In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More regularly than not, I’ve found that the answer is fairly simple: the tech industry’s incentives no longer align with the user.
The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.
To be clear, I don’t believe that this gradual enshittification is part of some grand, Machiavellian long game by the tech companies, but rather the product of multiple consecutive decisions made in response to short-term financial needs. Even if it was, the result would be the same — people wouldn’t notice how bad things have gotten until it’s too late, or they might just assume that tech has always sucked, or they’re just personally incapable of using the tools that are increasingly fundamental to living in a modern world.
You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.
It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.
These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.
Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.
This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today I’m going to explain why. It’s going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem.
You have, more than likely, said to yourself sometime in the last ten years that you “didn’t get tech,” or that you are “getting too old,” or that tech has “gotten away from you” because you found a service, or an app, or a device annoying. You, or someone you love, have convinced yourself that your inability to use something is a sign that you’re deficient, that you’ve failed to “keep up with the times,” as if the things we use every day should be in a constant state of flux.
Sidenote: I’m sure there are exceptions. Some people really just don’t try and learn how to use a computer or smartphone, and naturally reject technology, or steadfastly refuse to pick it up because “it’s not for them.” These people exist, they’re real, we all know them, and I don’t think anybody reading this falls into this camp. Basic technological literacy is a requirement to live in society — and there is some responsibility on the user. But even if we assume that this is the case, and even if there are a lot of people that simply don’t try…should companies really take advantage of them?
The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same. While buttons on our cars might have moved around — and I’m not even getting into Tesla’s designs right now — we generally have a brake, an accelerator, a wheel, and a turn signal. Boarding an airplane has worked mostly the same way since I started flying, other than moving from physical tickets to digital ones. We’re not expected to work out “the new way to use a toilet” every few months because somebody decided we were finishing too quickly.
Yet our apps and the platforms we use every day operate by a totally different moral and intellectual compass. While the idea of an update is fairly noble (and not always negative) — that something you’ve bought can be maintained and improved over time is a good thing — many tech platforms see it as a means to further extract and exploit, to push users into doing things that either keep them on the app longer or take more-profitable actions.
We as a society need to reckon with how this twists us up, makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer and suffer in manifold ways. There is no digital world and physical world — they are, and have been, the same for quite some time, and reporting on tech as if this isn’t the case fails the user. It may seem a little dramatic, but take a second and really think about how many little digital irritations you deal with in a day. It’s time to wake up to the fact that our digital lives are rotten.
I’m not talking about one single product or company, but most digital experiences. The interference is everywhere, and we’ve all learned to accept conditions that are, when written out plainly, are kind of insane.
Back in 2023, Spotify redesigned its app to, and I quote The Verge, be “part TikTok, part Instagram, and part YouTube,” which in practice meant replacing a relatively clean and straightforward user interface with one made up of full-screen cards (like TikTok) and autoplaying video podcasts (like TikTok), which CEO Daniel Ek claimed would, to quote Sky News, make the platform “come alive” with different content on a platform built and sold as a place to listen to music.
The tech media waved off the redesign without really considering the significance of the fact that at the drop of a hat, hundreds of millions of people’s experience of listening to music would change based on the whims of a multi-billionaire, with the express purpose being to force these people to engage with completely different content as a means of increasing engagement metrics and revenue. By all means try and pretend this is “just an app,” but people’s relationships with music and entertainment are deeply important to their moods and motivations, and adding layers of frustration in an app they interact with for hours a day is consistently grating.
And no matter how you feel, this design was never for the customer. Nobody using Spotify was saying “ah man, I wish I could watch videos on this,” but that doesn’t matter because engagement and revenue must increase. It’s clear that Spotify, a company best-known for exploiting the artists on its platform, treats its customers (both paying and otherwise) with a similar level of contempt.
It’s far from alone. Earlier in the year, smart speaker company Sonos released a redesign of its app that removed accessibility features and the ability to edit song queues or play music from your phone in an attempt to “modernize” the interface, with WIRED suggesting that the changes could potentially open the door to adding a subscription of some sort to help Sonos’ ailing growth. Meta’s continual redesigns of Facebook and Instagram — the latest of which happened in October to “focus on Gen Z” — are probably the most egregious example of the constant chaos of our digital lives.
Sidenote: Some of Meta’s random redesigns are subtle and not announced with any particular fanfare. Try this: Using the iPhone app, go to a friend’s profile, tap “photos,” and then “videos.” Naturally, you’d expect these to be organized in chronological order. If your friend is a prolific uploader, that won’t be the case. You’ll find them organized in a scattershot, algorithmically-driven arrangement that doesn’t make any sense.
What does that mean in practice? Say you’re looking for videos from an important life event — like a birthday or a wedding. You can’t just scroll down until you reach them. You’ve got to parse your way through every single one. Which takes longer, but is presumably great for Facebook’s engagement numbers.
Also, there are two separate tabs that show videos (one on the profile page, another under the photo tab). You’d assume both would show the exact same things, and you’d be wrong. They’ll often show an entirely different selection of videos, with no obvious criteria as to why. And don’t get me started on Facebook’s retrospective conversion of certain older videos — some of which might be a few seconds long, others lasting several minutes — into reels, which also strips the ability to skip certain parts without installing a third-party browser plugin.
As every single platform we use is desperate to juice growth from every user, everything we interact with is hyper-monetized through plugins, advertising, microtransactions and other things that constantly gnaw at the user experience. We load websites expecting them to be broken, especially on mobile, because every single website has to have 15+ different ad trackers, video ads that cover large chunks of the screen, all while demanding our email or for us to let them send us notifications.
