#36 in Crime & mystery
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
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About the book
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.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.2 across 184 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 50% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Crime & mystery average of 7.6. That is how 7.9 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardcover | 8.2 | 184 | 100% |
Reader voices
The most-liked reviews on Hardcover (credited to their authors).
““Enshittification” spells out well how the corporations who dominate our lives have no incentive to change their aggressively terrible ways as they’ve monopolized their competitors and have only their self interests in mind. That said, I don’t understand the main target of this book - is it techies, economists, the chronically online, everyday consumers? I agree with many reviewers that it really could’ve been edited down lengthwise as Doctorow’s argument loses some punch when you’re reading it reworded and repackaged in chapter after chapter. I ended up skimming the last third of the book…”
“I think this book does a great job of providing an accessible and fairly actionable description of what has gone wrong with the Internet and digital products in general over the last decade or two. There was plenty of stuff that I was expecting, mostly the negatives, but I felt it positively surprised me in a few important ways. First, the book provides a really convincing description of what laws, policies and events have lead to a world where companies can get away with making terrible products. It also contained a surprising amount of optimism. The recent progress in the EU, some glowing…”
Frequently asked
What is Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It rated?
7.9 out of 10, from 184 reader ratings across 1 independent sources.
Is Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It worth reading?
Readers give it 7.9/10 from 184 ratings, which puts it ahead of 82 % of the Crime & mystery shelf.
Where does Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It rank?
#36 in Crime & mystery on the current snapshot.
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