Soundtrack: Bad Religion — The Resist Stance
A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world — watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every corner of our digital lives. My core frustration isn't just how shitty things have gotten, but how said shittiness has become so profitable for so many companies.
Meta made $20.8 billion dollars of profit in its last reported quarterly earnings off the back of products that are bordering on non-functional, Microsoft made $24.11 billion in profit with an increasingly-deteriorating series of productivity products and cloud-based solutions that its customers hate, and Google made $26.5 billion in profit from multiple monopolies and making its core search product worse as a means of increasing the amount of times that people search for stuff.
The business of making our shit worse to increase revenue growth year-over-year is booming. The products you use every day are more confusing and frustrating to use because everything must grow, which means that product decisions are now driven, in many cases, by companies trying to make you do something rather than do something for you, which in turn means that basic product quality — things like "usability" or "functionality" — are secondary considerations.
It’s why your Facebook newsfeed doesn’t show you posts from friends and family, but is happy to bombard you with AI-generated images of weirdly shiny-faced old people celebrating their birthday alone, replete with a heartstring-tugging caption. It’s why whenever you search for something — not just on Google, but anywhere — the keywords you provide aren’t treated as an explicit instruction of something you want to see, but randomly disregarded with no rhyme or reason.
We do not "use" the computer — we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do, because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user.
Too often when you open an app you start bargaining with the company behind it — like a popup from Dropbox saying you could save money switching to an annual plan, securing annual recurring revenue and locking you into something it hopes you'll forget. Tech companies have the perseverance and desperate hunger for your money of a timeshare salesman, and they’re not sorry.
And that’s assuming it even loads. We’re all familiar with the tense moment where you open Microsoft Teams and hope that it doesn't crash, or that your audio or video works. We live in a constant state of digital micro-aggressions, and as I wrote last year, it's everywhere — banking apps that now have "helpful assistants" that get in the way of, well, banking, pop-ups during online shopping that promise discounts in exchange for our emails and phone numbers so they can spam us, notifications from apps that are built to push us to interact further rather (like Instagram's "someone just posted a comment on someone else's post" notifications), or the emails we get from Amazon about an order shipping that don't include any of the actual information about the purchase — a product decision allegedly made to stop Google from scraping your emails and selling that info to other parties, which is Amazon's business, not Google's.
Yet my — and I'd imagine your — frustration isn't borne of a hatred of technology, or a dislike of the internet, or a lack of appreciation of what it can do, but the sense that all of this was once better, and that these companies have turned impeding our use of the computer into an incredibly profitable business.
So much of the pushback I get in my work — and the pushback I've seen toward others — is that I "hate" technology, when I'd like argue that my profound disgust is borne of a great love of technology, and a deep awareness of the positive effects it's had on my life. I do not turn on my computer every day wanting to be annoyed, and I don't imagine any of you do either. We're not logging onto whatever social networks we're on because we are ready to be pissed off. If anything, we'd love to be delighted by the people we chose to connect with and the content we consume, and want to simply go about our business without a litany of microaggressions created by growth-desperation and a lack of responsibility toward the user.
Technology has, in many ways, stopped being about "using technology to help people do things," or at the very least "help the user do something that they want to do." Software has, as Marc Andreessen said it would in 2011, eaten the world, and has done so in the nakedly-cynical and usurious way that he wanted it to, prioritizing the invasion of our lives through prioritizing growth — and the collection of as much data as possible on the user — over any particular utility or purpose. Andreessen and his ilk saw (and see) software not as a thing that provides value, but as a means for the tech industry to penetrate and "disrupt" as many industries as possible, pushing legacy providers to "transform themselves into software companies" rather than using software to make their products better, describing Pixar — the studio that made movies like Toy Story and Inside Out that was acquired by Disney in 2006 — as a software company rather than a company that makes something using software.
I realize this sounds like semantics, but let me put it another way: software has, for the tech industry, become far more about extracting economic value than it has in providing it. When the tech industry becomes focused on penetrating markets (to quote Andreessen, "software companies...[taking] over large swathes of the economy") there's little consideration of whether said software is prioritizing the solution to a problem.