Every experience demands our email address, and giving out our email address adds another email to inboxes already stuffed with two types of spam — the actual “get the biggest laser” spam that hits the junk folder automatically, and the marketing emails we receive from clothing brands we wanted a discount from or newspapers we pay for that still feel it’s necessary to bother us 3 to 5 times a day. I’ve basically given up trying to fight back — how about you?
Every app we use is intentionally built to “growth hack” — a term that means “moving things around in such a way that a user does things that we want them to do” so they spend more money or time on the platform — which is why dating apps gate your best matches behind $1.99 microtransactions, or why Uber puts “suggestions” and massive banners throughout their apps to try and convince you to use one of its other apps (or accidentally hit them, which gives Uber a chance to get you to try them), or why Outlook puts advertisements in your email inbox that are near-indistinguishable from new emails (they’re at the top of your inbox too), or why Meta’s video carousels intentionally only play the first few seconds of a clip as a means of making you click.
Our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile, riddled with subtle and overt cons. Our apps are ever-changing, adapting not to our needs or conditions, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics.
It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.
Every app has a different design, almost every design is optimized based on your activity on said app, with each app trying to make you do different things in uniquely annoying ways. Meta has hundreds of people on its growth team perpetuating a culture that manipulates and tortures users to make company metrics improve, like limiting the amount of information in a notification to make a user browse deeper into the site, and deliberately promoting low-quality clickbait that promises “one amazing trick” because people click those links, even if they suck.
It’s everywhere.
After a coup by head of ads Prabhakar Raghavan in 2019, Google intentionally made search results worse as a means of increasing the amount of times that people would search for something on the site. Ever wonder why your workplace uses Sharepoint and other horrible Microsoft apps? That’s because Microsoft’s massive software monopoly meant that it was cheaper for your boss to buy all of it in one place, and thus its incentive is to make it good enough to convince your boss to sign up for all of their stuff rather than an app that makes your life easier or better.
Why does every website feel different, and why do some crash randomly or make your phone burn your hand? It’s because every publisher has pumped their sites full of as much ad tracking software as possible as a means of monetizing every single user in as many ways as possible, helping ads follow you across the entire internet. And why does everybody need your email? Because your inbox is one of the few places that advertisers haven’t found a consistent way to penetrate.
It’s digital tinnitus. It’s the pop-up from a shopping app that you downloaded to make one purchase, or the deceptive notification from Instagram that you have “new views” that doesn’t actually lead anywhere. It is the autoplaying video advertisement on your film review website. It is the repeated request for you to log back into a newspaper website that you logged into yesterday because everyone must pay and nothing must get through. It is the hundredth Black Friday sale you got from a company that you swear you unsubscribed from eight times, and perhaps even did, but there’s no real way to keep track. It’s the third time this year you’ve had to make a new password because another data breach happened and the company didn’t bother to encrypt it.
I’m not writing this to complain, but because I believe — as I hinted at a few weeks ago — that we are in the midst of the largest-scale ecological disaster of our time, because almost every single interaction with technology, which is required to live in modern society, has become actively adversarial to the user. These issues hit everything we do, all the time, a constant onslaught of interference, and I believe it’s so much bigger than just social media and algorithms — though they’re a big part of it, of course.
In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years.
Now, some of you may scoff at this a little — after all, you’re smart, you know about disinformation, you know about the tricks of these companies, and thus most people do, right?
Wrong! Most people don’t think about the things they’re doing at all and are just trying to get by in a society that increasingly demands we make more money to buy the same things, with our lives both interfered with and judged by social networks with aggressive algorithms that feed us more things based on what we’ll engage with, which might mean said things piss us off or actively radicalize us. They’re nagged by constant notifications — an average of 46 a day — some useful, some advertisements, like Apple telling us there’s a nailbiter college football game regardless of whether we’ve ever interacted with anything football related, or a Slack message saying you haven’t joined a group you were invited to yet, or Etsy letting you know that you can buy things for an upcoming holiday. It’s relentless, and the more time you invest in using a device, the more of these notifications you get, making you less likely to turn them off. After all, how well are you doing keeping your inbox clean? Oh what’s that? You get 25 emails a day, many of them from a company owned by William Sonoma?
Your work software veers between “shit” and “just okay,” and never really seems to get better, nor does any part seem to smoothly connect to another. Your organization juggles anywhere from five to fifteen different pieces of software — Slack or Microsoft Teams and/or Zoom for communication, Asana or Monday or Basecamp for project management, or Jira, or Trello, or any number of other different ways that your organization or team wants to plan things. When you connect with another organization, you find they’re using a different product, or perhaps they’re using the same one — say, Slack — and that one requires you to join their organization, which may or may not work. I’m not even talking about the innumerable amount of tech infrastructure products that more-technical workers have to deal with, or how much worse this gets if you’ve got a slower device. Every organization does things differently, and some don’t put a lot of thought into how they do so.
Yet beyond the endless digital nags there’s the need to be constantly aware of scams and outright misinformation, both on social networks that don’t really care to stop it and on the chum box advertisements below major news publications — you know, the little weird stories at the bottom promising miracle cures.
It’s easy to assume that it’s natural that you’d know there are entities out there trying to scam you or trick you, and I’d argue most people don’t. To most, a video from Rumble.com may as well be the same thing as a video from CNN.com, and most people would believe that every advertisement on every website is somehow verified for its accuracy, versus “sold at scale all the time to whoever will pay the money.”
And when I say that, I’m really talking about CNN.com, a website that had 594 million visitors in October 2024. At the bottom is the “Paid Partner Content” section, including things from publications ‘like “FinanceBuzz” that tell you about the “9 Dumbest Things Smart People Waste Money On.” FinanceBuzz immediately asks for you to turn your notifications on — you know, so it can ping you when it has new articles — and each bullet point leads to one of its affiliate marketing arms trying to sell you car insurance and credit cards. You’re offered the chance to share your email address to receive “vetted side hustles and proven ways to earn extra cash sent to your inbox,” which I assume includes things like advertorial content telling you that yes, you could make money playing online bingo (such as “Bingo Cash”) against other people.
