Morning Brew Daily What is “Enshittification” of Tech Companies? With Author Cory Doctorow
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Dec 24, 2025 
Cory Doctorow, a prominent author and digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dives into the concept of 'enshittification'—the decline of tech platforms. He discusses its three stages and how companies manipulate users before extracting maximum value. Cory highlights the failures in regulation and competition that allow this phenomenon to thrive. He also emphasizes the importance of collective political action for reforming incentives, and shares his optimistic view of technology's potential in reshaping society.
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TripAdvisor Sparked The Term
- Cory Doctorow coined “enshittification” after struggling to load TripAdvisor in a Puerto Rico cloud forest due to trackers.
- He tweeted the term and later expanded it into a broader critique of platform decay.
Three-Stage Decay Model
- Enshittification follows three stages: user-first growth, extraction from users for business customers, then harvesting value from those business customers.
- The platform retains minimal value to keep everyone locked in while executives and shareholders capture the rest.
Facebook As A Case Study
- Doctorow traces Facebook's arc: attracted users from MySpace, leveraged social lock-in, then prioritized advertisers and publishers.
- That shift degraded user experience and eventually pushed the company toward fragile pivots like the metaverse.