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Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome Cory Doctorow (c) Julia Galdo & Cody Cloud) Who are we to blame for enshittification? That is, who is at fault for the pandemic of platform decay, in which the platforms we depend on, where we congregate, trade, perform, sell, buy, connect, love, argue, and mobilize are all turning into piles of shit, all at once? 50 years of neoliberal canon says that we have to blame “consumers.” You, me, and everyone we know cast ballots in an election in which we “voted with our wallets,” and the winners were the ketamine-addled, zuckermuskian mediocrities who have filled our social media with slop, trolling, botshit, porn, and gore. In the jargon of the economics trade, we have a “revealed preference” for being spied on, manipulated, and harassed. If we didn’t want that, we’d simply leave. This “revealed preference” wheeze is a way to dress up old-fashioned victim-blaming as empiricism. Children digging conflict minerals, women stuck in abusive relationships, people paying $15 for water at a Hudson News on the airside of a TSA checkpoint? They all have a “revealed preference” for their plight. Same goes for people buying HP ink at $10,000 per gallon, powered wheelchair users who are stuck in bed for six weeks waiting for a callout from a manufacturer’s repair rep, and people living in the toxic exhaust plumes of Cancer Alley. If you really want to understand people’s preferences, you have to give them meaningful choices. Take privacy: Prior to 2021, every iOS user who installed a Facebook app “consented” to being comprehensively spied upon by that app as they moved through both physical and virtual space. Then, in 2021, Apple updated iOS to allow users to block Facebook spying, and _ninety-six percent_ of iOS users clicked that box. Now _there’s_ a revealed preference. The whole point of the conservative project is to take away choices, and corral us into “preferences” that we disprefer. Eliminate no-fault divorce, suppress the vote, gerrymander the electoral map, cram a binding arbitration clause into every terms of service and a noncompete into every labor contract, buy up all your competitors, DRM-lock all the media, ban contraception and abortion, and you’ve got a world of partners you can’t divorce, politicians you can’t vote out, companies you can’t sue, jobs you can’t quit, services you can’t leave, books and music you can’t move, and pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate. And after you are relentlessly corralled into all these things you hate, you will be told that you don’t hate them after all – because you revealed your preferences for them. Consumerism is a terrible way to make change at the best of times, and it gets less effective by the day, as authoritarianism and market consolidation shrink the world of possibilities to an endless Pepsi Challenge, where “choice” is narrowed to which flavor of sweetened battery acid you hate the least. I don’t think that end users are to blame for enshittification. So what about tech bosses? Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram and recaptured all the Facebook users who’d fled his platform for a better one, then monotonically increased the surveillance, ads, and boosted content in all their feeds. Elon Musk bought Twitter, invited the Nazis back, shut down the content moderation department, and then killed the API so that users couldn’t easily migrate to Mastodon or Bluesky and reconnect with the friends they’d made on Twitter. They both made a bet that we’d love each other more than we hated them. Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai relentlessly squeezed app makers and the creators who depend on them, taking 30 cents out of every dollar you send to news outlets, Patreon creators, and Etsy crafters using their apps (and banning apps from advertising other ways to pay). They imposed a 30 percent economy-wide app tax on the digital world. HP blocked you from refilling ink cartridges or replacing them with generics and then made printer ink more expensive than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner. ShiftMed, a company that supplies contract nurses to hospitals, uses commercial surveillance data to look up how much credit card debt a nurse is carrying and lowers their wage offer based on their perceived desperation. Amazon charges Prime users more than users who haven’t prepaid for a year’s shipping in advance. So tech bosses definitely belong on our naughty list. But here’s a mystery: How is it that these services were once good (or, at least, _better_), and then they all got worse, rather precipitously? Did these tech bosses have a change of heart? Were they all part of a patient conspiracy to bait us into their services, await our entrapment, and then turn the screws? I don’t think so. There’s no evidence of this conspiracy – and given how enthusiastically these guys commit their most illegal and unethical plans to writing and circulate them in memos, I think that if the conspiracy existed, it would have leaked all over the place by now. Moreover, these people have repeatedly demonstrated their lack of executive function and patience – they take whatever they can get, whenever they can get it. Which brings me to the people who I think bear the brunt of the blame – the true authors of the Great Enshittening and the prime movers behind the Enshittocene: policymakers. The same economists and politicians who gave us “revealed preferences” also halted antitrust enforcement, allowing companies to buy each other until once-thriving sectors had been degraded to anticompetitive cartels where the only choice was “heads I win, tails you lose.” Cowardly and venal politicians failed to update consumer privacy law for _decades_ : The last federal consumer law that Congress bestirred itself to pass was 1988’s Video Privacy Protection Act, a law that bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. Bought-and-paid for pols attacked the American worker, gutting labor law and ripping the hearts out of unions. Politicians, claiming to be fighting for creative workers, passed “IP” laws like 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that bans reverse-engineering and is the reason you can’t use an alternative app store on your phone or console; why you can’t install a privacy blocker for your apps; why you can’t fix your own wheelchair; why you can’t use third-party ink. And the thing is, all of these policies were enacted in living memory, by named individuals. We know who did this. We warned them at the time that this would be the consequence of their actions – that failing to protect privacy would result in mass surveillance; that failing to police mergers would lead to monopolies; that banning reverse-engineering would invite companies to lock their users in, take away features _after_ people buy their devices and media, spy on users, and block new companies from creating compatible products. They were warned that this would happen, and they went ahead and did it anyway, and they created the incentives for enshittification. They created a system in which the world’s worst tech bosses could give in to their very worst impulses and grow rich and powerful as a consequence. As our friends on the right like to (selectively) remind us: “incentives matter.” I write all this not merely to apportion blame where it belongs, but also as a tactical note. When the policy environment rewards enshittification, enshittifiers rise to the top of every company. Investors demand it. Good people in companies and in government are sidelined or trampled by enshittifiers moving into the niches created by bad policy. We could fire Zuck and all his bloodless billionaire pals tomorrow and a new cohort would step right into their shoes. To fix enshittification, we need policy change, not personnel changes in Big Tech’s C-suites. _All opinions expressed by commentators are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of_ Locus _._ * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr * Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest * * * * #### Cory Doctorow CORY DOCTOROW (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of dozens of books, most recently Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse And What To Do About It (nonfiction); and the novels Picks And Shovels and The Bezzle (followups to Red Team Blues). Other notable books include the solarpunk novels Walkaway and The Lost Cause; the tech policy books The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism; the internationally bestselling YA Little Brother series; and the picture book Poesy The Monster Slayer. He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is an AD White Professor at Cornell University; an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate; a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University. He co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. All opinions expressed by commentators are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Locus This article and more like it in the November 2025 issue of _Locus_. **Show your support of _Locus_** by helping us meet our donor match this February! Your gift today keeps the magazine full of all the book recs, fiction reviews, author interviews, and industry news you love to read. Plus the website, Locus Awards, writing workshops, and more. **Thank you for believing in _Locus_!** -- double the impact and donate today! ©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF. https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-show-me-the-incentive-ill-show-you-the-outcome/