Enshittification
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What it i
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Cory Doctorow's term for the process by which a digital platform degrades in quality over time — first for users, then business customers — once locked in via network effects and high switching costs, to extract more value for the platform owner.
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Intuition
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Once you can't easily leave, the platform doesn't need to keep earning your loyalty — it can extract more (ads, surveillance, worse recommendations) because leaving costs you more than staying.
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How it works
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A platform grows via network effects, becoming genuinely useful.
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Once a large, locked-in user base exists, the platform starts extracting more value from users.
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The article frames the underlying drivers as weak antitrust enforcement (letting giants buy up rivals and adjacent markets) and weak regulation (like no comprehensive privacy law), which remove the pressure that would otherwise punish this behavior.
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Example
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Repeated privacy scandals across every major tech giant, according to the article, are a symptom: each company degrades privacy because the cost of doing so is smaller than what users would pay to actually leave.
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