Papaya Games, developer of Bingo Cash, was sued in March by rival gaming company Skillz for using bots in allegedly skill-based games that are supposed to be between humans, and the Michigan Gaming Control Board issued a cease-and-desist order against the company for violating multiple gaming laws, including the Lawful Internet Gaming Act. To quote the lawsuit, “Papaya’s games are not skill-based and users are often not playing against live, actual opponents but against Papaya’s own bots that direct and rig the game so that Papaya itself wins its users’ money while leading them to believe that they lost to a live human opponent.”
This is a website and its associated content that has prime placement on the front page of a major news outlet. As a normal person, it’s reasonable to believe that CNN would not willfully allow advertisements for websites that are, in and of themselves, further advertisements masquerading as trustworthy third party entities. It’s reasonable that you would believe that FinanceBuzz was a reputable website, and that its intentions were to share great deals and secret tricks with you. If you think you’re not this stupid, you are privileged and need to have more solidarity with your fellow human beings.
Why wouldn’t you think that the content on one of the most notable media outlets in the entire world is trustworthy? Why wouldn’t you trust that CNN, a respected media outlet, had vetted its advertisers and made sure their content wasn’t actively tricking its users? I think it’s fair to say that CNN has likely led to thousands of people being duped by questionable affiliate marketing companies, and likely profited from doing so.
Why wouldn’t people feel insane? Why wouldn’t the internet, where we’re mostly forced to live, drive most people crazy? How are we not discussing the fact that so much of the internet is riddled with poison? How are we not treating the current state of the tech industry like an industrial chemical accident? Is it because there are too many people at fault? Is it because fixing it would require us to truly interrogate the fabric of a capitalist death cult?
Nothing I am writing is polemic or pessimistic or describing anything other than the shit that’s happening in front of my eyes and your eyes and the eyes of billions of people. Dismissing these things as “just how it is” allows powerful people with no real plan and no real goals other than growth to thrive, and sneering at people “dumb enough” to get tricked by an internet and tech industry built specifically to trick them suggests you have no idea how you are being scammed, because you’re smug and arrogant.
I need you to stop trying to explain away how fucking offensive using the internet and technology has become. I need you to stop making excuses for the powerful and consider the sheer scale of the societal ratfucking happening on almost every single device in the world, and consider the ramifications of the difficulty that a human being using the internet has trying to live an honest, dignified and reasonable life.
To exist in modern society requires you to use these devices, or otherwise sacrifice large parts of how you’d interact with other people. You need a laptop or a smartphone for work, for school, for anything really. You need messaging apps otherwise you don’t exist. As a result, there is a societal monopoly of sorts — or perhaps it’s more of a cartel, in the sense that, for the most part, every tech company has accepted these extremely aggressive, anti-user positions, all in pursuit of growth.
The stakes are so much higher than anyone — especially the tech media — is willing to discuss. The extent of the damage, the pain, the frustration, the terror is so constant that we are all on some level numb to its effects, because discussing it requires accepting that the vast majority of people live poisoned digital lives.
We all live in the ruins created by the Rot Economy, where the only thing that matters is growth. Growth of revenue, growth of the business, growth of metrics related to the business, growth of engagement, of clicks, of time on app, of purchases of micro-transactions, of impressions of ads, of things done that make executives feel happy.
I’ll give you a more direct example.
On November 21, I purchased the bestselling laptop from Amazon — a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage (which is, and I’m simplifying here, though not by much, basically an SD card soldered to the computer’s motherboard). Affordable and under-powered, I’d consider this a fairly representative sample of how millions of people interact with the internet.
I believe it’s also a powerful illustration of the damage caused by the Rot Economy, and the abusive, exploitative way in which the tech industry treats people at scale.
It took 1 minute and 50 seconds from hitting the power button for the laptop to get to the setup screen. It took another minute and a half to connect and begin downloading updates, which took several more minutes. After that, I was faced with a licensing agreement where I agreed to binding arbitration to use Windows, a 24 second pause, and then got shown a screen of different “ways I could unlock my Microsoft experience,” with animations that shuddered and jerked violently.
Aside: These cheap laptops use a version of Windows called “WIndows Home in S Mode,” which is a paired-down version of Windows where you can only use apps installed from the Microsoft Store. Microsoft claims that it’s a “streamlined version” of Windows, but the reality is it’s a cheap version of Windows for Microsoft to compete with Google’s Chromebook laptops.
Now, why do I know that? Because you’ll never guess who’s a big fan of Windows S? That’s right, Prabhakar Raghavan, The Man Who Killed Google Search, who said that Microsoft’s Windows S “validated” Google’s approach to cheap laptops back when he was Vice President of Google’s G Suite (and three years before he became Head of Search).
To be clear, Windows Home in S Mode is one of the worst operating systems of all time. It is ugly, slow, and actively painful to use, and (unless you deactivate S Mode) locks you into Microsoft’s ecosystem. This man went on to ruin Google Search by the way. How does this man keep turning up? Is it because I say his name so much?
Throughout, the laptop’s cheap trackpad would miss every few clicks. At this point, I was forced to create a Microsoft account and to hand over my cellphone number — or another email address — to receive a code, or I wouldn’t be able to use the laptop. Each menu screen takes 3-5 seconds to load, and I’m asked to “customize my experience” with things like “personalized ads, tips and recommendations,” with every option turned on by default, then to sign up for another account, this time with Acer. At one point I am simply shown an ad for Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage product with a QR code to download it on my phone, and then I’m told that Windows has to download a few updates, which I assume are different to the last time it did that.
