The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode: "It’s Not Just You: The Internet Is Actually Getting Worse"

Host: David Remnick

Guest: Cory Doctorow (interviewed by Kyle Chayka)

Date: October 28, 2025

Overview

This episode features The New Yorker’s technology columnist Kyle Chayka in conversation with prolific writer, tech activist, and science fiction author Cory Doctorow. The central theme revolves around “enshittification” (a term coined by Doctorow), which describes the process by which major online platforms and services gradually become worse for users and businesses in pursuit of profit, until only the companies themselves benefit. The conversation delves into why so many digital experiences seem worse now, how regulatory frameworks enable this decline, and whether there’s hope for a better future online.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Concept of “Enshittification”

• Definition: “Enshittification” is the stepwise degradation of online platforms as they lock in users, then business customers, before ultimately prioritizing the enrichment of shareholders and executives at everyone else’s expense.
  • Doctorow explains:

    “When you describe something that is all around but that is sort of so diffuse that you can't really put your finger on it... you kind of attach a handle to it and you give people a way to carry it around and maybe try and carry it to each other and say, are you noticing this? I’m noticing this. I thought I was crazy. I thought it was just me.”
    (Cory Doctorow, 03:17)

• Origins: The term, coined by Cory Doctorow, was the 2023 Word of the Year and is the subject of his new book.

2. Google Search as a Case Study

• Intentional Degradation:
  • Google’s internal memos from a DOJ antitrust case revealed decisions to worsen search in order to increase ad revenue, as growth plateaued.
  • Doctorow recounts:

    “Why don't we make search worse?... What if we make it a three shot, right? What if we make it so that you got to search two or three times and then every time we get to show you ads.”
    (Cory Doctorow, 04:09)

• Lack of Competition:
  • Google’s dominance comes not from product excellence alone but also from paying to be the default search engine across devices and browsers.
  • Even when competitors exist, degraded search opens doors for alternatives (e.g., Kagi, OpenAI’s “generative search”), though often only “less bad” by comparison.

  • “You can't tell me that Google cannot do a better job with its own search index than what, eight guys in a garage?”
    (Cory Doctorow, 07:33)

3. The Three Stages of Enshittification

• Stage 1: Platforms are great to users to attract and lock them in.
• Stage 2: Platforms shift focus to optimizing for business customers (advertisers, sellers, content creators) at the expense of users.
• Stage 3: Once both groups are locked in, the platform prioritizes extracting maximum value for shareholders/executives, making things bad for both users and business customers.

  • “All the value, except for whatever kind of homeopathic residue is needed to keep people locked in and to keep business customers locked into those people, all that value has been extracted, given to shareholders, given to executives. And that is like the final stage of enshittification.”
    (Cory Doctorow, 09:52)

4. Regulatory and Legal Barriers Preventing Competitor Emergence

• Then vs. Now: In the MySpace/Facebook migration era, users could bring their data from one platform to another. Today, copyright law (e.g., DMCA Section 1201) and expanded IP protection make such collective action impractical or illegal.

  • “We've kind of rigged the game so that history ended with the current round of winners... no one can do unto them as they did unto their predecessors.”
    (Cory Doctorow, 12:16)

• The result: Modern platforms are able to degrade user experience without meaningful risk of mass user defection or competition.

5. Antitrust and Policy Responses: A Glimmer of Hope

• A Global Movement:
  • Antitrust scrutiny and action have increased worldwide, in the EU, Canada, Australia, and even China, not just the US.
  • Doctorow credits public pressure and a growing political consensus as drivers for renewed regulation—even under seemingly unlikely governments.

  • “This is happening everywhere. And Trump, he's trying to stop it. But... there was this giant political tailwind for doing something about concentrated power, about monopoly. And that came from you and me, that came from people who are living out what the finance sector calls Stein's Law, that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.”
    (Cory Doctorow, 17:19)

• Policy Ripple Effects:
  • Example: The EU’s USB-C charging rule forced Apple to change hardware globally for simplicity.
  • The Digital Markets Act imposes interoperability and privacy requirements, benefiting users worldwide.

6. AI and the Next Potential Enshittification

• AI Hype vs. Reality:
  • Billions are invested in generative AI with a view to automating labor; Doctorow argues this is misguided, and AI is currently more “flashy demo” than functional replacement.
  • Doctorow warns:

    “I don't think that bosses firing workers and replacing with AI is going to work... It's like saying, you know, we keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, it's only a matter of time till one of the mares gives birth to a locomotive.” (Cory Doctorow, 21:06)

• Extractive Pricing Models: AI services are quickly adopting opaque, value-extracting billing models, reminiscent of other enshittified services.

7. Advertising and the “Privacy Crisis”

• Advertising Isn’t the Root, Surveillance Is:
  • Doctorow, who has run advertising-supported sites, argues the problem isn’t advertising but the model of pervasive, surveillant “behavioral” ads.
  • If surveillance advertising is banned, marketers would still use ads, just less intrusively.
• Privacy as the Common Thread:
  • Issues from online radicalization to police tracking to deepfakes to discrimination are united by the lack of modernized privacy laws.

  • “If we could just make it illegal to spy on people, we could solve so many problems like that.”
    (Cory Doctorow, 24:45)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I immediately grabbed onto it. I knew what it meant... everything just seems to be getting worse all around on our phones and on websites.”
  — Kyle Chayka on discovering “enshittification” (02:13)

• “The product doesn't have to be so bad.”
  — Kyle Chayka (07:33)

• “You can't tell me that Google cannot do a better job with its own search index than what, eight guys in a garage?”
  — Cory Doctorow (07:33)

• “We've kind of rigged the game so that history ended with the current round of winners...”
  — Cory Doctorow (12:16)

• “It’s not just that everything is getting more and more and enshittified... there are strategies and there are ways to make that lever... harder to use.”
  — Kyle Chayka (16:05)

• “The policy environment creates enshittification, right? The enshittificatory environment creates the regime in which bad impulses, bad people, bad ideas thrive. And so we have to make a hostile environment for enshittification.”
  — Cory Doctorow (23:22)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:47] — Introduction by David Remnick and the origin of “enshittification”
• [03:17] — Cory Doctorow on giving shape to a nebulous decline online
• [03:49] — Google Search example: Deliberate product degradation for ads
• [07:56] — Doctorow explains the three stages of enshittification
• [10:42] — Platforms' use of IP law to block competitor migration
• [16:31] — Signs of optimism: global antitrust and regulatory action
• [18:34] — EU laws' effect on global product and privacy standards
• [20:45] — The questionable rush to replace workers with AI
• [22:58] — Debate over advertising vs. privacy/surveillance as the root cause
• [24:45] — The privacy coalition as a solution to a wide array of digital woes

Tone and Takeaways

True to Doctorow’s direct and witty style, the conversation is clear-eyed, at times irreverent, but ultimately constructive. The episode affirms that while the internet’s decline is real and intentional, history, policy, and user organizing can—and sometimes do—open new pathways for positive change. Above all, Doctorow urges that modernizing privacy laws and fostering competitive markets are tools within reach to reverse the current “enshittification” trend.

For further reading, Kyle Chayka's column “Infinite Scroll” publishes weekly at newyorker.com.