Nowhere is this more obvious than the software we use in our professional lives. Microsoft Teams is one of the single worst products I've ever used, because Microsoft's goal isn't to make it easy to have digital meetings, but to make a product good enough and cheap enough to make it easier for your boss to buy the entire Microsoft 365 Suite, even if most of the parts of said suite kind of suck.
Here's another great example: Google Drive. Google Drive is absolutely fucking awful. The people responsible for designing Google Drive's user interface should be made to explain themselves before a judge. Why can’t you sort files by size? Why does it only show image and video thumbnails when viewing a folder in a grid layout? Why, when you attempt to move a file to a folder, are the suggested folders — literally the first window you see — always, without fail, wrong?
The proliferation of software throughout society has been led by the stewards of the Rot Economy, as software — along with its associated managed services — can effectively proliferate infinitely, and can take advantage of how many corporations are run by management consultants (and filled with middle managers) that don't do any real work or have any true connections to the problems they solve.
When your goal is "winning the market," you're not necessarily optimizing for having a great product, or even happy customers. Selling software to a big company doesn't require you to speak to everybody who might use it. You're selling hundreds or thousands of seats (users who might access the product) to management in the gestalt, because let's be honest, your manager or their manager isn't really using any of this stuff, they just want to see that it looks like it works well enough, fits within their budget, and makes them feel good inside. The people leading the charge in the tech industry — Andreessen Horowitz has been one of the biggest and most influential players in Silicon Valley history — have never seen its primary purpose as the creation of value for anybody other than the people selling it.
This manifests in the rest of your daily lives in far simpler ways:
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.
All of these annoying little examples are inherently hostile toward the user, and they're a direct result of a tech industry oriented around growth driven by the pernicious and aggressive poison of growth-focused software. The Rot Economy has changed the incentives of everything you see and do on the computer — the websites you read that inexplicably recommend laptops that are actively painful to use because of the affiliate revenue they drive to the website (with this intent driven by management rather than the writers themselves), Instagram swapping the location of your notification and message buttons, discounts on stores that require both your email and phone number, social networks that put things in the way of you trying to find the people and things you actually log on to see — all ways in which software is used to extract from, trick you mislead and control you.
Let me give you a current example. Riverside makes arguably the easiest-to-use podcasting software — it works in a browser, it records reliably, it's easy to invite people — but inexplicably moves buttons around every once in a while. It used to be that I could just hit the "plus" button to make a new recording, but now I have to, for no reason, scroll down a list of already-existing studios (which is what they call recordings) that are completely out of order and hit "new studio." On hitting that button, nothing appears to happen because Riverside's new UI wants you to hit "plan," "record," "upload" or "edit," the latter of which allows it to sell its higher-priced subscriptions.
Riverside has changed this interface at least twice in the last year. Another cool thing that it does is if you want to download all of the audio files from an episode, you have to hit "export only," which brings you to an extremely awkward-to-use user interface full of other buttons. For some reason, if you hit the "download cloud" button, it'll download a video of the entire session immediately.
Nothing in Riverside is organized logically. "Projects" are meant to be, I assume, where you can group recordings, except you do not appear to be able to move things into them, and on creating a "Project" you have to create — by scheduling or recording — something inside it as a means of saving it. "Studios" are, it seems, where you record stuff. You can no longer, as a result of recent UI changes, see a full list of studios. You have to scroll through them. A logical way would be to have "projects" that have within them distinct recording sessions, and a drag-and-drop interface.
Riverside is widely respected as "the best" podcast software. I pay for it not because it's good — I regularly find it genuinely, upsettingly annoying to use — but because services like Zencaster and Squadcast are markedly worse. Riverside has also aggressively been upselling customers on its AI services in a way that I find disgusting.
To be quite blunt: I think any podcasting recording company with a bit of money that actually gave a fuck could steamroll basically anyone, including Riverside. As a paying customer, I believe that Riverside needs real competition.
What's frustrating is that it’s actually got the technological side down. Recording audio and video is great. Sadly, due to a combination of business incentives and a complete disconnection from its customer, Riverside has begun to rot. No, I have not reached out to them, because these problems are never actually fixed by people emailing in feedback — they're fixed through public pressure.