Aside: With a normal version of Windows, it’s possible — although not easy — to set up and use the computer without a Microsoft account. On S Mode, however, you’re restricted to downloading apps through the Microsoft Store (which, as you’ve guessed, requires a Microsoft account).In essence, it’s virtually impossible to use this machine without handing over your personal data to Microsoft.
It has taken, at this point, around 20 minutes to get to this screen. It takes another 33 minutes for the updates to finish, and then another minute and 57 seconds to log in, at which point it pops up with a screen telling me to “set up my browser and discover the best of Windows,” including “finding the apps I love from the Microsoft Store” and the option to “create an AI-generated theme for your browser.” The laptop constantly struggles as I scroll through pages, the screen juddering, apps taking several seconds to load.
When I opened the start bar — ostensibly a place where you have apps you’d use — I saw some things that felt familiar, like Outlook, an email client that is not actually installed and requires you to download it, and an option for travel website Booking.com, along with a link to LinkedIn. One app, ClipChamp, was installed but immediately needed to be updated, which did not work when I hit “update,” forcing me to go to find the updates page, which showed me at least 40 different apps called things like “SweetLabs Inc.” I have no idea what any of this stuff is.
I type “sweetlabs” into the search bar, and it jankily interrupts into a menu that takes up a third of the screen, with half of that dedicated to “Mark Twain’s birthday,” two Mark Twain-related links, a “quiz of the day,” and four different games available for download.
The computer pauses slightly every time I type a letter. Every animation shudders. Even moving windows around feels painful. It is clunky, slow, it feels cheap, and the operating system — previously something I’d considered to be “the thing that operates the computer system” — is actively rotten, strewn with ads, sponsored content, suggested apps, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user.
Another note: Windows in S Mode requires you to use Edge as your default browser and Bing as your default search engine. While you can download alternatives — like Firefox and Brave, though not Google Chrome, which was removed from the Microsoft Store in 2017 for unspecified terms of service violations — it’s clear that Microsoft wants you to spend as much time in its ecosystem as possible, where it can monetize you.
The reason I’m explaining this in such agonizing detail is that this experience is more indicative of the average person’s experience using a computer than anybody realizes. Though it’s tough to gauge how many of these things sold to make it a bestseller on Amazon, laptops in this pricepoint, with this specific version of Windows (Windows 11 Home in “S Mode” as discussed above), happen to dominate Amazon’s bestsellers along with Apple’s significantly-more-expensive MacBook Air and Pro series. It is reasonable to believe that a large amount of the laptops sold in America match this price point and spec — there are two similar ones on Best Buy’s bestsellers, and as of writing this sentence, multiple different laptops of this spec are on the front of Target’s laptop page.
And if I haven’t made it completely clear, this means that millions of people are likely using a laptop that’s burdensomely slow, and full of targeted advertisements and content baked into the operating system in a way that’s either impossible or difficult to remove. For millions of people — and it really could be tens of millions considering the ubiquity of these laptops in eCommerce stores alone — the experience of using the computer is both actively exploitative and incredibly slow. Even loading up MSN.com — the very first page you see when you open a web browser — immediately hits you with ads for eBay, QVC and QuickBooks, with icons that sometimes simply don’t load.
Every part of the operating system seems to be hounding you to use some sort of Microsoft product or some sort of product that Microsoft or the laptop manufacturer has been paid to make you see. While one can hope that the people buying these laptops have any awareness of anything, the reality is that they’re being dumped into a kind of TJ Maxx version of computing, except TJ Maxx clothes don’t sometimes scream at you to download TJ Maxx Plus or stop functioning because you used them too fast.
Again, this is how most people are experiencing modern computing, and it isn’t because this is big business — it’s because laptop sales have been falling for over a decade, and manufacturers (and Microsoft) need as many ways to grow revenue as possible, even if the choices they make are actively harmful to consumers.
Aside: I swear to god, if your answer here is “get a MacBook Air, they’re only $600,” I beg you — I plead with you — to speak with people outside of your income bracket at a time when an entire election was decided in part because everything’s more expensive.
At that point, said person using this laptop can now log onto the internet, and begin using websites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, all of which have algorithms we don’t really understand, but that have been regularly proven to be actively — and deliberately — manipulative and harmful.
Now, I know reading about “algorithms” and “manipulation” makes some people’s eyes glaze over, but I want you to take a simpler approach for a second. I hypothesize that most people do not really think about how they interact with stuff — they load up YouTube, they type something in, they watch it, and maybe they click whatever is recommended next. They may know there’s an algorithm of sorts, but they’re not really sitting there thinking “okay so they want me to see this,” or they may even be grateful that the algorithm gave them something they like, and reinforce the algorithm with their own biases, some of which they might have gotten from the algorithm.
To be clear, none of this is mind control or hypnosis or voodoo. These algorithms and their associated entities are not sitting there with some vast agenda to execute — the algorithms are built to keep you on the website, even if it upsets you, pisses you off, or misinforms you. Their incentive isn’t really to make you make any one choice, other than one that involves you staying on their platform or interacting with an advertisement for somebody else’s, and the heavy flow of political — and particularly conservative — content is a result of platforms knowing that’s what keeps people doing stuff on the platform. The algorithms are constantly adapting in real time to try and find something that you might spend time on, with little regard for whether that content is good, let alone good for you.
