Enshittification is ruining everything online (feat. Cory Doctorow)

Enshittification is ruining everything online (feat. Cory Doctorow)

From Lock and Code by Malwarebytes

January 11, 2026 · 53 min · Season 7 · Episode 1

About this episode

Cory Doctorow discusses the concept of Enshittification and how it negatively impacts online platforms and user experience.

There’s a bizarre thing happening online right now where everything is getting worse. Your Google results have become so bad that you’ve likely typed what you’re looking for, plus the word “Reddit,” so you can find discussion from actual humans. If you didn’t take this route, you might get served AI results from Google Gemini, which once recommended that every person should eat “ at least one small rock per day .” Your Amazon results are a slog, filled with products that have surreptitiously paid reviews. Your Facebook feed could be entirely irrelevant because the company decided years ago that you didn’t want to see what your friends posted, you wanted to see what  brands  posted, because brands  pay  Facebook, and you don’t, so brands are more important than your friends. But, according to digital rights activist and award-winning author Cory Doctorow, this wave of online deterioration isn’t an accident—it’s a business strategy, and it can be summed up in a word he coined a couple of years ago:  Enshittification . Enshittification is the process by which an online platform—like Facebook, Google, or Amazon—harms its own services and products for…

People in this episode

Guest: Cory Doctorow

Topics covered

  • online deterioration
  • business strategy
  • digital rights
  • platforms
  • Enshittification

Keywords

  • Enshittification
  • Cory Doctorow
  • online platforms
  • Google
  • Amazon
  • Facebook
  • digital rights

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Google, Amazon, Facebook

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