In a 2023 column for Wired, blogger, journalist, software co-founder, and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow popularized “enshittification,” a term that describes “how platforms die.” Even if TikTok marks your introduction to the internet, the story will be familiar: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
TikTok, for example, started out feeling weird and experimental, low stakes and fun. Anyone could go viral, and its role during the 2020 wave of #BlackLivesMatter was seen as proof that the platform could be used to educate young people and organize the masses. That same year, TikTok launched a $200 million fund that recognized content creators as their business partners. Five ban attempts later, and TikTok is still too big to fail: Creators and small business owners cried on camera that they had come to depend on TikTok for their livelihoods. Users were panicked with no way of exporting or preserving the communities and connections they built. Now, the app’s ad business growth is set to outpace both Facebook’s and Instagram’s, but the creator fund is nixed, and the For You Page is awash in the same kind of censored and AI-generated slop that’s been making the rest of the internet hard to bear.
Five ban attempts later, and TikTok is still too big to fail.
Doctorow, who worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a group that advocates for internet civil liberties), is still mourning what he calls the “old, good internet,” a place “where enshittification had consequences.” In the days of the old, good internet, people didn’t rely on particular platforms to get work done or talk to their friends. If a platform was banned or went bust overnight, it wasn’t anything to cry about. If it had too many ads or if it didn’t show you posts from people you followed or subscribed to, you had options: You could add an ad-blocker to your browser or connect your Twitter account to a service like TweetDeck, which let you customize your feed and schedule posts. It was easy to switch platforms (Facebook enticed early users with a bot that would migrate their MySpace messages into their new inboxes). The infancy of the platformed internet meant competition was robust, and no one platform was in a position to take its users for granted. Now, Doctorow writes, Meta blocks links to other websites, and Twitter/X’s new policy bans users from sharing links to their accounts from competitors like Mastodon or Bluesky. If we now have too much to lose, it’s by design.
“We live in an age of zombie platforms,” Doctorow writes in Enshittification, the book. “The force that animates those zombies is desperation: not the desperation of the platforms’ owners; rather the desperation of the platform’s users and business customers, who can’t live without one another.” In the 2022 blog post where he coined the term, Doctorow emphasizes the importance of the network effect, an economic term that describes how a product’s value grows with the number of users: I first joined Facebook in 2011 when too many of my friends were on there to ignore; I stopped using Facebook a long time ago, but I keep my profile because that is my only connection to my hometown friends and my extended family. The switching cost, another economic term Doctorow uses throughout his book, is now too high. Facebook is unusably clogged up with scams, hoaxes, and AI garbage, but if I shut down my account, I lose hundreds of connections.
Enshittification endows the oldest capitalist impulses with the shiniest twenty-first-century tools. This leads to what Doctorow calls “twiddling” — “the process of changing the costs, prices, recommendation weights, and search rankings through automated or semi-automated means.” There is nothing new or mysterious about the unadulterated greed that turned a handful of tech companies into what we now call Big Tech. We can, however, credit them for pioneering business models that leverage the latest in digital technology to extract value from customers and clients alike. “Twiddling is the how of enshittification,” and it’s digital technology at its worst: fast and obscure.
Now, tech suppliers are exporting their twiddling services in the form of “smart” devices that are taking over every industry imaginable: “In Norway, where electronic shelf labels are popular,” Doctorow writes, “some merchants ‘adjust prices’ more than two thousand times per day,” all in the name of giving customers the best deal. But as we all know — from personal experience and all the ways the federal government has tried to discipline Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft — twiddling mostly helps companies give themselves the best deals. A “smart” device is a soon-to-be-enshittified device.
Enshittification endows the oldest capitalist impulses with the shiniest twenty-first-century tools.
