How Silicon Valley enshittified the internet

Hello, and welcome to Decoder. This is Sarah Jeong, features editor at The Verge. I’m standing in for Nilay for one final Thursday episode here as he settles back into full-time hosting duties. 

Today, we’ve got a fun one. I’m talking to Cory Doctorow, prolific author, internet activist, and arguably one of the fiercest tech critics writing today. He has a new book out called Enshittifcation: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. 

If you want to know what happened to the tech industry, and why the products and platforms you use every day feel like they’ve gotten meaningfully more terrible, this is the book that explains it. 

Enshittification as a term is relatively new — Cory only coined it a few years ago to explain a phenomenon you’ll hear him call platform decay, or the experience of a piece of software or a website becoming worse and worse over time. But the term has since become a kind of rallying cry among creatives, tech theorists, and others trying to make sense of where, exactly, the internet went so wrong.

Now, with generative AI, it feels like everything in our digital lives is becoming enshittified in ways that are plainly obvious to even the most casual user of technology. So you’ll also hear Cory and I delve into that intersection between the rise of so-called AI slop and enshittification — and why it’s important that these two themes have so much overlap. 

Now, I’ve known Cory for a long time. We’ve traveled in a lot of the same circles on the internet for years, writing and debating copyright, Section 230, and a lot of the other major forces in U.S. law that have shaped the tech industry. And all of that comes up in this conversation, too — because central to the narrative around enshittification is how tech companies became so big and so powerful that they were able to start abusing their market dominance with little to no consequences.

So enshittification, in Cory’s eyes, is as much a legal and regulatory story as it is a product one — but which laws and regulations have what kind of effects over time? What kind of effects will they have in the future? What’s the best way to curb monopoly power? 

This was a really fascinating conversation that touches on a lot of Decoder themes that come up again and again on the show. And in true Cory fashion, he really does not hold back. I think you’re going to like it.

If you’d like to read more on what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:

• Enshittification | Macmillan
• Why every website you used to love is getting worse | Vox
• The age of Enshittification | The New Yorker
• Yes, everything online sucks now — but it doesn’t have to | Ars Technica
• The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot | Cory Doctorow
• Mark Zuckerberg emails outline plan to neutralize competitors | The Verge
• Google gets to keep Chrome, judge rules in search antitrust case | The Verge
• How Amazon wins: by steamrolling rivals and partners | WSJ
• A DRM standard has been approved for the web, and security researchers are worried | The Verge
• Netflix, Microsoft, and Google just quietly changed how the web works | The Outline

_{Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}