Cory Doctorow on Enshittification: Break Up Meta, Google, and Musk

Cory Doctorow, the Canadian author and activist, coined the term "Enshittification" to describe the decay of digital platforms. In an interview, he recounts the term's origin during a vacation in Puerto Rico, where he stayed in a remote cabin in a cloud forest. Using TripAdvisor to search for restaurants, he encountered extremely slow internet via a microwave radio link that couldn't penetrate the fog. The site loaded with 70 trackers, rendering it nearly unusable. He then tweeted: "TripAdvisor is the most 'enshittified' website I've ever used. Has anyone ever actually gone on a trip using TripAdvisor?" Doctorow argues that platforms like Meta, Google, and those owned by Elon Musk must be broken up to combat enshittification. The full interview appears in the current issue of der Freitag.