The Enshittification of Technology
There’s a very specific kind of frustration that comes from using modern technology.
Not frustration because something is broken.
Not frustration because something is old.
It’s the frustration of using something that technically works, but feels worse than what came before.
More steps.
More clutter.
More pop-ups.
More rules.
More friction.
You find yourself asking questions like:
- Why does this take longer now?
- Why do I need an account for this?
- Why was this easier five years ago?
That feeling isn’t nostalgia.
There’s a word for it.
Enshittification.
What does “enshittification” actually mean?
The term enshittification was coined and popularized by writer and technologist Cory Doctorow.
Doctorow uses it to describe the systematic decay of technology platforms and products over time. Not because engineers forget how to build good things—but because the incentives behind the product change.
At a high level, the pattern looks like this:
- A product starts out serving users extremely well
- It gains popularity and market power
- It pivots to serve business interests, advertisers, or shareholders
- The user experience is slowly sacrificed to extract more value
Two great starting points if you want to go deeper:
What makes enshittification dangerous is that it rarely looks dramatic.
Nothing explodes.
Nothing obviously breaks.
The product just becomes slightly worse with every update.
Where I learned to recognize the pattern
While Cory Doctorow gave the problem a name, I learned to recognize the pattern through Burnie Burns, a longtime tech commentator, storyteller, and co‑founder of Rooster Teeth.
Burnie has spent decades building and talking about internet‑native companies, media platforms, and products, which gives him a very grounded perspective on how technology changes once money, scale, and incentives enter the picture.
In recent years, he’s talked openly about this idea on his daily podcast Morning Somewhere, where he breaks down why technology so often:
- Starts out genuinely helpful
- Grows quickly
- Gets monetized
- Slowly becomes worse than the thing it replaced
I heard this pattern described there long before I ever saw the word “enshittification” written down.
Doctorow named the problem.
Burnie made it obvious.
Why enshittification keeps happening
This isn’t about bad engineers or careless designers.
Most people building these products are talented and well-intentioned.
The issue is incentives.
When success is measured by:
- Engagement metrics
- Subscription growth
- Consumable replacements
- Lock-in
- Shareholder value
Instead of:
- Usefulness
- Simplicity
- Accessibility
- Respect for the user
Products decay.
Every individual decision makes sense on its own.
Taken together, they rot the experience.
Example 1: Nest — smart home magic, slowly diluted
When Nest launched, it felt genuinely revolutionary.
- Clean interface
- Simple setup
- Local control
- Learning behavior that actually worked
You bought the hardware.
You owned the experience.
After Google acquired Nest, things didn’t break overnight—but they slowly eroded:
- Forced Google account migrations
- Broken integrations
- Reduced local control
- Increased cloud dependency
- Features quietly removed or restricted
Useful background reading:
Nothing technically failed.
It just got worse.
Example 2: Litter-Robot 3 — smaller bags, bigger frustration
The Litter-Robot 3 by Whisker is genuinely clever hardware.
Automatic litter boxes solve a real problem and can dramatically improve quality of life.
But over time, something subtle changed.
The waste bags:
- Are smaller than they used to be
- Fill up much faster
- Need replacing more often
- Increase long-term cost for the same usage
My cats didn’t change.
The robot didn’t suddenly get worse at its job.
The consumable changed.
This is a textbook enshittification move: make the replaceable part worse so it needs replacing more often.
Nothing breaks.
You just feel quietly annoyed—and slightly ripped off.
Example 3: Streaming services reinventing cable
Streaming once promised freedom from cable.
For a while, it delivered:
- Lower costs
- Fewer ads
- Simple subscriptions
- Predictable libraries
Now:
- Multiple subscriptions
- Ads on paid plans
- Content removed without warning
- Fragmented catalogs
- Worse discovery and search
Useful context:
We didn’t escape cable.
We rebuilt it—with worse UX and more friction.
Why accessibility suffers first
Enshittification doesn’t hit everyone equally.
It hits hardest for:
- Disabled users
- Older users
- Power users
- Anyone who relies on clarity and consistency
More layers.
More pop-ups.
More tracking.
Less control.
Accessibility rarely breaks dramatically.
It erodes quietly—until the product no longer works for the people who depended on it most.
Why naming the problem matters
Technology didn’t get worse because we forgot how to build good things.
It got worse because we stopped rewarding them.
Having a word enshittification gives us:
- Language to describe the pattern
- Awareness to spot it early
- Accountability when it happens
Final thoughts
Good technology should feel human. It should respect your time. It should get out of your way.
If a product feels adversarial, manipulative, or exhausting—something went wrong.
Naming that wrong is the first step toward fixing it.