Undoing the Enshittification of the Internet

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