The internet isn't broken by accident. Cory Doctorow's term enshittification — now widely circulated since he coined it in a January 2023 Pluralistic post — describes a predictable lifecycle: platforms first serve users to build scale, then serve businesses to monetize that scale, then serve shareholders by extracting value from both. The sequence is not incidental. It is, Doctorow argues, structurally inevitable under the incentive conditions that govern platform capitalism. That framing shifts the conversation from individual corporate malfeasance to systemic design.
The Mechanics of Platform Decay
Doctorow's model maps cleanly onto observable history. Facebook in 2008 was a tool users chose over MySpace because it was genuinely better — less cluttered, more connective. By 2023, its feed had become an algorithmically optimized surface for advertisers, with organic reach for individuals and publishers throttled to near zero. Instagram followed the same arc: launched in 2010 as a chronological photo-sharing app, it now surfaces Reels from accounts users never followed, prioritizing engagement metrics over user intent. When asked — as he was in this CBC interview with Ian Hanomansing — whether Instagram is still "working" for users, Doctorow's answer is precise: it works just enough to keep you from leaving, which is different from working for you.
The distinction matters because it identifies the mechanism. Switching costs — the social graphs, the follower counts, the years of uploaded content — function as a trap. Platforms exploit those costs deliberately, degrading the product incrementally, betting users won't absorb the friction of exit. This is not a new dynamic in industrial economics, but digital networks amplify it because the lock-in is social, not merely contractual. You can cancel a cable subscription; you cannot easily migrate your Instagram following to a competitor.
The comparison to earlier monopoly eras is instructive. Standard Oil's leverage was geographic and physical — control of pipelines. Platform leverage is relational and behavioral. That makes it harder to regulate with 20th-century antitrust tools designed for tangible market concentration.
Regulation, Canada, and the AI Complication
Doctorow, a Canadian author based in Los Angeles and associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gestures in the interview toward Canada as a potential site of regulatory experimentation — a recurring theme in his public writing. Canada's smaller market and parliamentary system, the argument goes, give it more agility to impose interoperability mandates or data-portability requirements that the U.S. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass. The EU's Digital Markets Act, which came into force in March 2024, is the closest live experiment: it requires designated "gatekeepers" to allow third-party interoperability, directly targeting the switching-cost trap Doctorow describes.
The AI dimension complicates the enshittification thesis in ways the interview's seven-minute runtime can only gesture at. Generative AI tools are currently in the first phase of Doctorow's cycle — aggressively subsidized, genuinely useful, burning investor capital to acquire users. The question his framework raises is not whether AI will enshittify, but when and how fast. The training-data moats that companies like OpenAI and Google have built suggest the lock-in mechanisms may arrive earlier and run deeper than in the social media era, because the switching cost isn't just your social graph — it's the institutional knowledge baked into fine-tuned enterprise models.
Doctorow's closing point — "it's not your fault" — is rhetorically important. It redirects individual guilt (you're addicted to your phone) toward structural critique (the phone was designed to addict you). That move has political consequences. Framing platform harm as a design choice, not a user failure, is a precondition for regulatory intervention. What remains unresolved is whether the regulatory tools being built — in Brussels, Ottawa, or Sacramento — can move faster than the next platform cycle already underway.
Source · The Frontier | Society