It's offensive to me that a company would so thoroughly succeed at beating a technical challenge — being able to record multiple audio sources cleanly and easily with a simple web interface — then wrap it in such awful design. This is the result of a lack of true competition in this industry, or executives disconnected from their users.
If you have other experiences with other software platforms like this, please email me at ez@betteroffline.com. I'd love to hear them. It's time to hold these companies accountable.
Note, when I say "control" I don't mean that these companies have the ability to subconsciously manipulate you and your desires, so much as they have spent decades finding new ways to gaslight and bully you into doing things they'd like. Everybody knows that Instagram sucks, and it sucks because there's things that you actually want to do on Instagram that Meta has hidden behind hundreds of little user interface changes optimized to increase your time on the app and thus the amount of money you make them.
Sidebar: Have you ever tried to search for something on Instagram? You can’t just type the words that you want to see in a caption. It only allows you to search for certain phrases (and it’s not clear what makes a phrase acceptable or not). You can have two queries, each with the same words but arranged in a slightly different order, and Instagram will let you search for one and not the other.
And the posts you’ll see will contain only some of the keywords (making them irrelevant). The other day I searched for the name of an event with the word “live,” hoping to see whether someone had livestreamed it. Instead, I got hundreds of posts that just had the word “live” in.
Even if you get semi-relevant results, they won’t be organized in any particular coherent fashion. You’ll see content from recent weeks mixed in with stuff from over a decade ago. And you can’t even search for recent posts using a hashtag — Instagram removed that feature a couple of years ago, and no amount of caterwauling from users has persuaded it to reverse course.
Everybody knows that Google Search sucks because it’s optimized to to provide results that make the company more money, but we use it because, well, the web is a huge place and Search, while broken, provides enough of a service that it's useful, to the point that we'll push through the bullshit to get to the thing that we want.
To quote Connor O'Malley, "the computer's bullshit, it's fucking sick, it's not cool anymore, it's not fun anymore...they've changed everything about it, it used to be so cool!"
Google Search was, at one point, extremely cool — something that used to give users a sense of peace and control over an internet that had grown so vast that it was hard to fully grasp, and even once felt like a place you'd go to find a quality result. Facebook was instrumental in me building my life in America when I moved in 2008, both in connecting with people I went to college with at Penn State and operating as a kind of digital address book where people (crazy, I know) used to post updates about their life and pictures of things that they were doing. Once upon a time, Apple's App Store had actual quality standards, both for the apps themselves and the services they sold, which made downloading a new app feel exciting because your first popup wasn't for some sort of monthly subscription product.
I am romanticizing things a little. Capitalism is capitalism, these companies were still worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and evil incentives still existed (see: Microsoft and its historic monopoly over operating systems). Nevertheless, the experience of using hardware and software felt less exploitative, or more simply-put, the stuff we used felt more like they worked.
The reason I'm so onerously explaining this is that I do not believe the majority of people hate technology, but what the technology industry has become in search of growth. In fact, I'd argue that deep down, many people love technology — we love that we can instantly connect to friends using little computers in our pockets, or that we can share photos or videos with effectively anyone with an internet connection. As "one of big tech's angriest critics," I must confess I absolutely love what I can do with the computer, as deep down I'm a brokenhearted romantic that can see, beneath all the slop, growth and bullshit are many, many things I truly, deeply love.
I love that I can write a newsletter and share it with my editor thousands of miles away, and that we can work on an idea or sentence in real-time, despite an entire landmass and an ocean separating us. I love that I can run a business online from anywhere with a stable internet connection, and I love that during work I can also quickly and easily catch up with my friends wherever they are. Beneath the bullshit of Google Search lies the ability to research decades of journalism and academia, and my fury and disgust comes from seeing such a great product get mangled by the incentives of freaks like Prabhakar Raghavan and Sundar Pichai.
Sidebar: None of this is to say that these companies were ever perfect, or even good, or even that they had good intentions, nor is any of this any attempt to cheerlead for them. This is not a shift toward me being more "fair," either, which is often a euphemism for waving away the obvious wrongs of a company or a person out of a misguided sense of politeness.
