Ellen Simpson and Bryan Semaan's "The Enshittification of the Creative Internet," published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction in November 2025, is among the first academic papers to take the enshittification framework as a foundational analytical lens rather than treating it as a journalistic coinage. Published in a leading HCI venue, the paper applies the platform-decay-cycle concept to creative workers — artists, writers, musicians, and other content producers — who depend on platforms like Instagram, Etsy, and YouTube for income and audience.
The paper's contribution is empirical: it interviews and surveys creative workers about their experiences of platform change over time, documenting how platforms that once actively cultivated creative communities (by suppressing algorithmic reach manipulation, providing favorable revenue splits, and maintaining predictable discovery mechanisms) progressively degraded those conditions once the creative community had been sufficiently locked in through audience relationships and platform-specific workflows. The patterns the paper documents map precisely onto Doctorow's platform-decay-cycle description.
This source is valuable for the Doctorow KB for several reasons. First, it demonstrates academic uptake of the enshittification framework within two years of the concept's introduction — a measure of its analytical tractability and generativity. Second, it connects enshittification to the specific economic conditions of creative labor, extending the framework beyond its original focus on general consumer platforms. Third, it provides empirical grounding for claims that Doctorow makes analytically, supporting the framework with qualitative and quantitative evidence.
The paper also cites chokepoint-capitalism-book (Doctorow and rebecca-giblin's analysis of how chokepoint control harms creative workers) as background, suggesting that the academic HCI community is engaging with Doctorow's work as a coherent research program rather than a collection of disconnected arguments.