Putting aside any moral responsibility, the experiences on these apps are discordant. Facebook, as I’ve written about in detail, is a complete nightmare — thousands of people being actively conned in supposed “help groups,” millions of people being scammed every day (with one man killing himself as a result of organized crime’s presence on Facebook), and bizarre AI slop is dominating feeds with Mark Zuckerberg promising that there’s more to come. That’s without mentioning a product experience that continually interrupts you with sponsored and suggested content, as these platforms always do, all algorithmically curated to keep you scrolling, while also hiding content from the people you care about, because Facebook thinks it won’t keep you on the platform for as long.
The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person’s experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they’re immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like “WorldTrending.com” with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it’s an ad.
As their clunky, shuddering laptop hitches between every scroll, they go to ESPN.com, and the laptop slows to a crawl. Everything slows to a crawl. “God damnit, why is everything so fucking slow? I’ll just stay on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. At least that place doesn’t crash half the time or trick me.”
Using the computer in the modern age is so inherently hostile that it pushes us towards corporate authoritarians like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta — and now that every single website is so desperate for our email and to show us as many ads as possible, it’s either harmful or difficult for the average person to exist online.
The biggest trick that these platforms played wasn’t any one algorithm, but the convenience of a “clean” digital experience — or, at least as clean as they feel it needs to be. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if they’re engineered to manipulate you, even if the experience gets worse seemingly every year, because at least it isn’t as bad as the rest of the internet. We use Gmail because, well, at least it’s not Outlook. We use YouTube to view videos from other websites because other websites are far more prone to crash, have quality issues, or simply don’t work on mobile. We use Google Search, despite the fact that it barely works anymore, to find things because actually browsing the web fucking sucks.
When every single website needs to make as much money as possible because their private equity or hedge fund or massive corporate owners need to make more money every year without fail, the incentives of building the internet veer away from providing a service and toward putting you, the reader, in silent service of a corporation.
ESPN’s app is a fucking mess — autoplaying videos, discordantly-placed scores, menus that appear to have been designed by M.C. Escher — and nothing changes because Disney needs you to use the app and find what you need, versus provide information in anything approaching a sensible way. It needs your effort. The paid subscription model for dating apps is so aggressive that there’s a lawsuit filed against Match Group — which owns Tinder and Hinge, and thus a great deal of the market — for “gamifying the platforms to transform users into gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards,” likely as a means of recouping revenue after user numbers have begun to fall. And if you’re curious why these companies aren’t just making their products less horrible to use, I’m afraid that would reduce revenue, which is what they do care about.
If you’re wondering who else is okay with that, it’s Apple. Both Bumble and Tinder are regularly featured on the “Must-Have Apps” section of the App Store, most of which require a monthly fee to work. Each of these apps is run by a company with a “growth” team, and that team exists, on some level, to manipulate you — to move icons around so that you’ll interact with the things they want you to, see ads, or buy things. This is why HBO Max rebranded to Max and created an entirely new app experience — because the growth people said “if we do this in this way the people using it will do what we want.”
Now, what’s important to accept here is that absolutely none of this is done with any real consideration of the wider effects on the customer, as long as the customer continues doing the things that the company needs them to. We, as people, have been trained to accept a kind of digital transience — an inherent knowledge that things will change at random, that the changes may suck, and that we will just have to accept them because that’s how the computer works, and these companies work hard to suppress competition as a means of making sure they can do what they want.
In other words, internet users are perpetually thrown into a tornado of different corporate incentives, and the less economically stable or technologically savvy you are, the more likely you are to be at the mercy of them. Every experience is different, wants something, wants you to do something, and the less people know about why the more likely they are to — with good intentions — follow the paths laid out in front of them with little regard for what might be happening, in the same way people happily watch the same TV shows or listen to the same radio stations.
Even if you’re technologically savvy, you’re still dealing with these problems — fresh installs of Windows on new laptops, avoiding certain websites because you’ve learned what the dodgy ones look like, not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know what a spam bot looks like, and so on. It’s not that you’re immune. It’s that you’re instinctually ducking and weaving around an internet and digital ecosystem that continually tries to interrupt you, batting away pop-ups and silencing notifications knowing that they want something from you — and I need you to realize that most people are not like you and are actively victimized by the tech ecosystem.
As I said a few weeks ago, I believe that most people are continually harmed by their daily lives, as most people’s daily lives are on the computer or their smartphones, and those lives have been stripped of dignity. When they look to the media for clarity or validation, the best they’ll get is a degree of “hmm, maybe algorithm bad?” rather than a wholehearted acceptance that the state of our digital lives is obscene.
Yet it’s not just the algorithms — It’s the entirety of the digital ecosystem, from websites to apps to the devices we use every day. The fact that so many people likely use a laptop that is equal parts unfit for the task and stuffed full of growth hacked poison is utterly disgraceful, because it means that the only way to escape said poison is to simply have more money. Those who can’t afford $300 (at least) phones or $600 laptops are left to use offensively bad technology, and we have, at a societal scale, simply accepted that this is how things go.
Yet even on expensive devices you’re still the victim of algorithmic and growth-hacked manipulation, even if we’re aware of it. Knowing allows you to fight back, even if it’s just to stop yourself being overwhelmed by the mess, and means you can read things that can tell you what new horror we need to avoid next — but you are still the target, you are still receiving hundreds of marketing emails a week, you are still receiving spam calls, you are still unable to use Facebook or Instagram without being bombarded by ads and algorithmically-charged content.
I’ve written a lot about how the growth-at-all-costs mindset of The Rot Economy is what directly leads big tech companies to make their products worse, but what I’ve never really quantified is the scale of its damage.
