Introduction
You notice that your favorite digital platforms steadily worsen over time. Useful features disappear, ads multiply, and prices rise while service quality plummets. Network effects and high switching costs trap you inside walled gardens with no easy way to leave.
Cory Doctorow terms this predictable decay enshittification. Digital platforms initially subsidize users, then tilt value toward business customers, and finally extract all surplus for themselves and their shareholders.
You will explore this cycle across four distinct parts.
- How do platforms progress from generous tools to extractive monopolies?
- Why do digital locks and legal threats prevent you from escaping?
- What economic forces drive the shift toward modern technofeudalism?
- How can adversarial interoperability and regulation restore open markets?
1. The Natural History of Platforms
Platforms start by offering generous terms to users. They subsidize a great user experience using investor capital to attract you. High switching costs and network effects soon lock you into the ecosystem.
Platforms deteriorate through a predictable three-stage process: first being good to users, then shifting surplus to business customers, and finally extracting all value for themselves.
Once you and your peers are trapped and take one another hostage, the platform changes course. It courts business customers like advertisers and publishers by offering targeted reach and traffic. Finally, the platform claws back surplus value from both users and business customers. This leaves a degraded experience for all participants.
Facebook began as an ad-free college network and welcomed MySpace refugees with data-import bots. It later lured advertisers and publishers with targeting and free traffic funnels. Eventually, the platform squeezed them all while pushing algorithmic feeds of ads and boosted content.
You stay on Facebook despite hating the platform because your friends, support groups, family logistics, and customers are locked into the same ecosystem. Social platforms benefit from network effects where a service grows more valuable with more users. Leaving becomes nearly impossible due to switching costs, such as losing contact with friends or communities.
Because of the collective action problem, getting a large, interconnected group of people to quit and migrate simultaneously is practically impossible. In the first quarter of 2022, 250 billion dollars in market value was wiped out from Facebook in twenty-four hours following lower-than-projected US user growth.
Twiddling and Ad-Tech Duopolies
Digital businesses possess a digital back end that allows them to instantly change costs, prices, recommendation weights, and search results through automated or semiautomated means. Cory Doctorow calls this invisible, continuous tweaking twiddling.
Because this happens inside a corporate black box and is coupled with platform deception, you cannot detect how or when you are being manipulated. In Norwegian grocery stores, electronic shelf labels adjust prices more than two thousand times per day, illustrating how digital pricing controls are expanding into physical retail.
Modern digital ad-tech intermediaries capture a vastly higher share of revenue than historical advertising middlemen. Google and Meta operate sell-side platforms, demand-side platforms, and marketplaces simultaneously, effectively sitting on all sides of every transaction.
Historical print, TV, and radio ad intermediaries took about 15 percent of generated sums. Today, the modern ad-tech duopoly captures 51 percent of those sums. An identical 15 percent of money in the modern ad-tech market remains completely unaccounted for through a phenomenon known as surveillance lag.
Procter & Gamble completely zeroed out its 200 million dollar annual programmatic advertising budget and registered no decline in sales. This experiment proved that many ads were either shown to random people or not shown at all.
Tech giants justify their exorbitant fees by claiming advanced artificial intelligence and big data can psychologically target human vulnerabilities. Scholars note that accepting these pseudoscientific claims amounts to criti-hype, distracting from the reality that these firms simply maintain a collusive duopoly and cheat their clients. Google and Meta pitch advertisers on cybernetic behavior modification techniques, echoing historical quackery from Mesmer to pickup artists.
2. The Pathology of Lock-In
Computers are fundamentally universal machines that can run any valid program. Derived from Alan Turing's theoretical work and John von Neumann's physical architecture, every modern computer can compute the output of any valid program. Because universality is a double-edged sword, manufacturers cannot build a computer that executes only corporate-friendly programs. They must rely on legal prohibitions rather than technical impossibilities.
Digital locks, anti-circumvention laws, and universal computing architectures enable corporations to strip hardware features and trap users and workers.
HP printers, iPhones, and modern cars are all computers in fancy cases. They technically could run third-party ink, apps, or privacy blockers, despite corporate claims to the contrary.
