Introduction: When the Internet Turned Against Us
Something has gone profoundly wrong with the digital economy. The platforms that once felt like liberation—search engines that could answer any question, social networks that reconnected long-lost friends, marketplaces that brought the world’s goods to your doorstep—have curdled into something hostile. Search results are clogged with ads and SEO spam. Social media feeds are algorithmically manipulated to maximize engagement rather than connection. Online marketplaces extract fees so steep that sellers raise prices across all channels just to survive.
The two authors who have most effectively named and diagnosed this problem—Cory Doctorow, a novelist and digital rights activist, and Tim Wu, a Columbia Law professor and former White House advisor—published books in 2025 that, taken together, offer the most comprehensive account yet of what went wrong and what might be done about it. Remarkably, the two attended elementary school together. Their analyses approach the same crisis from different angles, with different vocabularies, and with complementary prescriptions for recovery.
Part One: Enshittification — The Three-Stage Decay of Platforms
The Core Concept
Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in a November 2022 blog post. The American Dialect Society named it their 2023 Word of the Year, and Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary followed for 2024. By the time Doctorow’s book arrived in October 2025, the term had entered Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com.
At its core, enshittification describes a three-stage process of platform decay:
Stage 1: Attraction
Platforms are good to users. They offer genuine value—free services, superior search results, low fees—often at a loss. The goal is to build a critical mass of users and lock them in through network effects and switching costs.
Stage 2: Exploitation of Users
Once users are locked in, the platform degrades their experience to attract business customers. Ad loads increase, organic reach decreases, and value is extracted from users’ attention and data to sell to advertisers and merchants.
Stage 3: Extraction from Everyone
The platform turns on its business customers too—jacking up fees, reducing fraud prevention, clawing back all remaining value for shareholders. The bare minimum is delivered to prevent total user exodus.
Doctorow calls the mechanism behind this process “twiddling”—the continual adjustment of platform parameters to squeeze out marginal profits. Because digital platforms are software, operators can change the rules at any time: how much content reaches subscribers, how many ads appear, what percentage of a sale goes to the marketplace operator.
The Facebook Case Study
Doctorow uses Facebook as his paradigm case because its entire lifecycle played out under a single leader, Mark Zuckerberg—which debunks the excuse that platforms only degrade after visionary founders depart. In Stage 1, Facebook attracted users with promises of privacy and genuine social connection. In Stage 2, it courted publishers and businesses, encouraging them to “pivot to video” based on metrics later revealed as fraudulently inflated. In Stage 3, Facebook turned on everyone: users saw feeds filled with ads and algorithmic content from strangers; publishers had to pay to reach their own subscribers; advertisers faced rising prices and declining fraud enforcement.
The Four Broken Constraints
A critical contribution of Doctorow’s framework is his explanation of why enshittification accelerated simultaneously across nearly every major platform. The answer is not greed alone—corporate greed is a constant. Rather, four forces that historically constrained bad corporate behavior were systematically dismantled over four decades:
The Four Broken Constraints on Platform Behavior
Competition: Beginning with the Carter administration and accelerating under Reagan, antitrust enforcement was gutted by the “consumer welfare” standard promoted by Chicago School economists. Under this doctrine, monopolies were tolerated as long as consumer prices did not immediately rise—a framework catastrophically ill-suited for platforms that offer consumer products for free.
Regulation: Concentrated industries are easy to regulate—by the monopolists themselves. With only a handful of dominant firms, regulatory capture becomes endemic. The revolving door between government and industry ensures that regulations serve incumbents.
Worker Power: Tech workers once held enormous leverage due to labor scarcity. But as Doctorow observes, tech workers “thought they were temporarily embarrassed founders” and failed to unionize. Following half a million tech layoffs, scarcity-based power evaporated.
Interoperability (Self-Help): The universal nature of computing historically meant any artificial limitation could be worked around. Over 25 years, the expansion of intellectual property law—particularly the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions—criminalized this kind of tinkering. Doctorow calls this “felony contempt of business model.”