Everything I’ve discussed around the chaos and pain of the web is a result of corporations and private equity firms buying media properties and immediately trying to make them grow, each in wildly different ways, all clamouring to be the next New York Times or Variety or other legacy media brand, despite those brands already existing, and the ideas for competing with them usually being built on unsustainably-large staffs and expensive consultants. Almost every single store you visit on the internet has a massive data layer on the background that feeds them data about what’s popular, or where they’re spending the most time on the site, and will in turn change things about their design to subtly encourage you to buy more stuff, all so that more money comes out, no matter the cost. Even if this data isn’t personalized, it’s still powerful, and turns so many experiences into subtle manipulations.
Every single weird thing that you’ve experienced with an app or service online is the dread hand of the Rot Economy — the gravitational pull of growth, the demands upon you, the user, to do something. And when everybody is trying to chase growth, nobody is thinking stability, and because everybody is trying to grow, everybody sort of copies everybody else’s ideas, which is why we see microtransactions and invasive ads and annoying tricks that all kind of feel the same in everything, though they’re all subtly different and customized just for that one app. It’s exhausting.
For a while, I’ve had the Rot Economy compared to Cory Doctorow’s (excellent) enshittification theory, and I think it’s a great time to compare (and separate) the two. To quote Cory in The Financial Times, Enshittification is “[his] theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it.” He describes the three stages of decline:
“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”
I agree with Cory on some levels, but I believe he gives far more credit to the platforms in question than they deserve, and sees far more intention or strategy than really exists. I fundamentally disagree about the business customers even being some elevated class in the equation — as we’ve seen with the Google Ads trial, Google didn’t really give a shit about its business customers to begin with, has always sought a monopoly, and made things worse for whoever it needed to as a means of increasing growth.
Perhaps that’s semantics. However, Cory’s theory lacks a real perpetrator beyond corporations that naturally say “alright we’re gonna do Enshittification now, watch this.” Where The Rot Economy separates is that growth is, in and of itself, the force that drives companies to enshittify. While enshittification neatly fits across companies like Spotify and Meta (and their ad-focused business models), it doesn’t really make sense when it comes to things where there isn’t a clear split between business customers and consumers, like Microsoft or Salesforce — because enshittification is ultimately one part of the larger Rot Economy, where everything must grow forever.
And I believe the phenomenon that captures both is a direct result of the work of men like Jack Welch and Milton Friedman. The Rot Economy is selfish and potently neoliberal — corporations are bowed down to like gods, and the powerful only seek more, at all times, at all costs, even if said cost is “the company might eventually die because we’ve burned out any value it actually has” or “people are harmed every time they pick up their phone.” The Rot Economy is neoliberalism’s true innovation: a kind of economic cancer that with few reasons to exist beyond “more” and few justifications beyond “if we don’t let it keep growing then everybody’s pensions blow up.”
To be clear, Cory is for the most part right. Enshittification successfully encapsulates how the modern web was destroyed in a way that nobody really has. I think it applies in a wide-ranging way to a wide range of tech companies and effects.
I, however, believe the wider problem is bigger, and the costs are far greater. It isn’t that “everything is enshittified.” It’s that everybody’s pursuit of growth has changed the incentive behind how we generate value in the world, and software enables a specific kind of growth-lust by creating virtual nation states with their own digital despots. While laws may stop Meta from tearing up people’s houses surrounding its offices on 1 Hacker Way, it can happily reroute traffic and engagement on Facebook and Instagram to make things an iota more profitable.
The Rot Economy isn’t simply growth-at-all-costs thinking — it’s a kind-of secular religion, something to believe in, that everything and anything can be more, should be more, must be more, that we are defined only by our pursuit of more growth, and that something that isn’t growing isn’t alive, and is in turn inferior.
No, perhaps not a religion. Religions are, for the most part, concerned with the hereafter, and contain an ethical dimension that says your present actions will affect your future — or your eternity. The Rot Economy is, by every metric, defined by its short-termism. I’m not just talking about undermining the long-term success of a business to juice immediate revenue numbers. I’m thinking in broad ecosystem terms.
The onslaught of AI-generated content — facilitated, in no small part, by Google and Microsoft — has polluted our information ecosystems. AI-generated images and machine-generated text is everywhere, and it’s impossible to avoid, as there is no reliable way to determine the provenance of a piece of content — with one exception, namely the considered scrutiny of a human. This has irreparably damaged the internet in ways I believe few fully understand. This stuff — websites that state falsehoods because an AI hallucinated, or fake pictures of mushrooms and dogs that now dominate Google Images — is not going away. Like microplastics or PFAS chemicals, they’re with us forever, constantly chipping away at our understanding of reality.
These companies unleashed generative AI on the world — or, in the case of Microsoft, facilitated its ascendency — without any consideration of what that would mean for the Internet as an ecosystem. Their concerns were purely short-term. Fiscal. The result? Over-leverage in an industry that has no real path to profitability, burning billions of dollars and the environment - both digital and otherwise - along with it.
I’m not saying that this is how everybody thinks, but I am convinced that everybody is burdened by The Rot Economy, and that digital ecosystems allow the poison of growth to find new and more destructive ways to dilute a human being to a series of numbers that can be made to grow or contract in the pursuit of capital.
Almost every corner of our lives has been turned into some sort of number, and increasing that number is important to us — bank account balances, sure, but also engagement numbers, followers, number of emails sent and received, open rates on newsletters, how many times something we’ve seen has been viewed, all numbers set by other people that we live our lives by while barely understanding what they mean. Human beings thrive on ways to define themselves, but metrics often rob us of our individuality. Products that boil us down to metrics are likely to fail to account for the true depth of anything they're capturing.
Sidenote: Here’s a good example: in an internal document I reviewed from 2017, a Facebook engineer revealed that engagement on the platform had started to dive, but because the company had focused so much energy on time spent on the app as a metric, nobody had noticed (and yes, that’s a quote). Years of changes — the consequences of which were felt by billions of people — were made not based on using the product or talking to users, but a series of numbers that nobody had bothered to check mattered.