Felony Contempt of Business Model
By embedding copyrighted software onto tiny chips inside physical parts, manufacturers can frame any bypass or refill as copyright circumvention. This transforms routine maintenance or using non-authorized parts into a federal criminal offense, empowering corporations to enforce their commercial preferences.
The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act signed by Bill Clinton criminalizes these modifications. Helping remove DRM carries a 5-year prison sentence and $500,000 fine according to the text. William Blackstone defined sole and despotic dominion in a 1753 treatise on property, but digital locks subvert ownership into a conditional license.
HP uses digital locks on ink cartridge chips so that refilling them or using third-party cartridges violates DMCA 1201. Apple uses tiny laser-engraved logos on internal parts to trigger customs seizures of refurbished parts under trademark tarnishment claims.
Internet-connected devices enable companies to downgrade hardware post-purchase and extract recurring subscription fees from secondary market owners. Companies exploit continuous internet connectivity and intellectual property laws to strip away pre-existing features unless you pay a monthly fee. This extracts value from used devices and shifts it entirely to corporate shareholders by disrupting secondary markets.
Happiest Baby charged a $20 monthly subscription to maintain advanced features on its $1,695 SNOO Smart Sleeper bassinet. Anova Culinary imposed a $2-a-month fee for its sous vide wand app.
Audible enforces digital rights management on nearly all audiobooks through DMCA 1201, legally prohibiting authors from providing tools to take their books to rival platforms. Amazon controls 90 percent of the audiobook market, and its 30 percent cut on purchases traps listeners whose valuable collections tie them to the platform. Independent Audible authors discovered an unannounced accounting trick called Audiblegate that shifted $100 million from authors to Amazon. Few could leave because their audiences were locked in.
The Collapse of Labor Power
When a dominant monopolist captures any part of an industry's supply chain, the remaining links must consolidate defensively. This defensive consolidation leaves the fragmented edges, including workers and customers, exposed to aggressive corporate strategies and private equity rollups.
After Simon and Schuster failed to merge with Penguin Random House due to a 2023 US Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit, it was acquired by KKR. This private equity fund is known for damaging rollups in healthcare, nursing homes, and retail.
As Big Tech consolidated, startups became mere acqui-hires designed to be acquired and shut down rather than independent products. Following massive waves of layoffs across the tech sector, worker job security collapsed, emboldening executives to mandate office returns and deploy artificial intelligence.
The US tech sector shed 260,000 workers in 2023, followed by another 100,000 workers fired in the first half of 2024. Elon Musk celebrated firing Twitter employees to enforce compliance and trigger voluntary departures, such as a two-day-a-week office requirement that resulted in 20 percent voluntary departures.
3. Rent Seeking and Technofeudalism
Tech firms have transitioned the economy away from capitalism and into technofeudalism, a system where power and revenue are derived from extracting rent rather than producing goods through capital and labor. Economist Yanis Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system where profit relies on fragile competition and investment in productive factors. Feudalism and technofeudalism rely on owning bottlenecks and factors of production to extract guaranteed rents regardless of performance. Big Tech companies act as digital landlords, collecting massive fees for search placement, cloud computing, and app distribution.
Tech giants have shifted the economy from competitive capitalism to a rent-extraction model enforced by monopolies, monopsonies, and app store taxes.
Amazon collects 38 billion dollars a year from merchants for search placement and delivery services while penalizing those who use independent delivery competitors. As monopolies, tech platforms control access to buyers, but as monopsonists, they dominate as powerful buyers who can dictate terms, force down supplier prices, and slash wages without triggering regulatory fear under outdated consumer welfare antitrust standards. Uber blew 31 billion dollars of early investor money subsidizing rides to destroy traditional taxi competitors, and lost 41 cents on every dollar brought in for 12 years before using its monopsonistic power to drive down driver wages.
Mobile app stores leverage legal restrictions and design choices to impose a 30 percent rent on software developers, crushing profit-seeking innovation. Operating systems like iOS and Android force all apps through proprietary app stores by refusing to run sideloaded software. Laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalize jailbreaking, insulating platforms from competition and enabling them to levy a 30 percent commission that vastly exceeds normal payment processing fees. You face a five-year prison sentence under DMCA Section 1201 for circumventing iPhone digital rights management.
