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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Enshittification summary
Cory Doctorow
Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
25 mins
Brief summary
Enshittification by Cory Doctorow examines how digital platforms degrade over time as they prioritize revenue over user experience. This book provides a critical analysis of tech companies' impacts on society and individuals.
Table of Contents
Enshittification
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Key idea 1 of 5
The natural history of decay
Let’s start with how the disease of enshittification progresses. Every platform follows the same four-stage life cycle, as predictable as any infection.
Platforms are middlemen, connecting you to other people or businesses. First, they’re good to you. They burn investor cash to make their service irresistible, drawing you in. Once you’ve joined, once your friends are there and leaving means losing your communities, the platform shifts to stage two. Now it degrades your experience to squeeze value from business customers. These businesses pour in for access to you, the captive audience.
When they’re fully dependent on that access, stage three begins. The platform turns on them too, clawing value from both sides for shareholders. Stage four is the endpoint: a rotting carcass with everyone trapped inside.
Facebook illustrates this perfectly. You probably remember when it was genuinely useful – back at stage one. Facebook offered a simple, compelling deal: tell us who your friends are, and we’ll show you what they post, chronologically. To lure you from MySpace, it even offered a tool that would log into MySpace, scrape your messages, and pull them into your Facebook inbox. This made switching painless.
Users piled in, and soon, you were locked in. You were held hostage by your own communities. Even if you hate the platform, you can’t leave. Getting your friends and family to all leave simultaneously is an impossible collective action problem.
Once Facebook sensed this lock-in, stage two began. It started abusing users to serve business customers. It spied on you to sell precision-targeted ads. It crammed posts from publishers you didn’t follow into your feed, luring them with promises of free traffic.
Then stage three arrived: Facebook turned the screws on those business customers. The algorithm was twiddled. Publishers watched their traffic vanish. To get it back, they were forced to post longer excerpts, until entire articles appeared on Facebook. Then Facebook suppressed their posts anyway, unless they paid to “boost” them. They were paying ransom to reach people who had already asked to see their content.
For you, the platform became a void. The things you wanted to see disappeared, replaced by ads and boosted content.
The evolution of Amazon shows the same process in motion. During stage one, it used investor cash to subsidize products, selling below cost. It subsidized shipping with Prime. It locked you in – that Prime membership makes you start all searches on Amazon.
Stage two was good to merchants, offering a clean search engine that rewarded quality. Once merchants were dependent, stage three began. Amazon now clones successful products and crushes merchants with massive fees. This forces merchants to raise prices everywhere.
Your user experience? Amazon’s search is now pay-to-play. The top results are overpriced junk from sellers who paid the biggest bribe.
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What is Enshittification about?
Enshittification (2025) explains why so many essential online services are deteriorating at the same time. It breaks down the four-stage strategy platforms use to lure users, lock them in, and systematically extract value – ultimately leaving behind a degraded product that primarily serves the platform itself. You’ll discover the specific economic and legal decisions that caused this decay – and the concrete, actionable steps we can take to reverse it.
Who should read Enshittification?
- Tech users frustrated with declining online services
- Digital activists and policy-makers seeking concrete solutions
- Gig workers and online sellers feeling squeezed by platforms
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