Enshittification explains how the internet has been eaten up by platforms, businesses that operate in a two-sided market that connects business customers (like brands that buy ads, agencies that broker surveillance data, and the creators that make the content) and end users, the people who watch the ads, scroll the content, click the links and, have always also doubled as creators. “The argument that ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product’ is herein revealed as bunk,” Doctorow declares. You are the product whether you pay or not; there is no good-faith exchange between unequal parties. “Companies abuse you if they can get away with it.” And while Doctorow can be relied on to explain how we should mobilize antitrust law, interoperability, tech unions, and more, the most radical and baffling changes to come out of Web 2.0 lie just beyond the scope of his book: this crucial doubling of the end-user as a commodity and a creator.
We all work for the platforms that claim to be working for us: We beta-test new features, upload images and words they use to train AI models, share information they sell to data brokers, and generate the views and clicks they sell to their advertisers. In addition to being user-commodities, when we are online, we’re also recruited into the amorphous role of amateur artists through content creation: “It’s often been said that the social contract of the internet was free use in exchange for data” writes Joanna Walsh in her newest book, Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters. “It’s less often said that the deal was free use in exchange for creativity.”
Online, we each maintain a range of artistic practices, whether we mean to or not, that serve an essential function in each platform’s business. Our creativity is what generates the kind of value that pulls in other user-commodities, creating the network effect that keeps us all coming back to even the worst zombie platforms. Our encounters with each other’s creative activity are what charge our time online with intense feelings that can range from euphoria to grief, anxiety to relief. These feelings give online communities, however flawed, their cohesion and strength. These creative acts turn the whole internet game of aesthetics into something we can’t help but attach meaning to: Even if all you do is save things on Pinterest and Instagram, you are creating something, probably an idealized version of yourself or your life, and that counts. Or as Walsh cannily puts it, “the platforms of Web 2.0 not only provided space for amateur creativity: they demanded it … in return for the chance to be in touch.”
Over the past five years, Walsh has been documenting how work and leisure swirl around one another as digital technologies have gotten better and faster at tightening the loop. She narrates these changes from within her own experiences as a woman and a writer — two socioeconomic positions that make a mess of any work-leisure distinction. In her 2023 book, Girl Online: A User Manual, she wrote: “Online I am working/not working: I am working towards something beyond the work I’m doing.” In Amateurs!, she returns to this juncture to declare the amateur as the protagonist of the last 20 years of internet culture.
Walsh’s amateur is, first and foremost, someone who loves to do, admire, or create for the sake of it. These are the people behind the fan accounts, the Reddit moderators, and all the other hobbyists. But the amateur also learns on her own and from a distance. Without formalized training, apprenticeship, or mentorship, she looks to the world around her and often finds in fiction — books, movies, television, social media — ideas of what it takes to be a writer, philosopher, organizer, or whatever it is she is trying to be. (Walsh: “I’ve learned everything from the anonymous comfort of my screen.”)
But Walsh (who’s earned a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing), bills herself “an amateur at being an amateur” before making it clear that she intends to lead with the “particularly amateur move” of reclaiming “the left’s canon of Western aesthetic theory — from the Frankfurt School to cultural studies, post-structuralism, and postmodernism — for online culture.” Readings from Rancière, Benjamin, Adorno, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Guattari are braided into the histories of everything from NFTs and Aesthetics Wiki to cursed images and Icanhazcheezburger. In crafting this “philosophical history of the internet” Walsh offers herself as the ultimate amateur, weaving the historical and the anecdotal into an investigation of “how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.”
Walsh’s amateurs include the LiveJournal authors, MySpace web designers, Tumblr photographers, Blogspot fashion editors, Aesthetics Wiki curators, Twitter comedians, YouTube hosts, Vimeo filmmakers, Substack writers, and TikTok trend forecasters. The amateur who started being online just to play will have to eventually contend with the fact that they are also working. Conversely, the amateurized labor of online brand building has slowly become a requirement for competitive professionals in fields like medicine, politics, and finance. However you earn your living, your time online likely plays a major role in shaping the future of your career. Walsh argues that “if the internet has amateurised professionalism” by turning dermatologists into “skinfluencers,” for example, it has also “professionalised amateurism” by turning every viral trend into a marketing and advertising asset. The hobbyist may eventually go pro, and the pro is increasingly required to dabble in the attention economy. Here again, work and leisure have become indistinguishable.
