Enshittification by Cory Doctorow: A Working Marketer's Review

Doctorow's Enshittification is the number one seller in social media for business. After a decade running brand accounts, here's what it gets right and where it quits.

The Goodreads listing shows the black cover with a pile-of-poop illustration, a 4.06 average from 14,095 ratings, and 2,327 written reviews.

I've been paying the enshittification tax for ten years. Doctorow finally named it.

The book is right. I want that first, because everything after this is criticism, and I don't want the criticism read as a dismissal.

Cory Doctorow's Enshittification came out on October 7, 2025. As I write this, it's the number one seller in Amazon's Social Media for Business category, number one in Social Media Guides, and number two in Business Ethics. It's got 14,095 ratings on Goodreads at a 4.06 average, with 2,327 people bothering to write out a full review, plus a Goodreads Choice Award nomination for Readers' Favorite Nonfiction. On Amazon it's sitting at 4.4 from 1,036 ratings. Those aren't niche tech-polemic numbers. Those are the numbers of a book that hit a nerve a lot of people didn't even know they were all sitting on together.

The whole thesis fits on one page. Doctorow puts it there on page 16, in a passage Goodreads readers keep copying into their reviews word for word because it just does the work: "Here's the natural history of enshittification: 1. First, platforms are good to their users. 2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. 3. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. 4. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit."

Four steps. Everybody who isn't a shareholder ends up holding a worse version of the thing they signed up for. His argument is that this decay isn't entropy and it isn't bad luck. It's a decision. And it only becomes possible when four things fail at the same time: competition, regulation, worker power, and the ability of outsiders to build tools that route around the walls.

I run social media strategy and content for brands that sell physical things. Tires. Salsa. Mineral water. Boats. Food you can put in your mouth and photograph in good light. My clients don't own a platform. They rent attention on somebody else's, and the rent goes up every quarter while the apartment gets smaller.

I've watched a client's organic reach on one platform fall by most of itself in under three years, without a single change to what we published. Same cadence, same quality, better photography than we started with. The floor just moved. Every marketer I know has their own version of this story, and most of us told it to ourselves as a personal failing, or as an algorithm we hadn't cracked yet, or as proof we needed to post more. Doctorow's contribution is saying it plainly: you didn't get worse. You got squeezed, on purpose, by people with a spreadsheet.

That reframe matters more than it sounds like it should. When you think the problem is your content, you buy another course. When you understand the problem is the business model of your distribution, you start making different structural decisions about where your audience actually lives.

This is where the review pile gets interesting, because that 4.06 average is hiding a real fight underneath it.

The people who loved it loved the receipts. "An engrossing exposé on the enshittification of the internet and all its components over the last few years," one five-star reader wrote. "Well-researched with substantial and concrete examples." A four-star reader with 186 likes warned people off the joke cover: "Please don't let the cute cover fool you, this is a very serious book about how both the internet and our world got so crappy (see what I did there?)" Another five-star reader liked the pacing decision specifically, noting approvingly that the book "spends 250 pages on 'here's what enshittification means'" before it gets anywhere near a prescription.

Hold onto that last quote for a second. A reader is praising the book for spending 250 of its 338 pages on diagnosis. That's a real editorial choice, and it's also the whole problem, depending on why you picked the book up in the first place.

Because the critics aren't arguing with the diagnosis. Not one of them. Read the one-star review with 49 likes and you'll find someone who agrees with the premise and still couldn't finish the book: "the matter is extremely important and needs way more light shining on it. I really want to know what causes enshittification and how to battle it. But it's just too damn boring." That reader quit at twenty percent, and still landed the sharpest structural critique in the whole pile: "this book in reality is just a bunch of blog posts by Doctorow combined together. The cohesion is fragile at best, non-existing at worst."

A two-star reader made the same complaint from the other direction, as someone who actually finished it and took notes: "The issue I have with this book is that it gets too bogged down in minutiae. My eyes glaze over after a while of reading tangents on 'reverse-chickened centaurs', obscure legal codes, and the intricacies of how Google modeled its website ranking algorithms."

Then that same reader went after the cure, and this is the criticism with the most weight, in my opinion: "when all of Doctorow's solutions boil down to technocratic state management of these firms, with the end goal being to completely break them apart in order to reinvigorate competition, I have to roll my eyes. Capital has a tendency to concentrate. All of the Googles, Apples, and Amazons of the world started out as smaller companies that were subdued via regulation."

That's a serious objection, and honestly, it deserves a better answer than the book gives it. Break up the giants, wait twenty years, meet the new giants.

One passage in the reader notes stopped me cold, and it's got nothing to do with social media. It's about Amazon's search results. The way readers describe it, merchants bid for position, the top slots go to whoever paid the most rather than whoever actually fits best, and that auction pulls in roughly thirty-eight billion dollars a year. The same reader flags the most-favored-nation clause: raise your price on Amazon to cover Amazon's fees, and you're obligated to raise it everywhere else too.

If you work in consumer packaged goods, the shelf you thought you were competing on is a pay-to-play auction wearing the costume of a search result, and the price you charge at your own farmers market stand is being set, indirectly, by a contract clause. I've sat in brand meetings where a founder couldn't understand why their beautifully reviewed product was on page nine. Nobody in that room did anything wrong. They just hadn't read the terms of the auction they'd already been entered into.

That's the chapter I'd hand a CPG client. Not the whole book. That chapter.

Doctorow is diagnosing an illness he doesn't have to live inside of professionally. He's a writer with an enormous owned audience and thirty years of credibility, which happens to be the one position platform decay is survivable from. Most of the people who need this book aren't in that position. They're a two-person marketing team at a hot sauce company, and what they need to know is what to do on Monday.

The book's answer is largely political: antitrust enforcement, interoperability mandates, killing the laws that make it illegal to build tools that escape the walled garden. I think he's right on the merits. I also think the timeline on that is measured in a decade, and the hot sauce company has a quarter.

So the gap in the book isn't in its argument. It's in its audience. It's a superb explanation of the weather, and it never quite tells you to build the barn. The reader who quit at twenty percent because he wanted to know "how to battle it" wasn't being lazy. He was reading the subtitle, which promises "what to do about it," and counting pages while he waited for it to show up.

I'm recommending it, just with the sizing adjusted. If you work in marketing, content, or anything that depends on distribution you don't own, read the first third and the Amazon material, and skim the legal history unless that's your idea of a good time. You'll come out of it with a mental model that makes the last five years of your professional life make sense, and that's worth the hardcover price on its own.

What you won't get is a playbook. The playbook part is on us. Own the list. Own the domain. Treat every platform as rented ground and price the rent honestly in your planning. Build the thing that survives the day the floor moves again, because it will move again, and now you know it was never you.

The 315 people who gave this book one star and the 5,071 who gave it five aren't actually disagreeing about whether the internet got worse. They're disagreeing about whether reading 338 pages about it helps. That's a fair fight, and the fact that it's even the fight tells you the diagnosis is already settled.

The rating data, review excerpts, and publication details in this piece were pulled directly from the book's public Goodreads and Amazon listings on August 6, 2026, and every quoted review is a short excerpt from a real reader review on Goodreads, used for commentary. The opinions about client work, reach decline, and CPG shelf economics are mine.

BOOK: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow. MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 7, 2025. 338 pages. Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222376640-enshittification Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374619328