Intelligence Squared

Why Does It Feel Like Everything is Getting Worse? With Cory Doctorow

October 17, 2025

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  • The 'enshittification' of digital platforms is not a technical glitch but a deliberate technique, following a three-stage process where platforms initially serve users well to gain lock-in, then exploit business customers (publishers/advertisers), and finally claw back value from those customers, resulting in a worse experience for everyone. 
  • The decay of digital platforms is driven by the removal of four historical constraints: competition (due to anti-competitive acquisitions), effective regulation, tech worker power (due to layoffs and a lack of unionization), and the ability to create counter-technologies via interoperability, which is currently banned by laws like the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. 
  • Restoring digital health requires rebuilding these four constraints, with repealing laws that ban adversarial interoperability (like Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive) being a crucial first step to allow new technologies to bridge to and drain value from entrenched, enshittified platforms, which also serves as targeted industrial policy against monopolistic American tech firms. 

Segments

Coining and Popularity of Enshittification
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(00:01:01)
  • Key Takeaway: Cory Doctorow coined ’enshittification’ in 2022 to capture the feeling of worsening digital platforms, finding that pairing a nuanced critique with a slightly rude word aids journalistic uptake.
  • Summary: The term ’enshittification’ was coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe the purposeful degradation of digital platforms for profit maximization. Doctorow found that combining a complex technical critique with a mildly profane word significantly increased its adoption by journalists and the public. This word has since become a widely recognized descriptor for the current state of digital services.
Thesis: Enshittification as Policy Choice
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(00:04:40)
  • Key Takeaway: The downward spiral of digital services is not due to mystical economic forces but is the direct result of specific policy decisions made by policymakers who were warned of the likely negative outcomes.
  • Summary: The worsening state of digital platforms is attributed to material choices made by policymakers, contrary to claims that it is an inevitable outcome of economic laws like returns to scale. By grounding the problem in specific decisions, the thesis suggests that reversing the trend is possible by implementing different policies. This approach moves the issue from one of helplessness to one where accountability and corrective action are feasible.
Facebook’s Three-Stage Enshittification
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(00:07:42)
  • Key Takeaway: Facebook followed the enshittification template by first attracting users with privacy promises (Stage 1), then locking in publishers and advertisers through dependency (Stage 2), and finally extracting maximum value from them, leading to a brittle equilibrium.
  • Summary: Stage one involved Facebook prioritizing end-users by promising not to spy on them, locking them in via collective action problems and high switching costs. Stage two involved exploiting publishers by cramming content into user feeds and advertisers by offering precise targeting, creating monopsony power. Stage three saw Facebook raise ad rates, increase fraud, and force publishers to host full content, leading to a brittle state where user experience is minimal but platform lock-in remains.
Consequences of Monopoly and Platform Lock-in
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(00:14:19)
  • Key Takeaway: Because platforms retain lock-in even after becoming unfit for purpose due to market structure and policy, management panics (pivots) when stock value drops, leading to drastic shifts like the Metaverse pivot.
  • Summary: When the market loses faith in a platform’s growth trajectory, massive sell-offs occur, impacting executive compensation tied to stock. This triggers panicked ‘pivots,’ exemplified by Zuckerberg’s shift to the Metaverse, despite prior commitments to text-based interfaces. The key difference now is that these degraded platforms survive due to external factors, unlike previous failed services.
Constraints Preventing Enshittification
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(00:17:24)
  • Key Takeaway: The historical discipline preventing bad behavior by tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg came from competition, regulation, tech worker power, and interoperability, all of which have been systematically removed.
  • Summary: Zuckerberg’s early bad impulses were checked by competition, which collapsed after Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, following the stated intent to ‘buy than to compete.’ Furthermore, tech workers lost leverage as the supply of labor caught up, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) eliminated the technological ability to create counter-technologies like ad blockers or alternative clients.
Adversarial Interoperability as a Fightback
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(00:25:49)
  • Key Takeaway: A key strategy for fighting enshittification is restoring adversarial interoperability by repealing anti-circumvention laws, which would allow external developers to build tools that extract user data and offer alternative clients, thus undermining platform lock-in.
  • Summary: Restoring the four constraints—competition, regulation, worker power, and interoperability—offers a path to an enshittification-resistant internet. Repealing laws like Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, which bans reverse engineering, would enable the creation of tools to scrape data and provide alternative interfaces unilaterally. This strategy functions as good industrial policy by targeting the monopoly rents of American tech giants.
Privacy as a Central Regulatory Failure
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(00:35:55)
  • Key Takeaway: The lack of robust privacy enforcement, exemplified by the failure of GDPR enforcement in Ireland and the absence of federal US privacy law since 1988, enables harmful practices across labor and commerce.
  • Summary: The failure to enforce privacy laws allows companies to exploit user data for profit, such as using credit history to lower wages for agency nurses or repricing fast food based on a customer’s recent payday. A large coalition of people harmed by privacy violations—from political surveillance to algorithmic discrimination—could form a powerful movement if they recognize privacy enforcement as the foundational first step to address their diverse grievances.