As much as I may like any given product, these companies are providing a service as a means of making money. I am — as you are — a customer, and the fact that so many of them are making so much more money as they make these products manifestly worse fills my veins full of poison.
The problem is that we, as a society, still act like technology is some distinct thing separate from our real lives, and that in turn “technology” is some sort of hobbyist pursuit. Mainstream media outlets have a technology section, with technology reporters that are hired to cover “the technology industry,” optimizing not for any understanding or experience in using technology, but 30,000 foot view of “what the computer people are doing.”
This may have made more sense 20 years ago — though I’d add that back in 2008 you had multiple national newspapers with technology columnists, and computers were already an integral part of our working and personal lives — but in the year 2025 is a fundamental failure of modern media. Every single person you meet in every single part of your life likely interfaces with technology as much as if not more than they do with other people in the real world, and the technology coverage they read in their newspaper or online doesn’t represent that. It’s why a relatively modest software update for Android or Windows earns vastly more column inches than the fact that Google, a product that we all use, doesn’t really work anymore.
As a result, it’s worth considering that billions of people actually really like what technology does for them, and in turn are extremely frustrated with what technology does to them.
The problem is that modern tech media has become oriented around companies and trends rather than the actual experience of a person living in reality. Generative AI would never have been any kind of “movement” or “industry” if the media had approached it from the perspective of a consumer and said “okay, sure, but what does this actually do?” and the same goes for both the metaverse and cryptocurrency.
Rather than fold their arms and demand our tech overlords prove themselves, the media decided that they would be the ones that would prove it for them, describing ChatGPT as a “revolution” without really expressing why, parroting narratives driven by massive corporations or corporate interests and tutting at those who would disagree. There were multiple other companies doing exactly what GPT-3 did months before ChatGPT launched. It only caught fire because the media insisted it did so. To this day I still can’t find a single journalist who has a cogent explanation as to why ChatGPT is big, other than the fact that lots of people use it.
The problem, I believe, is that the tech media has become poisoned by a mixture of ignorance and cynical optimism where the narratives are driven not by any particular interest or domain expertise, but by whatever they believe the market (or the powerful people they admire) would like it to be.
I know for a fact that the senior editorial staff handling technology at multiple major mainstream publications do not really care about, understand or have any real interest in tech other than a vague attachment to the idea that it’s “important, somehow.” As a result, mainstream tech coverage is focused on market effects (like artificial intelligence, or whatever other “thing” everybody wants to read about) rather than directing coverage from the perspective of “what things are happening to people in real life as a result of technology.”
I also think that the tech media has been infiltrated and controlled by people that want to be famous or associated with famous people. They want them to win. They want a benevolent dictator. They want their products to do well so that they can get the interview with the big-name founder or CEO on stage at a conference. They want access to them for interviews, and they want to make sure they get the first look at their next product release. While one might argue that “people want to hear about AI,” what people want to hear about is largely driven by the narratives the media agrees upon.
The people parroting these narratives — much like the executives they admire — do not find any joy in technology at all, nor do they experience (or care about) the problems that technology might solve for a real person. While I don’t care whether a regular person has any enthusiasm or domain expertise, I believe that anyone working in the tech media should have genuine interest in the technology itself, actual domain expertise, actually fucking use the products they’re writing about and have the ability to say “okay, for a regular person, does this actually fucking matter?”
Because I’d argue that technology really really matters to just about everybody. The things that actually rock about technology — global connectivity, quality-of-life things like Chromecast and Apple Pay, fast and portable laptops that allow us to do things wherever we want to — are things that billions of people enjoy, and in turn billions of people are frustrated and hurt and abused by technology when the harms I described earlier are perpetuated at scale.
The tech media continually acts without context or conscience, or with any kind of appreciation of how much worse things have got. While I understand that it’s hard to break editorial direction at a major newspaper, any coverage of Facebook should, by rights, cover the fact that Facebook is fucking broken and has been for years, and has never made more money than it does today, because that is, in and of itself, extremely horrifying. Any discussion of ChatGPT should add that it lacks any real killer app and burns billions of dollars a year, and, I dunno, discuss how this thing doesn’t really have any real use cases? And never did? Why did we fucking hype this exactly? What is going on?
