Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification isn’t just a rant about Big Tech. It’s a field guide to how our digital world curdles over time—and how we might reclaim it.

I purchased the Kindle version of this book. After I read the book, I started trying to withdraw from Big Tech. In prior book reviews, I put the link to the Amazon page with the book and a picture of the cover of the book from the Amazon page. I will not be doing that going forward.

Doctorow names a process we’ve all felt: the slow, sticky decay of once-great platforms. Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, TikTok—they all followed the same script. First they make things wonderful for users. Then they squeeze business partners. Finally, when everyone’s locked in, they squeeze the users too.

He calls this enshittification, and it’s driven by monopoly power and broken incentives, not bad code. As he puts it, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” And what these systems do is extract value from everyone inside them.

But Enshittification is more than diagnosis. It’s a blueprint for resistance.

Doctorow offers real-world examples of creators and communities choosing differently: DRM-free publishing, community bookstores, federated social networks like Mastodon, and worker solidarity inside tech giants. His vision isn’t techno-utopian; it’s civic. It’s about restoring agency, transparency, and the ability to leave bad systems behind.

The cure, he says, begins with interoperability—the right to plug things together and walk away when they stop serving us. That’s what the web was supposed to be: a network of networks, not a plantation of apps.

So the next time your favorite platform “updates” itself into uselessness, remember: enshittification is predictable, but it isn’t destiny. As long as we can build, fork, and federate, we can still take the internet back.