I’ve been a digital-rights activist for half my life. Up until the late 2000s, I was fighting for privacy and against censorship on what I call the “old, good internet,” as a UN delegate, lobbyist, writer and community organizer. But since then, as the online world became more surveilled, manipulative and worse in every way, my mission shifted drastically. I began railing against “enshittification,” the crude (and surprisingly popular) word I coined to describe the decay of the internet we all rely on—and the subject of my forthcoming book.

It’s not your imagination: social media sucks. Online dating sucks. E-commerce sucks. It would be neat if there was a single precipitating incident at which the websites we rely on dramatically disqualified themselves from being fit for purpose. But, rather, they have all steadily declined, in ways large and small. Take Google, a search engine with 90 per cent market share that gets worse every day, as the company chases an AI-slop strategy that obscures links to the best websites with error-ridden chatbot-generated pablum. Then there’s giant, terrible Meta, which diluted content posted by friends and trusted news sources with engagement bait and scammy ads. Twitter (now X), the formerly fun public square, has been turned into a Nazi-propaganda mill. Every corner of the web has been redesigned by inches to extract value from end-users and business customers, to the benefit of a tech cartel that’s repeatedly proven it’s not only too big to fail and jail, but too big to care.

Enshittification follows a characteristic three-stage process. In stage one, a platform is good to its end-users, while finding ways to lock them in. Take Facebook, for example. At its inception, it showed you a feed-full of the things you’d asked to see: content posted by friends and family, artists, publications and participants in the groups you’d joined. Lots of us took Mark Zuckerberg up on this deal, and we users proceeded to take each other hostage. (In other words, it became really hard to convince your friends to leave Facebook at the same time and migrate to another site all........

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