A hiring app that draws on workers’ credit reports to offer lower pay to those desperate to get out of debt. A search engine that blurs the line between answers and advertisements. A social media platform that buys its competitors rather than competing with them.

These are not isolated failures; they are the outcomes of deliberate policies and norms. Technologies that once promised empowerment have, in Doctorow’s formulation, entered a predictable phase of decay and, well, turned to shit. 

In a lecture rich with historical context and analytical precision, Cory Doctorow offered a diagnosis drawn from his recent book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. (The event, originally scheduled for the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, was held on Zoom and is available on YouTube.)

Doctorow describes enshittification as “a tragedy in three acts.” In the first act, platforms delight users while subtly locking them in. In the second, once users cannot easily leave, platforms degrade the user experience in order to extract value from business customers (typically advertisers) by monetizing user data and attention. In the third act, the platform claws back nearly all remaining value, leaving what he calls “a pile of shit”: just enough functionality to keep users captive, but no more. 

Google search serves as his paradigmatic example. Once celebrated for clarity and speed, it now presents users with ad-laden pages and AI slop. The underlying mechanism, Doctorow argues, is what he calls “twiddling”: the continuous, cloud-enabled adjustment of prices, rankings, wages, and visibility in real time. Every user interaction becomes an opportunity for manipulation and rent-seeking.

He identifies four developments that have created the conditions for it to flourish. First, the collapse of antitrust as a governing framework, as monopolies have been normalized across many sectors of the economy. Second, regulatory capture, as concentrated firms gain the power to shape the rules meant to restrain them. Third, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s authorization of digital locks, which undermines interoperability and makes it illegal to modify or repair digital systems in ways that might challenge corporate control. (For example, digital locks which constrain printer ink cartridges have made it the most expensive liquid a civilian can buy, at roughly $10,000 a gallon—all because a single chip can lock out competition from other manufacturers.) Fourth, the erosion of tech workers’ bargaining power, especially in the wake of mass layoffs, which has weakened one of the last internal constraints on corporate degradation.

Despite this diagnosis, Doctorow expressed guarded hope. He pointed to renewed antitrust enforcement in parts of the United States and the European Union, as well as labor organizing in the tech sector, as evidence that political conventional wisdom may be shifting.

The Q&A sharpened the stakes. Asked about strengthening copyright as a means of resisting AI-driven exploitation, Doctorow argued that copyright is a strategic dead end. In his view, existing doctrine does not clearly prohibit core practices such as AI training. More importantly, in a concentrated market, expanding copyright protection tends to empower corporations rather than creators. When a handful of firms dominate distribution, additional rights are simply contractual leverage, which creators must sign away as a condition of participation. If enshittification is the result of weakened competition, captured regulators, blocked interoperability, and diminished labor power, then the remedy lies in rebuilding those constraints—not in expanding intellectual property law.

Robert Carson — Associate Director, Tanner Humanities Center

This event was supported in part by Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts, and Parks, and the Salt Lake City Arts Council. Views expressed in Tanner Humanities Center events do not reflect the official views of the Center, its supporters, or the University of Utah.