The Enshittification of Everything: Why the Internet Feels Broken
You open Amazon. You type in “USB-C cable.” You’re greeted with pages of brands you’ve never heard of — Zynlon, Fistek, Kablor — all with suspiciously perfect 4.8-star ratings from 12,000 reviews. You scroll past three screens of sponsored junk before finding the product you actually wanted.
This isn’t just annoying.
It’s designed that way.
Cory Doctorow calls it enshittification — a delightfully vulgar term for a grimly predictable pattern: the slow degradation of platforms that once felt good, useful, or even community-driven.
And once you spot it, you see it everywhere.
First They Woo You. Then They Milk You. Then They Gut the Rest.
Doctorow lays out the lifecycle:
- Stage One: The platform prioritizes users. Everything works well. It feels like a gift.
- Stage Two: The platform starts squeezing users to benefit business customers. Your feed gets cluttered. Ads creep in.
- Stage Three: It even screws the business customers, maximizing profits by taking a bigger cut of everything.
That’s when the magic dies.
Amazon, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, even food delivery apps — all follow this script.
It’s not a bug. It’s the business model.
Habermas Was Right: We’re Watching the System Devour the Lifeworld
Back in the 1980s, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas gave us a warning. He described two domains of life:
- The lifeworld: where people communicate, build meaning, form communities.
- The system: where institutions operate based on money and power.
His fear? The system would invade and colonize the lifeworld. That our most human spaces — conversation, connection, creativity — would get paved over by the cold logic of optimization, profit, and control.
That’s enshittification in a nutshell.
Platforms once promised us community, access, empowerment. Today, they offer sludge, friction, and manipulation — the language of the system disguised as a friendly user interface.
The Communication of Sludge
Let’s talk tactics.
How does this colonization show up?
Through design. Through language. Through calculated misdirection.
- Obfuscation: Settings buried under menus and written in legalese.
- Confirmshaming: “No thanks, I prefer not to grow my business.”
- Friction-by-design: Hidden unsubscribe links. Tiny opt-out boxes. Confusing layouts.
It’s not just about functionality. It’s about how platforms speak to you. And increasingly, that speech is adversarial.
They don’t just want your attention. They want your surrender.
Can We De-Enshittify?
There are glimmers of resistance.
People returning to blogs, newsletters, RSS feeds. The rise of community-run Mastodon servers. Reddit protests. Open-source platforms.
But there’s a real question: can good platforms scale without becoming bad?
Because scale demands system logic. And system logic demands enshittification.
Maybe we don’t need one big new public square. Maybe we need thousands of small gardens — intentional, friction-aware, user-respecting media spaces that refuse to play the old game.
The lifeworld needs a comeback.