Doctorow’s Proposed Solutions
Doctorow devotes substantial attention to remedies, corresponding to the four broken constraints:
Restore competition through revived antitrust enforcement. He applauds the Biden-era FTC under Lina Khan and DOJ Antitrust Division under Jonathan Kanter for seeking structural remedies rather than token fines.
Rebuild regulatory capacity with agencies empowered to impose meaningful penalties. The US has not passed a major consumer privacy law since 1988.
Mandate interoperability and the right to repair. This is Doctorow’s signature proposal: mandatory APIs and data portability so users can leave platforms without losing connections or data, analogous to phone number portability. He also champions the end-to-end principle—platforms should deliver content from willing senders to willing receivers, not algorithmically curate feeds.
Strengthen worker power through unionization and whistleblower protections. Internal resistance to enshittifying features is one of the most effective checks on corporate behavior.
Doctorow also champions federated open-source alternatives like Mastodon (ActivityPub) and Bluesky (AT Protocol), arguing that federation “disciplines enshittifiers” by ensuring users can always migrate to another server.
Part Two: Extraction — The Economics of Platform Power
The Core Concept
Tim Wu—Julius Silver Professor of Law at Columbia, the scholar who coined “net neutrality,” and former Biden White House advisor—brings a different analytical lens to overlapping concerns. Where Doctorow focuses on the experiential decay of platforms, Wu focuses on the economic mechanics of wealth extraction.
The Age of Extraction (2025) represents the capstone of a trilogy that includes The Master Switch (2010) on the cyclical consolidation of communication technologies, and The Attention Merchants (2016) on the commercial exploitation of human attention. Wu also wrote The Curse of Bigness (2018) on antitrust law and served in the Biden White House from 2021 to 2023.
Wu’s central argument: today’s tech platforms are fundamentally instruments of extraction. They seize immense amounts of money, data, and attention from users, businesses, and workers, concentrating wealth in a shrinking number of hands. Platforms provide genuine conveniences—that is not in dispute—but the value they capture far exceeds the value they create.
Platforms as Marketplaces Gone Wrong
Wu situates his analysis in the long history of marketplaces. Physical marketplaces—the Greek agora, the medieval fair, the stock exchange—have always served as intermediaries. But historically, their fees were constrained by competition, regulation, and social norms. Digital platforms are marketplaces of unprecedented scale operating with virtually no competitive discipline, minimal regulatory oversight, and extraordinary information asymmetry.
Wu provides a vivid test for extraction: you experience it when the seller is undisciplined in their market power toward you—when they can charge whatever you will pay and there is nothing you can do about it. With platform economics, that dynamic is not occasional but the permanent structure of the relationship.
Extraction Beyond Tech
One of Wu’s most striking arguments is that the extractive logic of platform economics is spreading beyond technology into the broader economy. He documents how the housing market is being reshaped by algorithmic platforms, how the medical industry is being consolidated under private equity firms imposing platform-like intermediation on the doctor-patient relationship, and how the gig economy has extended platform extraction to labor markets. This expansionist vision distinguishes Wu from Doctorow’s more tightly focused account.
The Political Dimension
Wu draws an explicit connection between platform extraction and the rise of autocratic politics. Extreme economic inequality generates mass resentment, creating conditions ripe for authoritarian populism. The internet that promised to democratize information has instead concentrated power, and the political consequences are visible worldwide.
Wu’s Proposed Solutions
Strengthen antitrust enforcement to break up concentrated platform power and block further consolidation. Wu champions the anti-monopoly tradition that treats concentration of private power as inherently dangerous.
Treat platforms as utilities subject to requirements for fair access, transparent pricing, and non-discrimination—drawing on the model of electricity and telecommunications regulation.
Foster competition through policy: data portability requirements, interoperability mandates, and restrictions on self-preferencing where platforms favor their own products.
Address economic inequality directly through labor protections, investment in public alternatives, and political commitment to broadly shared prosperity.
