The apps get worse. The food tastes worse. The services fail. It's not in your head—it's by design. Enshitification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow, encapsulates the process where platforms and services deteriorate over time, prioritizing profits over user experience. This phenomenon isn't a glitch in capitalism; it's its final, logical form—an inevitable decay that follows when profit is prioritized over people.
Enshitification follows a predictable pattern:
Attraction: Companies offer high-quality products or services to attract users. Examples include ad-free platforms, affordable rideshares, and generous content algorithms.
Captivity: Once a substantial user base is established, companies create dependency by eliminating alternatives. This is achieved through buyouts of competitors, regulatory capture, and the creation of ecosystems that lock in consumers.
Extraction: With a captive audience, companies begin to degrade the quality of their offerings to maximize profits. Algorithms shift towards engagement farming, leading to junk ads, bait content, and worse service. The product is no longer the service—it’s the user.
This cycle is evident in various industries. For instance, platforms like TikTok have been observed to manually allocate surplus to creators, only to retract it later, prioritizing investor returns over user satisfaction.
Enshitification isn’t bad luck or corporate mismanagement—it’s a survival strategy under capitalism. Public corporations are legally required to pursue maximum profit for shareholders. Market “efficiency” often translates to cutting corners, slashing labor, and externalizing costs. Quality is sacrificed first, ethics second, and sustainability is rarely considered. This is not limited to tech; it's pervasive in healthcare, education, fast food, public transport, and journalism.
As enshitification spreads, infrastructure collapses, trust in institutions erodes, and daily life becomes friction-filled and exhausting. Late-stage capitalism is not shiny—it’s glitchy, broken, and padded with ads. Alienation deepens: workers hate their jobs, consumers hate the products, and there’s nowhere else to go.
Socialism begins with the premise that human needs—not private profits—should drive production. Public ownership of key platforms and services can prevent the enshitification cycle. Worker cooperatives and democratic planning ensure quality, accountability, and sustainability. Real innovation doesn’t come from monopolies—it comes from liberated, organized people.
Models like participatory economics, proposed by economists Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert, emphasize equitable cooperation and democratic planning as alternatives to capitalist market economies.
Capitalism cannot self-correct; enshitification is the rot at its core. Either we organize, seize the means of production, and build systems rooted in care and solidarity—or we keep refreshing broken apps, eating plastic-laced food, and calling it freedom. The choice is ours: socialism or enshitification.
Socialism or Enshitification: The Capitalist Death Spiral
The apps get worse. The food tastes worse. The services fail. It's not in your head—it's by design. Enshitification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow, encapsulates the process where platforms and services deteriorate over time, prioritizing profits over user experience. This phenomenon isn't a glitch in capitalism; it's its final, logical form—an inevitable decay that follows when profit is prioritized over people.
Enshitification follows a predictable pattern:
Attraction: Companies offer high-quality products or services to attract users. Examples include ad-free platforms, affordable rideshares, and generous content algorithms.
Captivity: Once a substantial user base is established, companies create dependency by eliminating alternatives. This is achieved through buyouts of competitors, regulatory capture, and the creation of ecosystems that lock in consumers.
Extraction: With a captive audience, companies begin to degrade the quality of their offerings to maximize profits. Algorithms shift towards engagement farming, leading to junk ads, bait content, and worse service. The product is no longer the service—it’s the user.
This cycle is evident in various industries. For instance, platforms like TikTok have been observed to manually allocate surplus to creators, only to retract it later, prioritizing investor returns over user satisfaction.
Enshitification isn’t bad luck or corporate mismanagement—it’s a survival strategy under capitalism. Public corporations are legally required to pursue maximum profit for shareholders. Market “efficiency” often translates to cutting corners, slashing labor, and externalizing costs. Quality is sacrificed first, ethics second, and sustainability is rarely considered. This is not limited to tech; it's pervasive in healthcare, education, fast food, public transport, and journalism.
As enshitification spreads, infrastructure collapses, trust in institutions erodes, and daily life becomes friction-filled and exhausting. Late-stage capitalism is not shiny—it’s glitchy, broken, and padded with ads. Alienation deepens: workers hate their jobs, consumers hate the products, and there’s nowhere else to go.
Socialism begins with the premise that human needs—not private profits—should drive production. Public ownership of key platforms and services can prevent the enshitification cycle. Worker cooperatives and democratic planning ensure quality, accountability, and sustainability. Real innovation doesn’t come from monopolies—it comes from liberated, organized people.
Models like participatory economics, proposed by economists Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert, emphasize equitable cooperation and democratic planning as alternatives to capitalist market economies.
Capitalism cannot self-correct; enshitification is the rot at its core. Either we organize, seize the means of production, and build systems rooted in care and solidarity—or we keep refreshing broken apps, eating plastic-laced food, and calling it freedom. The choice is ours: socialism or enshitification.