Is software enshittified?

21 Jul, 2026

Cory Doctorow's notion of enshittification not only really caught on but has been durable. If what I see and hear is representative, many people (including tech people) still think about software this way: software is getting worse and there are special economic forces pushing it to get worse. I am not an economist, but:

1. From a strictly cultural point of view, the stickiness of this idea is fascinating. People seem drawn to the idea that traditional forces of incentives and profits don't apply to software, and that these forces are user-hostile in nonobvious but important ways.
2. The main mechanism Doctorow proposes is that network effects are so powerful that services enjoying network advantages can exploit their users. This seems most relevant to me indirectly: these services tend to be free, so the available ways to "raise prices" involve degrading the experience (e.g., by showing more advertisements or trying to capture more of the economic value that happens on a platform). I suspect that a lot of the enshittification discourse amounts to "I don't like it when my consumer surplus goes away" or "when my consumer surplus goes away, I'd rather it cost me money than product quality."¹
3. I suspect that a lot of what people dislike is normal product evolution. It's hard to keep software simple and performant as it matures, and the importance of both simplicity and performance is underestimated by both software makers and software users.
4. Why is it hard to keep software simple? Some of it is, I think, that there are powerful psychological and organizational forces that push toward feature bloat...
5. ...but some of it is just maturity, in the sense that it is more complete, more responsible software. Some software complexity comes from making sure it follows the law. Plenty of software complexity comes from making it accessible. If your favorite little indie app feels a little more sluggish, it might be because it's now running bloated software from an ad network, but it could also be an indirect result of making the app better for people who are (e.g.) not sighted English speakers.
6. Sometimes things just change, whether that's an underlying operating system, a cultural context, or something else. People cite AI summaries in Google search as an example of enshittification. I'm not an expert in the economics of search, but if I had to list candidate explanations of this feature, "Google Search is so dominant that Google thinks it can get away with degrading the experience by showing AI results" would not be very near the top.

#generative AI #software