You can’t fight enshittification. (But we can.) | by Cory Doctorow | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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You can’t fight enshittification

(But we can.)

Cory Doctorow

8 min read·<br>Jul 31, 2025

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Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I’m selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11 .

I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life.<br>Oh sure, you can tinker in the margins, and you should! Get a repairable laptop, like the Framework, which is the greatest computer I’ve ever owned, and run Linux on it (I use Ubuntu, which is easy to install). You’ll spend two weeks looking around the UI for the thing you need to click on and then you’ll stop noticing it altogether, forever:<br>https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame<br>Access the internet via RSS, and avoid all the algorithmic twiddling and surveillance that subjects you and yours to the depredations of the worst people on earth and their feral algorithms:<br>https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/<br>Give preference to high-security, private, open messaging tools like Signal. Open an account on a federated social media service, like Mastodon, and make it a first-class home for your online social life:<br>https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes<br>Do all this! Do more! You’ll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better. But you’re not going to fight enshittification this way. Enshittification is not the result of people making bad choices: it’s the result of bad policies that produce bad systems.<br>Enshittification makes for a neat descriptive account, talking about how platforms go bad:<br>Here is how platforms die: 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.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys<br>But the most important part of enshittification is its causal hypothesis: the answer it proposes to why this degradation is happening everywhere, right now:<br>https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite<br>Here’s why you’re getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they’ve amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about “fighting for the user.” Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.<br>You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you’re going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta.<br>Likewise, you can use privacy-preserving adblockers in your browser, but the instant you’ve got to do business with a monopoly that requires you to use their app, you will be totally helpless before them, because anti-circumvention law felonizes modifying an app so it preserves your privacy. An app is just a webpage skinned with the right kind of IP law to make it a jailable offense to install an ad-blocker:<br>https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet<br>When all your friends are going to a festival, are you really going to opt out because the event requires you to use the Ticketmaster app (because Ticketmaster has a monopoly over event ticketing)? If so, you’re not gonna have a lot of friends, which is a pretty shitty way to live.<br>If you turn your personal campaign to live an enshittification-free life into a set of rigid practices that isolate you from your community, you will be miserable — and you will undermine your ability to address the systemic roots of enshittification.<br>That’s because systemic problems have systemic solutions. They are addressed through mass movements, impact litigation, political action, street...