“Online, the personal has never been so political — or economic. Or aesthetic,” Walsh notes. “Our challenge,” she continues, “is how to convert shopping into solidarity, brand identity into class identity, given that our personal identities have so often been facilitated by allegiances to things.” Every click and scroll, according to Walsh, is also an opportunity to nurture stronger solidarities based on the internet’s “radical we,” an “amateur we.” It is because these platforms hold hostage such varying dimensions of our professional and intimate lives that the enshitternet has raised the stakes of what it means to be online and what that means for how we collectivize.
Which brings us to the question of class: Now that our online lives are trapped within a system siphoning off every drop of surplus value through surveillance advertising and other enshittificatory strategies, “whatever we’re making online,” Walsh insists, “this is not a hobby. This is business. And if we’re not being paid for this work, someone is. Whatever we are, we are not amateurs any more.”
Every computer — in our phones, cars, and even pacemakers — is technically capable of running every computer program we know how to write. But they often can’t because tech companies add digital locks and make any attempt to circumvent said locks a prosecutable infringement of copyright. According to Doctorow, “the fact that every computer can run every valid program means that every enshittificatory gambit has a potential disenshittificatory countermaneuver.” He asks us to consider something like Para, an app that helps gig workers outsmart their platforms’ exploitative maneuvers by auto-declining low-ball offers, location-spoofing to prevent dangerous traffic jams, and revealing tip amounts early.
Enshittification alienates us from the pleasures of using technology with confidence and creativity.
Walsh identifies “hackers, techies and nerds” as a specific class of end-users that, unlike amateurs, who are marked by their ignorance, know more about the technologies they use. They are more capable than Walsh’s amateurs, people “who have other skills — or no formal skills at all — and need a ready-made platform in order to make something.” And Doctorow similarly casts “hackers, tinkerers, and entrepreneurs” as crucial third parties able to build interoperable tools that can plug into major services and “defend value” on behalf of their “normie friends.” Both authors verge on similar sentiments echoed by a Web 2.0 counterculture that “legitimated some of the most arrant forms of Silicon Valley individualism,” to use Walsh’s words. The hacker flies solo, while amateurs act in hordes. And without the proper controls — antitrust law, regulation, etc. — the hacker can sometimes become an enshittifier.
The crucial difference is always between knowing and not knowing. Enshittification — making an iPhone screen unreplaceable at home, for example — is not a technical inevitability but a business decision. Big Tech banks on the fact that we amateurs don’t know the difference. They trade in a mystified understanding of technology that presents itself as something best left to Apple employees, hackers gone pro. This sort of mystification not only allows companies to charge us more for simple fixes but has been a crucial building block in positioning tech bros as the new masters of the universe, supposedly mere decades away from extending human lifespans and creating sentient supercomputers. Before we start “seizing the means of computation,” as Doctorow exhorts, we amateurs and normies should know enough about our devices and platforms to tell when they’re being enshittified and to know what our options are. We should counter the platform-driven deskilling that makes migrating to Mastodon and experimenting with the fediverse feel too hard when a billionaire takes over Twitter. Enshittification alienates us from not just our data and our labor but from the pleasures of using technology with confidence and creativity.
The radical Tech Learning Collective offers an introductory course to the command line that tells the story of a solarpunk future where we’ll “scavenge the tossed out appliances and know how to speak with the software bundled inside.” For example, “a person in the future will remove the water sensor from a tossed out cellphone and solder it into a small computer they installed at the bottom of their flower pot,” now repurposed “to sense when the soil is dry, then send a message to its owner asking them to water their violet.” That same person will invite her friend over for a spaghetti dinner, and the two will discuss the DIY smartpot “as naturally as they discuss what gives the spaghetti sauce its wonderful punch.” Machines that work for the radical we of the internet instead of the extractive they. We can imagine a good, new internet where it’s just that simple.
Michelle Santiago Cortés is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She is pursuing an MA in Digital Humanities at the CUNY Grad Center.
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