Wu is candid about political obstacles. In a Lawfare interview, he noted his solutions assume a functioning legislative process and acknowledged that the current political environment may be hostile to the very reforms he advocates.
Part Three: Convergence and Divergence
Where the Frameworks Agree
The areas of agreement are substantial:
Shared Platform dominance is the central economic problem of the digital age. Both agree that Amazon, Google/Alphabet, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft exercise unprecedented control over the digital economy.
Shared Monopoly power is the root cause. Both trace the crisis to the collapse of antitrust enforcement and resulting industry consolidation.
Shared The situation is reversible, not inevitable. Doctorow insists enshittification is “not a natural law.” Wu points to historical precedent from Standard Oil to AT&T.
Shared The internet’s original promise was real and can be recovered through concrete structural reform.
Shared Mutual endorsement. Doctorow blurbed Wu’s book; Wu has adopted Doctorow’s terminology in interviews. They explicitly see themselves as allies.
Where the Frameworks Diverge
| Dimension | Doctorow (Enshittification) | Wu (Extraction) |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Focused on two-sided digital platforms and user experience | Broader economic lens: platforms, housing, healthcare, labor |
| Root Metaphor | Platform decay: a good thing becomes deliberately worse | Wealth extraction: value flows upward from many to few |
| Diagnostic Focus | Four broken constraints: competition, regulation, interoperability, worker power | Market power and the failure of competitive discipline over intermediaries |
| Special Villain | IP law and anti-circumvention rules (DMCA §1201) | Monopoly power and the Chicago School’s consumer welfare standard |
| Solution Orientation | Bottom-up: empower users, tinkerers, and workers to resist | Top-down: structural legal and regulatory reform |
| Key Prescription | Mandated interoperability and the right to repair | Antitrust enforcement and utility-style regulation |
| Political Vision | Movement-building: unite antitrust, privacy, labor, and repair | Institutional reform: strengthen the legal and regulatory apparatus |
| Professional Lens | Activist, technologist, novelist | Legal scholar, former White House advisor |
| Tone | Populist, polemical, urgent | Academic, measured, historically grounded |
| Audience | The public, tech workers, activists | Policymakers, legal scholars, the business press |
Framework Emphasis Comparison: Doctorow vs. Wu
The most consequential divergence is in their theory of change. Doctorow places faith in technical and social mechanisms that work even when government fails: interoperable protocols, federated networks, open-source alternatives, and worker organizing. Wu places faith in institutional reform—stronger laws, more aggressive enforcement, and a political class willing to confront concentrated power. Doctorow is more pessimistic about the policy environment but more optimistic about grassroots resistance. Wu is more optimistic about institutions but more sober about political obstacles.
Part Four: Predicted Future Trends
1. AI as the Next Frontier
Both authors identify artificial intelligence as an accelerant of the dynamics they describe. Doctorow characterizes the current AI sector as financially unsustainable—a bubble—but warns the infrastructure will persist and be used to automate enshittification. AI-powered recommendation algorithms are already the primary mechanism for degrading user experience. Wu frames AI as the next instrument of extraction: generative AI tools built on data scraped from the open web concentrate returns almost entirely in the companies controlling AI infrastructure.
2. Platform Logic Colonizing the Physical Economy
Wu’s most alarming prediction is that extractive platform dynamics are spreading beyond the digital world. Private equity firms are acquiring medical practices and imposing platform-like intermediation. Algorithmic landlords use data-driven pricing to extract maximum rent. Gig platforms have already converted employment relationships into extraction relationships. This suggests the platform critique is not merely a technology issue but a fundamental question about economic structure.
3. The Regulatory Paradox
Both authors confront a painful irony: the entities best positioned to regulate platform power are increasingly beholden to it. Regulatory capture has neutralized one of the four constraints on corporate behavior. Doctorow’s emphasis on interoperability is partly a hedge against regulatory failure: if government won’t act, at least users should not be legally prevented from helping themselves.