Apple Books blocked titles that linked to competing stores like Amazon, demonstrating how platform control is weaponized to protect rent extraction. Intellectual property laws have been subverted by patent, copyright, and copyleft trolls who manufacture litigation threats to extract passive rents from productive businesses. Non-practicing entities and trolls buy junk patents or use automated traps like Creative Commons attribution errors to send speculative legal invoices. Because settlement fees are priced below the cost of hiring a lawyer, victims pay up, allowing rentiers to drain capital from actual creators and enterprises.
Photographer Marco Verch hired Upwork gig workers to generate daily web images under Creative Commons licenses, then partnered with Pixsy to shake down small blogs and nonprofits for hundreds or thousands of dollars over minor attribution omissions. He faced statutory damages of 150,000 dollars per infringement under US law while spending 4 hours a week working while living off passive troll income.
Antitrust Resurgence and Backlash
A heterodox school of anti-monopoly thought inspired a global renaissance in antitrust enforcement, leading regulators to challenge tech giants and corporate consolidation. Rejecting decades of Chicago-school economic orthodoxy that ignored market concentration, neo-Brandeisian regulators in the US, the UK, and the EU revived merger scrutiny, technical market studies, and aggressive enforcement actions against monopolistic abuses. The UK Competition and Markets Authority built a 70-engineer Digital Markets Unit that produced detailed technical studies on ad tech and mobile devices, serving as blueprints for international regulators. The EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act entered into force in 2024.
Under Lina Khan's leadership, the US Federal Trade Commission transformed from an inactive agency into an aggressive regulator focused on deterrence and protecting consumers and workers. By connecting antitrust enforcement to everyday bread-and-butter issues, Khan shifted the corporate mood so that many large mergers were abandoned before being announced to avoid costly legal battles. Her agency brought major suits against Amazon, Google, and Meta, while updating merger guidelines to cover labor and privacy. Google abandoned its 24 billion dollar acquisition bid for security startup Wiz due to fears of lengthy FTC merger scrutiny. Wall Street Journal ran more than 100 op-eds condemning Lina Khan in the first 3 years of her term.
Regulatory agencies utilized technical rulemaking and interoperability mandates to dismantle hidden financial fees and empower consumers to switch service providers easily. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered banks to supply machine-readable rate cards and build one-click account migration tools, enabling public comparison shopping sites to evaluate financial products objectively without bribery-based search ranking.
- Export account history to a comparison shopping site with one click.
- Use the exported data on the shopping site to find the bank charging the least and paying the most interest.
- Transfer the account to the chosen bank with one final click.
The antitrust renaissance faced a swift political and corporate backlash, resulting in the ouster of key regulators and a pivot toward culture war priorities by incoming officials. Following tech billionaire intervention and political alignment with the incoming Trump administration, key antitrust and labor officials like Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter, and Rohit Chopra were removed or targeted, and regulatory agencies were redirected away from corporate accountability. Apple CEO Tim Cook personally donated 1 million dollars to Trump's inauguration. Elon Musk's DOGE unilaterally shuttered the CFPB, and new FTC chair Andrew Ferguson dropped predatory pricing enforcement to focus the agency's agenda on rooting out diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
4. The Cure and Adversarial Interoperability
You can fight enshittification by deploying adversarial interoperability, right-to-repair laws, counter-twiddling apps, and synchronized labor solidarity.
Interoperability acts as a powerful anti-enshittification force that allows users to help themselves when public enforcers and regulators move too slowly. Tech companies constantly invent new ways to lock down products and extract rent, while public regulators lag behind. Interoperability permits users and third parties to reverse-engineer and modify gadgets or services to route around corporate enshittification.
Epson printers rejected official cartridges during pandemic supply-chain shocks when security chips ran out, forcing the company to distribute instructions to disable cartridge-checking functions. Fixing one ton of e-waste creates 200 good, local jobs, compared to just one job created by landfilling it.
Counter-Twiddling and Self-Help
Workers can deploy counter-twiddling and helper applications to reverse algorithmic wage discrimination and regain leverage against algorithmic bosses. While security defenders like gig platforms use obscure algorithms to lower wages and hide tips, workers and third-party developers can exploit the attacker's advantage by building counter-apps. These applications decode hidden tip data and automate collective resistance, pitting algorithm against algorithm.
