There’s a reason why it feels like the internet has gone bad

Facebook is full of AI slop. X is full of “free thinkers” peddling conspiracies. Google’s search results are telling us to eat rocks. More and more, it feels like the internet has gone bad.

Facebook is full of AI slop. X is full of “free thinkers” peddling conspiracies. Google’s search results are telling us to eat rocks. More and more, it feels like the internet has gone bad. There’s an increasingly popular theory about why: “enshittification.” The term, coined in 2022 by the author, journalist and activist Cory Doctorow, refers broadly to the deterioration of services (especially online) as a result of giant companies extracting maximum profits from their customers. In a 2023 essay for Wired, Doctorow laid out the basic arc of enshittification, or the process by which platforms die. “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” In other words: Products are good when they first hit the market, because companies need to lock in as many consumers as they can to achieve the huge scale they desire. Once everyone’s using the product, the company refocuses on creating value for business partners, padding its profit margins and letting the product corrode. Eventually, the company maxes out what it can extract from its business partners, too, and the whole thing fades into obsolescence. Once you wrap your head around the idea, you start to see enshittification all around — not only online, but across the economy, in services that have been picked over by private equity (vet clinics, nursing homes, prisons, countless other industries) or in the products peddled by highly concentrated industries. The Australian dictionary Macquarie even crowned it the 2024 word of the year, noting its power to capture “what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment.”