by Cory Doctorow
MCD
10/7/2025, hardcover
SKU: 9780374619329
Enshittification: it's not just you--the internet sucks now. Here's why, and here's how we can disenshittify it.
We're living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.
Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution.
When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say "things are getting worse." He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better).
The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users--and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die.
Doctorow's argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror.
Here, now, in Enshittification the book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and--most important--how they can be undone.
"Big Tech does not just plunder your data. It does not merely rob you of your privacy. It does something far, far worse. You know it. You feel it. But you won't be able to put your finger on it until you have read Enshittification. Then you will know and, more important, you will stand a better chance of resisting." --Yanis Varoufakis, author of Technofeudalism
Reviews:
"Remember when the internet was young and alive, vibrant and accessible and free? Cory Doctorow does, and he knows what's gone wrong―and he sees a way forward. This is a magnificent book." --James Gleick, author of Chaos and The Information
"Cory Doctorow brilliantly diagnoses how our digital commons became a wasteland of extraction and surveillance. But his greatest contribution is showing us the escape routes, reminding us that the internet's promise isn't lost, its merely captured. We built it once; we can build it again, better."--Audrey Tang, Taiwan's cyber ambassador and first digital minister
"Cory Doctorow is a genuine tech hero. He has encapsulated here much of what's going wrong with the internet, and he suggests how the spirit of the original internet might be brought back. This is a great book for those of us hoping to make things better for everyone.""--Craig Newmark, founder of Craiglist
"With his hallmark clarity and energy, Cory Doctorow lays out how tech monopolies innovated ways to disregard, abuse, and suck dry their users. We must heed Doctorow's no-bullshit account of how to fight back." --Jathan Sadowski, author of The Mechanic and the Luddite
About the Author:
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, including The Lost Cause, a solarpunk science-fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His nonfiction book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation is a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.