DoorDash hid customer tip amounts to trick drivers into accepting money-losing deliveries, prompting startup Para to create an app that exposed the secret tip numbers and introduced an auto-decline feature despite intense corporate resistance. That effort required DoorDash to assign 40 engineers to block the Para app.
You can counter algorithmic control using direct actions:
- Set up accounts with multiple gig services to monitor payouts.
- Utilize a dashboard displaying highest payouts from moment to moment.
- Automate the decline of job offers below a certain compensation threshold.
International gig workers use grassroots modifications and location spoofing tools to bypass restrictive platform constraints and coordinate collective bargaining. When faced with exploitative algorithmic dispatch systems, workers build grassroots workarounds such as location spoofing tools or physical hardware rigs to secure better job assignments and circumvent unfair platform rules.
Amazon Flex drivers hid burner phones in trees near warehouses with remote-control software to trick dispatch algorithms into granting priority, while Indonesian motorbike riders used tuyul apps to spoof their locations near train stations.
To be successful, tech regulations must be administrable by avoiding fact-intensive rules and instead using structural tools like the right-to-exit. Content moderation rules that require proving harassment are fact-intensive and hard to enforce. Instead, policies should focus on making platforms less important by allowing users to leave easily while keeping their social connections, such as via Mastodon's ActivityPub protocol.
Mastodon allows users to export their follows, followers, and block lists into a file and import them into a new server, reducing switching costs to near zero while maintaining network connections.
You can execute this right-to-exit on federated networks through specific steps:
- Click the Export link in settings for your old account on a federated platform like Mastodon.
- Sign up for a new account on a different server.
- Click the Import link and select the exported file to transfer your social graph.
State-level right-to-repair initiatives and domain-specific legislation successfully bypass federal gridlock and break corporate anti-repair coalitions. Repair advocates organized under the Digital Right to Repair Coalition introduced domain-specific bills across states. This strategy created a complex patchwork of state laws that forces national companies to advocate for uniform national repair standards.
Massachusetts voters passed Question 1 protecting automotive right to repair with a 74.97 percent majority, and Colorado enacted the first powered wheelchair right-to-repair law banning parts pairing and DRM.
Rebuilding Worker Solidarity
Rebuilding worker solidarity and coordinating synchronized union contract expirations can counteract corporate power and secure broader community and user interests. While labor power based on scarcity is temporary, unionization provides institutions and mutual aid to protect workers. Leaders like Shawn Fain promoted coordinated contract expiry dates across unions to bypass restrictions like the Taft-Hartley Act and mount effective collective action.
The UAW held a historic simultaneous strike against the Big Three automakers after electing reformist leadership, and Los Angeles teachers secured both wage gains and community wins like immigrant protections and green spaces during strikes. Automakers capitulated after 6 weeks on the picket line.
Labor action requires strategic timing across organizations:
- Set union contract expiry dates for the year 2028 across all unions to enable synchronized general strikes.
10 Key Ideas
- Digital platforms deteriorate through a predictable three-stage process: first being good to users, then shifting surplus to business customers, and finally extracting all value for themselves.
- Universal computing architectures and digital locks enable corporations to strip hardware features and trap users and workers under threat of criminal prosecution.
- Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalizes software bypasses, transforming routine maintenance into a federal offense that protects corporate commercial preferences.
- Tech giants have shifted the economy from competitive capitalism to a technofeudal rent-extraction model enforced by monopolies, monopsonies, and app store taxes.
- Neo-Brandeisian regulators revived aggressive antitrust enforcement to challenge corporate consolidation, stop monopolistic abuses, and protect consumers and workers.
- Interoperability acts as a powerful anti-enshittification force that allows users and third parties to reverse-engineer and modify services to route around corporate restrictions.
- Workers can deploy counter-twiddling and helper applications to decode hidden data, automate collective resistance, and reverse algorithmic wage discrimination.
- Effective technology regulations must avoid fact-intensive content rules and instead focus on structural tools like the right-to-exit and open protocols.
- Domain-specific right-to-repair legislation and state-level initiatives successfully bypass federal gridlock to break corporate anti-repair coalitions.
- Rebuilding worker solidarity and coordinating synchronized union contract expirations can counteract corporate power and secure broader community and user interests.