Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (2025) is the book-length culmination of the conceptual work Doctorow began with his November 2022 coinage of enshittification on pluralistic-blog, brought to wide attention by the January 2023 TikTok analysis post, extending through the enshittification-talk-defcon DEF CON 31 keynote and the policy argument of the-internet-con. Published by MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Verso in the UK, it marks Doctorow's arrival at a mainstream American trade publisher for his most consequential nonfiction argument — a signal that the enshittification framework had achieved sufficient public visibility to carry a major commercial release.
The book was longlisted for the Financial Times / Schroeder Business Book of the Year in 2025 and was cited by the production team of the 2025 season of Black Mirror as a direct inspiration, demonstrating that the concept had moved from tech-policy discourse into broader cultural reference.
The Central Argument
The book's core claim is that the simultaneous degradation of so many digital platforms and services is not coincidental, not the result of individual bad actors, and not a mystery: it follows a predictable structural logic described by the platform-decay-cycle. Platforms that achieve dominant market positions through genuine usefulness then systematically extract value from the users and businesses that depend on them, because switching-costs — engineered through incompatible formats, proprietary protocols, closed APIs, and legal threats against interoperability — make exit practically impossible even as service quality deteriorates.
The "why everything suddenly got worse" of the subtitle is answered mechanistically: the platforms didn't change their values, they changed their position. Lock-in achieved, the incentive structure shifted from acquisition to extraction.
The "What To Do About It" Dimension
Where the-internet-con made the policy case for interoperability-mandates as the primary regulatory intervention, Enshittification is broader in its prescriptions, addressing the structural conditions — captured regulatory agencies, weakened antitrust enforcement, gutted labor protections — that enabled the platform-decay-cycle to operate unchecked. The book situates enshittification within a wider political economy of monopoly power, connecting it to the work of antitrust reformers like lina-khan and matt-stoller and to the labor economics of chokepoint-capitalism-book.
adversarial-interoperability and competitive-compatibility appear here as practical mechanisms, not just theoretical prescriptions: the argument is that the legal and technical infrastructure enabling interoperability existed and functioned, was deliberately dismantled by platform incumbents using legal tools, and can be restored through regulation.
MCD / FSG Publication and Its Significance
The choice of MCD (an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the most prestigious literary publishers in the US) represents a different positioning than previous Doctorow nonfiction. the-internet-con was published by Verso, a left political press; chokepoint-capitalism-book and information-doesnt-want-to-be-free were published by MIT Press and Beacon Press respectively. MCD/FSG reaches general readers, book reviewers, and airport bookstores. Publishing the enshittification argument there signals that Doctorow and his publishers believed the concept had achieved sufficient public recognition to anchor a mainstream trade book — and the longlisting for the FT Business Book of the Year confirmed that the business press recognized it as a serious contribution to understanding the contemporary economy.
Relationship to the Blog
The pluralistic-blog is the laboratory in which the enshittification concept was developed in real time, and the book's relationship to the blog is characteristic of Doctorow's working method: he develops ideas in public through daily writing, refines them through talks and essays, and periodically consolidates them into book-length treatments. Enshittification represents the fullest consolidation of several years of that iterative development — the moment the concept achieves its most careful and comprehensive articulation.