4. Geopolitical Fragmentation of the Internet
Doctorow sketches a “post-American internet” in which the US has lost authority to dictate global internet policy. This creates both risks (authoritarian closed systems) and opportunities (sovereign, open-source infrastructure). The EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act represent early attempts to impose structural constraints from outside the US framework.
5. The Brittleness of Enshittified Platforms
Doctorow makes a significant observation: enshittified platforms are inherently brittle. The difference between “I hate this but can’t leave” and “Why did I wait so long?” is razor-thin. Network effects become a double-edged sword during decline. The rapid collapse of Twitter/X after Elon Musk’s acquisition is a real-time case study. The question is whether alternatives that emerge after collapse will be structurally better—or simply restart the cycle.
Projected Platform Dynamics: Risk Escalation by Domain
Part Five: Recommendations
For Policymakers and Regulators
Revive and modernize antitrust enforcement
The consumer welfare standard must be supplemented with frameworks that account for zero-price products, data as a competitive asset, and network effects. Structural remedies—including forced divestitures and bans on self-preferencing—should be preferred over behavioral remedies and fines.
Mandate interoperability and data portability
Legislation requiring open APIs and user data export would directly address lock-in. The EU’s Digital Markets Act provides a model, though enforcement remains a challenge.
Enact comprehensive privacy legislation
The lack of a modern federal US privacy law enables platform extraction. Commercial surveillance is a core revenue model and a key lock-in mechanism. Meaningful privacy regulation would constrain this model and reduce switching costs.
Protect the right to repair and reverse-engineer
Anti-circumvention laws should be reformed to protect users, researchers, and competitors who modify products to improve interoperability, security, or functionality.
Invest in public digital infrastructure
Governments should invest in open-source digital infrastructure—open-source software development, public data repositories, and community-owned communication networks—as alternatives to proprietary platforms.
For Technology Workers
Organize collectively
Tech workers who refuse to build enshittifying features represent one of the most effective checks on corporate behavior. Unionization, whistleblower protections, and professional codes of ethics strengthen this constraint.
Build on open standards
Prioritize open protocols (ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Matrix) and open-source tools that resist lock-in by design. Technical architecture has political consequences: federated systems are structurally harder to enshittify than centralized ones.
For Communities and Local Organizations
Invest in local digital infrastructure
Communities can build their own digital commons—local information platforms, community data cooperatives, and municipal broadband—that are accountable to residents rather than shareholders, designed from the outset with interoperability, transparency, and user control.
Demand transparency from platforms you depend on
Diversify channels, maintain direct audience relationships (email lists, RSS, owned websites), and advocate for regulatory reforms that make platforms more accountable.
Support data-driven civic engagement
Local civic technology—platforms that make government data accessible, track public safety trends, and facilitate community engagement—represents a practical alternative to reliance on extractive corporate platforms.
For Individual Users
Reduce platform dependency
Use multiple platforms. Maintain a personal website. Use RSS readers, email newsletters, and direct channels that do not depend on algorithmic curation. Choose services built on open protocols that allow data migration.
Support alternatives with attention and money
Paid services accountable to users rather than advertisers are structurally less susceptible to enshittification. Search engines like Kagi, communication tools like Signal, and social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky represent different models worth supporting.
Conclusion: Two Maps, One Territory
Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification and Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction are complementary works that, read together, provide the most complete available account of what has gone wrong with the digital economy and what might be done to fix it.
Doctorow gives us the user-level phenomenology: the vivid, infuriating experience of services that used to work and now don’t, and the technical toolkit for building alternatives. Wu gives us the structural economics: the systemic logic of extraction, historical precedents for reform, and the legal framework for constraining platform power.
Where Doctorow says “make it possible for people to leave,” Wu says “make it impossible for monopolists to trap them.” These are not competing prescriptions but two sides of the same coin. Interoperability without antitrust leaves users free to flee to platforms that will eventually enshittify in turn. Antitrust without interoperability leaves users dependent on regulators who may be captured or indifferent.