Cory Doctorow has put a sharper political frame around a familiar consumer complaint: the phone tree that goes nowhere, the form that asks for the same data again, the broken product nobody at the company can repair. In a June 11 essay on Pluralistic, Doctorow argues that these failures are not mainly a matter of consumers making poor choices. He says they are symptoms of weakened competition, regulation, labor power and public accountability.
Doctorow points to the 2025 National Customer Rage Survey, a recurring study of 1,000 representative consumers conducted every three years for the past decade as part of a research effort that began in 1976. According to his summary of the survey, consumers are reporting more problems with products and services, more serious problems, more anger, more lasting stress and a growing desire to retaliate against companies.
He also cites a new investigative project by The Guardian’s Heather Timmons on consumer frustration in the United States. Doctorow says Timmons told him she had received a heavy volume of reader emails describing a sense that ordinary services now feel broken. Some readers, he says, linked that feeling to his work on “enshittification,” his term for platforms and companies degrading products after users, suppliers or workers become locked in.
The mechanism, according to Doctorow
Doctorow’s account is not that companies suddenly became careless. He argues that businesses had incentives to exploit customers before, but were restrained by several forces: competitors that could win defecting customers, regulators that could punish abuse, workers with enough power and professional pride to resist bad decisions, and new products that could expose incumbents’ defects.
In his telling, antitrust enforcement was the central support for those restraints. Doctorow argues that a long retreat from antitrust allowed companies to grow powerful enough to ignore customers, workers and regulators. He connects that retreat to broader attacks on consumer protection, labor rights, civil rights and environmental enforcement.
The result, he says, is a system where consumers are stuck with bad service because alternatives are weak or unavailable. Understaffed counters, unreachable support teams and outsourced or automated help desks shift costs away from owners and onto customers and front-line workers, Doctorow argues.
AI as paperwork amplifier
Doctorow gives special attention to online forms and AI-generated internal tools. Drawing on David Graeber’s writing about bureaucracy, he argues that digital systems make it cheap for institutions to impose repeated administrative work on everyone else. A company or agency can build a form once, then force thousands of people to feed it information.
He says AI lowers that barrier further by making it easier for employees to generate forms, scripts and analytics systems. In Doctorow’s view, that creates more duplicated paperwork, more brittle back-end systems and more cases where customers must wait for a human or deal with a bot when automated processes fail.
Doctorow’s prescription is political rather than consumerist. He urges readers to support advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, join or start unions, and get involved in party and local politics. His core claim is blunt: people cannot buy their way out of monopoly power. They have to organize against it.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.
