it put user rights into law. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is an attempt to stop gatekeepers from being unaccountable. In the US there was a flicker of energy under Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission but that has gone into reverse under the current alliance between Donald Trump and Silicon Valley.
Ireland is not a spectator here. We host the European headquarters of companies that shape global attention. Our regulators, courts and Government Ministers are on the front line of whatever comes next. Doctorow is a long-standing critic of the Irish regulatory system in general and the Data Protection Commission (DPC) in particular.
He has described the DPC as a “gamekeeper turned poacher” and Ireland as a “flag-of-convenience” hub for American tech companies. In a Financial Times column last year, he called Ireland “one of the EU’s most notorious corporate crime havens”, saying companies base their EU HQs in Dublin precisely because Irish enforcement is so accommodating to them.
“The Irish Data Protection Commission rules on very few cases,” Doctorow wrote. “And more than two-thirds of its rulings are overturned by the EU courts, even though Ireland is the nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent. So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app.”
Responding to queries from The Irish Times following that article’s publication, the DPC disputed Doctorow’s claim that 75 per cent of its decisions had been overruled in Europe. But the episode illustrates how effective he is as a spokesman for the many people who are concerned by the opaque nexus of power and money that underpin the dominance of a handful of large companies over all of our lives.
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Away from the regulatory arguments, Doctow’s advice to you and me is simple and unglamorous: pay for what matters; learn the settings menu; choose open formats; support institutions that are not optimised for your dopamine receptors; expect to be inconvenienced. Convenience is the bait; lock-in is the hook.
There is a temptation to think enshittification is inevitable. That would be wrong. Systems rot because incentives reward rot; incentives can be changed. Doctorow’s enemies are consolidation, opacity and the cultivated helplessness that comes with both. His allies are people who insist on seeing how things work and on the right to make them work differently.
