For years, Cory Doctorow has given us a language to describe a process that's becoming too common in the tech industry
enshittification, the deliberate degradation of platforms as they shift from serving users, to serving business customers, to extracting maximum value for shareholders
Doctorow’s earlier work helped explain how we got here
More recently, with his 2025 talks and essays, the focus has shifted towards answering:
What would it take to actually fix this?
In this posts, we share some of his ideas, and our response as a pragmatic approach
A Familiar Pattern
Consider what is happening in the publishing industry
There is a world of independent authors: smart, prolific creators running real businesses; on the sidelines of mainstream publishing, operating with an infrastructure designed for a completely different era:
Platforms built for centralized gatekeepers
Payment systems that assume intermediaries
Discovery systems with volume constrains
No real safety nets, portability, or leverage
Authors are running modern, global, digital businesses on top of systems that ignored their pitches
And it can be seen everywhere:
Creators
Small businesses
Healthcare providers
Educators
Nonprofits
Open-source developers
Sophisticated work, fragile infrastructure, weak labor protection
Restoring Agency
The worsening user experience and rising costs are just symptoms of enshittification
The underlying condition is who controls the system
When platforms own:
Identity
Payments
Distribution
Data
Rules
Devices
Users are no longer participants, they are inputs
Undoing enshittification means restoring agency, thinking back of unglamorous days of building in the garage, running servers on cheap hardware, obsessing about user experience, open standards and discovering new technology
Seizing the Means of Computation
“Seizing the means of computation” means re-architecting ownership, interoperability, and power, with the following principles:
Interoperability
Closed systems concentrate power
Interoperable systems distribute it
This means:
APIs that are open, documented, and stable
Data portability by default
Systems designed to integrate, not lock in
Open SDKS, APIs, dev rel
We love open source, Odoo, Markkët, Medplum, and modular stacks. Software we can run, extend, audit, and share
Interoperability makes exit possible
Exit makes systems behave better
Open Documentation
Knowledge asymmetry is a form of control
Modern platforms often:
Hide how things work
Obfuscate pricing and rules
Change terms silently
We believe documentation should be considered critical infrastructure
Open docs:
Reduce dependence on vendors
Enable local expertise
Allow communities to self-support
Create long-term resilience
Make debugging easier
Enable faster collaboration
This is why courses, playbooks, and shared knowledge matter as much as software
Capital That Builds
We must encourage investing, grant making and supporting projects that aligns with this values. There are many sources of capital that want to find technical and business operator allies with the expertise to see positive community returns
Share long term visions
Operator-aligned investors
Revenue-first businesses
Cooperative and hybrid models
Provide open standards and prefer open source
Growing intentionally allows building capacity at the right scale
Purposeful Companies
Things won't happen overnight with some app or website
It will happen through:
New companies
New features
New norms
New alliances between engineers, operators, creators, and communities
New legislation
Better enforcement agencies
Companies that:
Optimize for user trust
Treat privacy as default
View profit as a constraint, not the only goal
Measure success in years, not quarters
This is slower work, lasting work
Let's Do It
This is not theoretical, there are already many:
Open source self hosted alternatives for critical SASS tools
Shared infrastructure, smaller cloud providers, local data centers
Fractional leadership, cooperative business formation
Courses and documentation
Communities of operators
Activist investors
A Better Internet Is Still Possible
The internet didn’t become like this by accident
It was designed, and coded by people with goals and resources
It can be redesigned, collaboratively, and with better intentions
Not for nostalgia
For lasting technical and business infrastructure that benefits the community
It starts with us