Episode
Enshittification is ruining everything online (feat. Cory Doctorow)
- Podcast
- Lock and Code
- Published
- Jan 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3192
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/lock-and-code-112850/episodes/enshittification-is-ruining-everything-online-feat-cory-doctorow/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/lock-and-code-112850/enshittification-is-ruining-everything-online-feat-cory-doctorow.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
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 short-term gain while managing to avoid any meaningful consequences, like the loss of customers or the impact of meaningful government regulation. It begins with an online platform treating new users with care, offering services, products, or connectivity that they may not find elsewhere. Then, the platform invites businesses on board that want to sell things to those users. This means businesses become the priority and the everyday user experience is hindered. But then, in the final stage, the platform also makes things worse for its business customers, making things better onl…