Enshittification

Cory Doctorow has written a book called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. The book is about the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms (Google, Facebook etc, and the internet more generally). You can read a useful review and discussion here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/why-the-internet-is-turning-to-shit.

Enshittification is driven by the desire to make more profit by a disregard for the user and a consequent reduction in the quality of the user experience. Whether that approach makes more money in the long term is an important question, but you can see enshittification-style thinking (ie. a disregard for the other party to the contract) in some B2B contracts.

How does that disregard manifest itself? Here’s some typical examples.

• Contracts made up of long clauses, long sentences and few headings so the reader has to struggle to work out which issues are being dealt with.

• Kitchen-sinking – populating the contract with clauses that are never likely to be relevant.

• One-sidedness – designing the contract so it reflects only the interests of the author and making the other side put in the work needed to make the contract balanced.

But will enshittification at a contract level be a successful strategy? It’s unlikely. The contract is one of the first experiences of a company that a potential customer is going to have. If it’s a bad experience, then that’s not a promising start.

13th January 2026