Not sure how to incorporate the UCSB Reads 2027 book in your winter or spring class? UCSB librarians have developed a series of potential assignment frameworks and discussion ideas across multiple disciplines to help you integrate Cory Doctorow's Enshittification into your curriculum. These suggestions serve as jumping-off points, and instructors are encouraged to iterate and ideate on these ideas.

If you would like assistance in creating a custom assignment tailored directly to your course learning objectives, please reach out to the Library’s Research & Teaching team.

Potential Assignments and Discussion Questions

Arts and Humanities

  • Framework Application: Ask your students to use additional source material to employ Cory Doctorow's four-stage framework against a platform he does not cover in the book, such as TikTok, Discord, a UCSB application, or a streaming service.
  • Creative & Satirical Media Creation: Prompt students to respond to Enshittification by creating critical or satirical media, such as prints, zines, or digital art, that explores themes of platform decay, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic manipulation, or other core concepts from Doctorow's work.
  • Narrative Analysis: Doctorow’s use of the term “enshittification” is often linked by reviewers to the opening story of season seven of the Black Mirror series. Have your students view the episode "Common People" to study how the show visualizes enshittification as narrative and aesthetic, or ask them to write a critical analysis on what fiction can communicate that non-fiction cannot. (Recommended background reading: “Black Mirror series 7 episode 1: Common People review” and “The gap between reality and Black Mirror is closing”). 
  • Historical Sound Tech vs. Digital Streaming: Using UCSB Library’s UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, have students explore an early recorded-sound industry (formats, ownership, and distribution control) and compare it with how modern streaming platforms handle content access and removal. This also provides a concrete example of Doctorow's “enshittification-resistant infrastructure”: a public institution that preserves material and provides free public access.

Science and Engineering

  • UX Audit & Interface Annotation: Have your students use Doctorow’s framework as a rubric to document and critique "enshittified" user interfaces. Ask students to screenshot an app or platform and annotate specific design choices that extract user attention, obscure opt-out settings, or degrade the user experience.   
  • Interface Redesign Prototype: Ask students to critically examine and redesign a degraded interface as a "disenshittified" alternative, prototyping what a user-first version would look like.
  • Case Studies & Prevention Strategies: Assign students to examine case studies of platform enshittification and have them research and propose management practices that might prevent the degradation spiral.  

Social Sciences

  • User Interviews & Ethnographic Report on Lock-In: Focusing on Doctorow’s “lock-in” explanation for why platforms get worse without losing their user base, have students interview 3-5 people about a platform they dislike but continue to use anyway. Ask students to analyze the language people use to explain why they continue to use the site(s), connect their findings to Doctorow’s work, and present their findings in an ethnographic report.
  • Policy Draft & Institutional Design: Assign students to small groups and have them choose one proposed solution from the book's final section (such as interoperability requirements or stronger antitrust enforcement). Have them draft a model regulation or institutional design, anticipate who would oppose it and how, and predict potential unintended consequences.
  • Economic Theory Debate: Ask students to examine Doctorow's question “is it just capitalism?” or his claim that platform decay stems from specific policy choices rather than inevitable economic laws. Students should evaluate how that claim bears on the "just capitalism" question. Assign supplementary readings that provide different points of view, such as interviews with Yanis Varoufakis about Technofeudalism or articles from Shoshana Zuboff about Surveillance Capitalism. Using the conclusion of the book and critical sources, have students write an argumentative essay on where they believe the core problem lies.
  • Institutional Archives vs. Commercial Platforms: Have students compare how a library or archive and a commercial platform handle preservation, access, and user data for similar materials. Using the COVID-19 Community Archives Project (or, in consultation with a librarian or curator, another collection available in UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections) as an example, ask students to evaluate whether the archive model is "enshittification-resistant" in Doctorow's sense.

Further Reading

Book Reviews