The creeping enshittification of online platforms isn’t accidental but the inevitable consequence of the power of Big Tech. Only organised workers can reverse it.

If you are the sort of person who noticed that Keir Starmer appointed former British head of Amazon Doug Gerr to lead the Competition and Markets Authority and wondered how that could possibly be right, then Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It might be the book for you.

By now, concepts like ‘shrinkflation’ have entered the public discourse, and people are aware that consumer products are starting to cost more for much less. But anyone who interacts with Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft or others will be familiar with the feeling of ‘enshittification’, even if they haven’t yet heard the phrase.

The degraded state of modern technology, powered by your data and bolstered by weak competition regulation and enforcement, has created a globally unaccountable set of interoperating monopolies able to capture and inhibit regulatory bodies with ease, often with the assistance of elected politicians who later land highly paid jobs in a revolving door between government and big tech. The result is digital products and services getting worse while we are fleeced for the privilege of using them.

If you have found yourself inescapably locked into the Apple ecosystem because you once liked the look of an iPhone, if you wonder what happened to all those independent shops on your high street that couldn’t compete with Amazon’s massive purchasing power and price-gouging tactics, or if you recently discovered that you don’t actually own all those albums and audiobooks that you could have sworn you paid for, then you know about this phenomenon.

Monopoly Power

Doctorow’s diagnosis is that ‘people in the United States and all over the world have figured out that there is something rotten going on with corporate power. A genuine, spontaneous groundswell of popular rage of the enshittification of everything is all around us.’ The author is clear: the power is too great and concentrated in too few people’s hands.

Enshittification unpacks monopolies, mergers, cartel behaviour, rentier business models, public harm, and the lengths tech companies go to in order to obscure their activities. We now know the game being played: for example, Uber is not an unregulated taxi firm with no licences or duty to adhere to worker protections, as its many lawyers have argued, but an app that should not be held to the standards enforced elsewhere. But we are probably less aware of how far along the game is, and where it could lead.

As part of the cure to these ills of stage of late capitalism, Doctorow suggests that labour and unions must play a pivotal role, alongside stronger regulatory enforcement. The author’s knowledge of prescient examples of modern regulatory capture alone makes the book worth reading.

Organising Against Enshittification

Throughout his writing (not only in this volume) the author references the rise and fall of tech workers’ labour power from a position of scarcity, which peaked sometime in the last two decades and is now in recognisable freefall. Doctorow does this to advance his hypothesis that the enshittification we are now experiencing on big tech platforms and the internet more generally was held back by this bastion of labour power flexing its muscles to protect users’ interests.

Scarcity gave tech workers at these companies unusual leverage to use their labour market power and specialised skills to push for the safety of users and the reputation of the products they worked on. Internal teams were able to hold management to account in ‘town halls’ and similar forums, and to successfully lobby internal stakeholders to do the right thing. But as the tech labour market contracts and convulses, that power has proven fragile and temporary.

Whether you see this as a generalisable diagnosis or not, you can’t avoid the fact that one could plot a graph showing the quality and safety of Twitter before and after Elon Musk’s firing the platform’s trust and safety teams. Had that maniacal takeover not happened, and had those teams remained in place, we would be unlikely to see the release and eventual monetisation of a generative ‘AI’ product called Grok which has generated more nude deepfakes than every other tool on the internet combined.

The author points out the difference between how companies treat their workforce depending on labour market conditions. Amazon technical workers, coders and the like, enjoy many of the perks and freedoms expected of the privileged tech employee. Amazon workers in fulfilment centres and drivers are practically forced to urinate in bottles and defecate in bags, all the while being surveilled by ‘AI’ systems and disciplined for infractions such as singing along to the radio.

These well-documented examples are used by Doctorow to make a point: organised labour and unions are part of the cure. The author describes a ‘mohawked coder’ workforce (which I must confess I’ve never encountered in two decades in the industry) and correctly identifies that the privileged tech employee currently enjoys labour power through job-market scarcity of their skills. But as this changes, Amazon’s preferred labour conditions, already inflicted on the majority of its employees, will become standard.

The author goes on to argue that worker power based on scarcity is temporary at best, and that we need unions to rebalance workplace power. This means enforcing improvements in living conditions through higher wages, reduced stress, shorter hours, an end to sexual harassment, protection from bullying bosses and a better work-life balance. In the UK tech sector, the United Tech & Allied Workers (part of the CWU) are winning this struggle in the workplace; delivering to members material improvements on their pay, terms and conditions whilst rebalancing an out-of-date power dynamic that sees management holding all the cards. Worsening labour market conditions and growing awareness of the material effects of enshittification on people’s lives are both driving the growth of unions in a previously un-unionised industry.

The Limits of Reform

Doctorow, drawing on years of experience working with and writing about regulators across the globe, argues that regulation is not to be sniffed at. The author details how effective regulatory capture has been for US-based big tech companies — including Starmer’s appointment of a senior Amazon executive here. Globally, however, we are beginning to see a regulatory fightback. A example is Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM imposing a record-breaking €14.2 million fine on Cloudflare.

I have no complaints about the surface-level analysis, as this book is best understood as a well-crafted series of polemical blog posts. What leaves this reader slightly unconvinced is that the author fills more than 300 pages with vivid examples of the failures of liberal reform in western democracies, yet still suggests that an inflection point will arrive and a grand pushback will follow. Whether institutions of reform will save us remains uncertain. Unions will certainly be part of the picture, but I am less convinced about the power and reach of regulatory bodies across the world. As Enshittification itself shows, they are simply too easily captured by a big tech lobby with deep pockets.