Enshittification is the gradual, deliberate degradation of a product or service by whoever controls it. Cory Doctorow coined the term in 2022 for digital platforms, which decay in a recognizable sequence: good to their users first, then worse for those users to please business customers, then worse for everyone to feed the platform itself, and finally collapse. The word caught on fast, and Paul Krugman even formalized an economic model in a 2025 article.
Doctorow has already chased the rot off the screen and into physical things along one key dimension: products with a chip in them and a lock on the chip. The printer that rejects a cheaper cartridge, the tractor a farmer is barred from repairing, the refrigerator that learns to show ads. A thin layer of software, shielded by law, becomes the lever, and the maker can make the product worse because you can neither escape it nor fix it… read more >