The change in incentives toward driving more growth actively pushes out those with long-term thinking. It encourages hiring people who see growth as the driver of a company's success, and in turn investment, research and development into mechanisms for growth, which may sometimes be things that help you, but that isn't necessarily the reason they're doing it. Organisational culture and hiring stops prioritising people that fix customer problems, because that is neither the priority nor, sadly, how one makes a business continue to grow.
We are all pushed toward growth — personal growth, professional growth, growth in our network and our societal status — and the terms of this growth are often set by platforms and media outlets that are, in turn, pursuing growth. And as I've discussed, the way the terms of our growth is framed is almost entirely through a digital ecosystem of warring intents and different ways of pursuing growth — some ethical, many not.
Societal and cultural pressure is nothing new, but the ways we experience it are now elaborate and chaotic. Our relationships — professional, personal, and romantic — are processed through the funhouse mirror of the platforms, changing in ways both subtle and overt based on the signals we receive from the people we care about, each one twisted and processed through the lens of product managers and growth hackers. Changes to these platforms — even subtle ones — actively change the lives of billions of people, and it feels like we talk about it like being online is some hobbyist pursuit rather than something that many people do more than seeing real people in the real world.
I believe that we exist in a continual tension with the Rot Economy and the growth-at-all-costs mindset. I believe that the friction we feel on platforms and apps between what we want to do and what the app wants us to do is one of the most underdiscussed and significant cultural phenomena, where we, despite being customers, are continually berated and conned and swindled.
I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else. I realize it’s tough to conceptualize because it’s so ubiquitous, but how much do you fight with your computer or smartphone every day? How many times does something break? How many times have you downloaded an app and found it didn’t really do the thing you wanted it to? How many times have you wanted to do something simple and found that it’s actually really annoying?
How much of your life is dodging digital debris, avoiding scams, ads, apps that demand permissions, and endless menu options that bury the simple things that you’re actually trying to do?
You are the victim of a con. You have spent years of your life explaining to yourself and others that “this is just how things are,” accepting conditions that are inherently exploitative and abusive. You are more than likely not deficient, stupid, or “behind the times,” and even if you are, there shouldn’t be multi-billion dollar enterprises that monetize your ignorance.
And it’s time to start holding those responsible accountable.
I’m fairly regularly asked why this all matters to me so much, so as I wrap up the year, I’m going to try and answer that question, and explain why it is I do what I do.
I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I didn't have friends. I was insular, scared of the world, I felt ostracised and unnoticed, like I was out of place in humanity. The only place I found any kind of community — any kind of real identity — was being online. My life was (and is) defined by technology.
Had social networking not come along, I am not confident I’d have made many (if any) lasting friendships. For the first 25 or so years of my life, I struggled to make friends in the real world for a number of reasons, but made so many more online. I kept and nurtured friendships with people thousands of miles away, my physical shyness less of an issue when I could avoid the troublesome “hey I’m Ed” part that tripped me up so much.
Without the internet, I’d likely be a resentful hermit, disconnected from humanity, layers of scar tissue over whatever neurodivergence or unfortunate habits I'd gained from a childhood mostly spent alone.
Don't feel sorry for me. Technology has allowed me to thrive. I have a business, an upcoming book, this newsletter, and my podcast. I have so many wonderful, beautiful friends who I love that have come exclusively through technology of some sort, likely a social network or the result of a digital connection of some kind.
I am immensely grateful for everything I have, and grateful that technology allowed me to live a full and happy life. I imagine many of you feel the same way. Technology has found so many ways to make our lives better, perhaps more in some cases than others. I will never lie and say I don't love it.
However, the process of writing this newsletter and recording my podcast has made me intimately aware of the gratuitous, avaricious and intentional harm that the tech industry has caused to its customers, the horrifying and selfish decisions they’ve made, and the ruinous consequences that followed.
The things I have watched happen this year alone — which have been at times an enumeration of over a decade of rot — have turned my stomach, as has the outright cowardice of some people that claim to inform the public but choose instead to reinforce the structures of the powerful.
I am a user. I am a guy with a podcast and a newsletter, but I am behind the mic and the keyboard a person that uses the same services as you do, and I see the shit done to us, and I feel poison in my veins. I am not holding back, and neither should you. What is being done to us isn't just unfair — it's larcenous, cruel, exploitative and morally wrong.
Some may try to dismiss what I'm saying as "just social media" or "just how apps work" and if that's what you truly think, you're either a beaten dog or a willing (or unwilling) operative for the people running the con.
I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer, and the more I learn about both their intentions and actions the more certain I am that they are unrepentant and that their greed will never be sated. I have watched them take the things that made me human — social networking, digital communities, apps, and the other connecting fabric of our digital lives — and turned them into devices of torture, profitable mechanisms of abuse, and find it disgusting how many reporters seem to believe it's their responsibility to thank them and explain why it's good this is happening to their readers.
- Sam Altman is a con artist, a liar, and a sleazy carnival barker who would burn our planet to the ground, steal from millions of people and burn billions of dollars in pursuit of power, and I believe the same can be said of people like Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft.
- Tim Cook is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, slowly allowing the rot to seep into Apple’s products, slowly adding bothersome subscription products and useless AI features to chip away at the user experience. Apple’s app store and its repeated support of exploitative microtransaction-laden mobile games built to create gambling-like addiction in adults and children alike, making it billions of dollars a year. Because Apple’s products are less shitty, it gets a much easier time.
- Sundar Pichai is the Henry Kissinger of technology — a glossy executive that escapes blame despite having caused harm on a global scale. The destruction of Google Search at the hands of Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan should be written about like a war crime, and those responsible treated as such.
