Enshittification summary

This pattern of decay, this systematic extraction, is happening everywhere at once. A material phenomenon, a disease with a specific cause. If enshittification is so obviously bad for all of us, what changed to allow it?

For decades, companies were always tempted to enshittify their products – to cut quality, raise prices, and squeeze suppliers. Yet they were held in check by four forces. First, competition – if you made your product worse, customers and workers would leave for a rival. Then, regulation – government watchdogs might fine you or break you up. Next up was self-help – users could modify your product to undo enshittification, like installing ad-blockers. And finally, labor – your own workers, with their sense of mission, would refuse to deliberately break products they’d poured their lives into.

So, what are these sophisticated mechanisms? With competition neutralized – the first of those four forces that once protected us – platforms were free to deploy their internal machinery of abuse. The core mechanism, the how of enshittification, is a process called twiddling. This is the invisible, continuous adjustment of the platform’s knobs – its prices, search rankings, recommendation weights – all pumping value away from you and the businesses you’re trying to reach, and into the platform’s own pockets. Twiddling is how the platform, once it has you locked in, begins to lie to you.

You can see this value extraction most clearly in the gig economy. Take Uber. You might think Uber pays drivers a standard percentage of what you pay for the ride. But no – it actually engages in algorithmic wage discrimination. When a job offer appears, the Uber algorithm calculates a different wage for every single driver in the area. It knows your habits. It profiles you.

This system of abuse, this twiddling of the rules, functions through protection by a powerful legal weapon – a weapon that neutralizes the second and third forces that once constrained platforms: regulation and self-help. It makes it illegal for anyone to fight back.

When a company like HP or Apple tells you that your device can’t use a competitor’s ink or app, what they really mean is they’ve made it illegal for you to do so. This is the lynchpin holding the enshittified world together. Corporations used the law to create artificial impossibilities.

So what happened to those tech workers? For decades, they were the bulwark against enshittification. They held a unique power, born from two things: they were scarce, and they possessed a "vocational awe." They believed in their mission to "organize the world’s information" or "connect the world," and they would refuse to break the products they had poured their lives into.

This power reached its zenith in 2018. At Google, workers discovered projects that violated the company’s "Don’t Be Evil" ethos. There was Project Dragonfly, a censored search engine for China, and Project Maven, an AI built to guide military drones. When it was revealed that executive Andy Rubin was paid $90 million to leave after sexual abuse claims, the workforce exploded. Tens of thousands of Googlers walked off the job in a protest. And they won. They forced management to cancel both projects and end arbitration policies that had silenced victims.