Tech Leaderism

Enshitification

Cory Doctorow, the writer who coined the term "enshitification", argues that Amazon has finally reached the terminal stage of the process he first described years ago: the point where a platform stops serving users or partners and instead optimizes entirely for itself.

In its early years, Amazon built loyalty through low prices, fast delivery, and generous customer policies. Later, it courted sellers with visibility and scale, creating a powerful cycle of growth that reinforced itself with every new customer and merchant. But over time, that cycle turned inward. Search results became pay-to-play. Merchants faced rising fees and were nudged into costly fulfilment programs just to remain visible. Consumers were left with degraded search quality, counterfeit products, and creeping prices hidden behind the convenience of Prime.

Doctorow describes this as the final phase of enshitification: the slow transformation of a useful system into one that extracts more than it gives. It is no longer innovation or competition that drives Amazon's behaviour, but the maintenance of dominance through lock-in and algorithmic opacity.

His warning goes beyond Amazon itself, it's about what happens when digital ecosystems stop competing for trust and start competing for control. When efficiency, scale, and data concentration become ends in themselves. As Doctorow puts it, enshitification is not inevitable, but reversing it will require regulation, transparency and the courage to reimagine what a fair digital marketplace looks like.

Cory's article here.