Book review: "Enshittification" by Cory Doctorow

August 20, 2026

The word "enshittification" was popularised by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow in 2022. The American Dialect Society selected "enshittification" as its 2023 Word of the Year, with Australia's Macquarie Dictionary following suit for 2024. The word had been around since about 2013 and applies to the general decline in quality and usability of things over time.

As an example, I opened the book at a random page and found two examples that apply to me personally. Once upon a time as they say in the fairy tales I could buy Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite on physical media and they were mine for life if I was happy to use them without regular and frequent updates. If I wanted an update I could buy one, usually at a reduced price. Both of these products (now called Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud respectively) are only available now by subscription. Whether they continue to work if a user cancels the monthly payments is a risk people are generally not prepared to take if they need the products for work. I suffered a bit of "sticker shock" when my TAFE student subscription to Adobe expired and the monthly price doubled. (My DVD copy of Adobe Creative Suite cost $95 because I was a TAFE teacher.) As I only really use Photoshop and Acrobat I thought I would cancel everything else (the Bridge file management program and the program to handle raw camera images are free if you subscribe to Photoshop). This would have saved me about $6 a month so it wasn't worth doing if I ever needed Audition or Lightroom in the future, for example.

The book starts off with examples of four companies - Facebook, Amazon, Apple and the iPhone and Twitter. An obvious omission is Google who went from "Do no evil" to one of the most rapacious data harvesters of all time (Google's advertisement targeting system now means that Google's advertising income exceeds the total for all conventional media in the world - newspapers, magazines, radio, television, ...).

We're all familiar with how Facebook went from a great place to keep in touch with friends and family to a dumpster fire of misinformation and advertisements. Some people are even foolish enough to use it to replace conventional web sites for their businesses, totally unaware that pages and posts can be arbitrarily removed because some algorithm decides to do it. Large companies have found their Facebook presence disappearing overnight and I had a recent post removed for violating community standards by announcing that my office music that day was a cool jazz channel from a streaming service. But we all still love Facebook and go there every day.

Apple turned a handy new way to use a mobile phone into an "ecosystem" that causes people to feel the need to pay more than a thousand dollars each year for a new phone and then use it to hold up the checkout line at ALDI while they hunt for the right icons to pay for the groceries. Twitter was almost OK until Elon Musk poured petrol over it and threw in a match.

I have a special relationship with Amazon. Many years ago I became an Amazon affiliate, selling their books from my web sites. I was paid a commission of 15% for any sales made directly from one of my links and 5% for anything else sold after the buyer entered Amazon using one of my links. I would receive a check (never a cheque) for $US100 every couple of months. Because of the necessity to pay for $150 million weddings in Venice (Thanks, Jeff) I now get a cheque for $US70 every three or four years (Amazon now withholds US income tax) but it's moot anyway because none of the major Australian banks will accept foreign currency cheques for deposit. In another part of Amazon I have four books I've written on sale. That part of Amazon can actually deposit money directly into an Australian bank account (I once asked why sales commissions couldn't be paid that way and nobody could answer the question). My most recent royalty payment was eight cents, for which the bank charged $1.75 for processing the foreign exchange transaction.

I could go on but really, you need to get a copy of the book and read it for yourself. Oberon Library has a copy and reading it is an afternoon well spent. You will come out depressed and pessimistic about where we are and how we got here but this will be balanced by the possibility of doing something about it. Apparently MySpace is coming back and will be exclusively for keeping in touch with friends and family. For a while, anyway.

Highly recommended.