- Satya Nadella has aggressively expanded Microsoft’s various monopolies, the most egregious of which is the Microsoft 365 suite — a monopoly over business software that everybody kind of hates that Microsoft prices to undercut the competition, effectively setting the conditions of most business software as either “cheaper than Microsoft” or “slightly better than Microsoft.” Nadella has overseen layoffs of tens of thousands of people in the last three years alone, and despite his bullshit “growth mindset” culture treats his employees and customers as equally disposable.
- Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul that has overseen the growth and proliferation of some of the single-most abusive and manipulative software in the world. Meta has grown to a market cap of $1.5 trillion dollars by intentionally making the experience on Instagram and Facebook worse, intentionally frustrating and harming billions of people.
These are the people in charge. These are the people running the tech industry. These are the people who make decisions that affect billions of people every minute of every day, and their decisionmaking is so flagrantly selfish and abusive that I am regularly astonished by how little criticism they receive.
These men lace our digital lives with asbestos and get told they’re geniuses for doing so because money comes out.
I don’t know — or care — whether these men know who I am or read my work, because I only care that you do.
I don't give a shit if Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg knows my name. I don't care about any of their riches or their supposed achievements, I care that when given so many resources and opportunities to change the world they chose to make it worse. These men are tantamount to war criminals, except in 30 years Mark Zuckerberg may still be seen as a success — though I will spend the rest of my life telling you the damage he's caused.
I care about you. The user. The person reading this. The person that may have felt stupid, or deficient, or ignorant, all because the services you pay for or that monetize you have been intentionally rigged against you.
You aren't the failure. The services, the devices, and the executives are.
If you cannot see the significance of the problems I discuss every week, the sheer scale of the rot, the sheer damage caused by unregulated and unrepentant managerial parasites, you are living in a fantasy world and I both envy and worry for you. You're the frog in the pot, and trust me, the stove is on.
2025 will be a year of chaos, fear and a deficit of hope, but I will spend every breath I have telling you what I believe and telling you that I care, and you are not alone.
For years, I’ve watched the destruction of the services and the mechanisms that were responsible for allowing me to have a normal life, to thrive, to be able to speak with a voice that was truly mine. I’ve watched them burn, or worse, turned into abominable growth vehicles for men disconnected from society and humanity. I owe my life to an internet I've watched turned into multiple abuse factories worth multiple trillions of dollars and the people responsible get gladhandled and applauded.
I will scream at them until my dying fucking breath. I have had a blessed life, and I am lucky that I wasn't born even a year earlier or later, but the way I have grown up and seen things change has allowed me to fully comprehend how much damage is being done today, and how much worse is to come if we don't hold these people accountable. The least they deserve is a spoken or written record of their sins, and the least you deserve is to be reminded that you are the victim.
I don't think you realise how powerful it is being armed with knowledge — the clarity of what's being done to and why, and the names of the people responsible. This is an invisible war — and a series of invisible war crimes — perpetuated against billions of people in a trillion different ways every minute of every day, and it's everywhere, a constant in our lives, which makes enumerating and conceptualising it difficult.
But you can help.
You talking about the truth behind generative AI, or the harms of Facebook, or the gratuitous destruction of Google Search will change things, because these people are unprepared for a public that knows both what they’ve done and their sickening, loathsome, selfish and greedy intentions.
I realize this isn’t particularly satisfying to some, because you want big ideas, big changes that can be made. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know how to fix things. To quote Howard Beale in the movie Network, I don’t want you to write your Congressman because I don’t know what to tell you to write.
But what I can tell you is that you can live your life with a greater understanding of the incentives of those who control the internet and have made your digital lives worse as a means of making themselves rich. I can tell you to live with more empathy, understanding and clarity into the reasons that people around you might be angry at their circumstances, as even those unrelated to technology are made worse by exploitative, abusive and pernicious digital manipulation.
This is a moment of solidarity, as we are all harmed by the Rot Economy. We are all victims. It takes true opulence to escape it, and I'm guessing you don't have it. I certainly don't. But talking about it — refusing to go quietly, refusing to slurp down the slop willingly or pleasantly — is enough. The conversations are getting louder. The anger is getting too hard to ignore. These companies will be forced to change through public pressure and the knowledge of their deeds.
Holding these people to a higher standard at scale is what brings about change. Be the wrench in the machine. Be the person that explains to a friend why Facebook sucks now, and who chose to make it suck. Be the person to explain who Prabhakar Raghavan is and what his role was in making Google Search worse. Be the person who tells people that Sam Altman burns $5 billion a year on unsustainable software that destroys the environment and is built upon the large-scale larceny of creative works because he's desperate for power.
Every time you do this, you destabilise them. They have succeeded in a decades-long marketing campaign where they get called geniuses for making the things that are necessary to function in society worse. You can change that.
I don't even care if you cite me. Just tell them. Tell everybody. Spread the word. Say what they've done and say their names, say their names again and again and again so that it becomes a contagion. They have twisted and broken and hyper-monetised everything — how you make friends, fall in love, how you bank, how you listen to music, how you find information. Never let their names be spoken without disgust. Be the sandpaper in their veins and the graffiti on their legacies.
The forces I criticize see no beauty in human beings. They do not see us as remarkable things that generate ideas both stupid and incredible, they do not see talent or creativity as something that is innately human, but a commodity to be condensed and monetized and replicated so that they ultimately own whatever value we have, which is the kind of thing you’d only believe was possible (or want) if you were fully removed from the human race.
You deserve better than they’ve given you. You deserve better than I’ve given you, which is why I’m going to work even harder in 2025. Thank you, as ever, for your time.