These, by the way, are the questions I get from readers and listeners every single day. Regular people — people that work outside of the tech industry, teachers, writers, artists, authors, academics, and so on — have been asking what the fuck any of this was since the beginning, and the fact they’re still asking is a damning indictment of the tech media writ large.
Worse still, regular people are also furious at the state of software, and are fully aware that they’re being conned. The tech media continually frames the “growing distrust” of the tech industry as some result of political or social change or a cumulation of scandals, rather than the big, unspoken scandal called “how the tech industry made things worse in the pursuit of growth,” and the greater scandal of exactly how much contempt tech regularly treats their customers with.
And more importantly, regular people feel like they’re being gaslit by the tech media. I am regularly told that people are glad to have *someone* say simple things like “hey the apps you use that feel like they’re fucking with you? They are actually doing that!” with regularity. The feedback I regularly receive is that there are too many articles about technology that seem fundamentally disconnected from reality, or at the very least disconnected from the people at the receiving end of the product.
The modern "Techlash" narrative has been the sole focus on big, meaty problems like Meta's Cambridge Analytica scandal while ignoring the gradual destruction of the products we use every day. In the space of a decade, Google made its ads look near-identical to regular search results, and only a few websites (like Search Engine Land) seemed to take that — and the other changes made to the algorithm of one of the single most important sources of information in the world — seriously.
The fact that I, a part-time blogger with a podcast that runs a PR firm during his day, was the one to uncover and discuss how the ads team made Google Search worse for money nine months after the associated emails were made public is a glaring example of the misalignment of tech media with what actually effects people on a daily basis.
Let me give you another example. NVIDIA — arguably one of the single-most-covered tech companies of the last year — effectively lied about the launch of its RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards, doing a "paper launch" where stores like Microcenter received as few as 233 RTX 5090 graphics cards nationwide. While NVIDIA did warn of "stock shortages," it's laughable to even call this a launch — and I'd argue that the tech media has...well...no interest in covering it, despite this being a very, very significant story about how NVIDIA is misleading people about its consumer and prosumer graphics cards (which make up billions of dollars of revenue and a large percentage of NVIDIA's revenue), and does not appear to be able to deliver them on time.
These events hit millions of consumers in a tangible way. NVIDIA, despite all its financial success selling AI chips to companies like Microsoft and Amazon, appears to be spurning one of its core customer bases, and the response from the consumer tech media has been tepid, despite the fact that PC gaming revenue is comparable in size to console gaming ($43.2 billion in 2024 compared to the $51.9 billion that console gaming brought in according to research from NewZoo, with PC gaming growing 4% year-over-year compared to a 1% contraction in console revenue).
Worse still, NVIDIA's 5080 graphics card sucks and "represents how NVIDIA is treating PC gamers in 2025" according to Paul's Hardware, who skewered NVIDIA for slowly reducing the amount of performance gains you'll get out of mid-range cards like the 5080 — a cynical attempt to make it so that anyone looking for a "real" upgrade has to spend $2000 on a 5090, which they also can't seem to find.
This is significant, akin to Apple slowly (over the course of years) reducing the efficiency and performance of the regular iPhone in a hope to juice sales of the iPhone Pro. Which it also kinda did.
Yet the only people taking stories like these seriously appear to be video creators like Paul’s Hardware (1.5 million subscribers) and Gamers Nexus (2.4 million subscribers), who time and time again have taken on stories — like gaming PC builder NZXT creating a “PC rental program” that actively conned consumers with rates worse than a pay day loan company — to protect consumers from active harm as the mainstream media chases their tails about whatever half-broken bullshit OpenAI is slinging this week.
NVIDIA, a company discussed by what feels like every single business and tech outlet, has a documented pattern of misleading and short-changing customers. Why isn’t this everywhere? It’s almost as if the only reason that anyone is talking about NVIDIA is that there’s a herd-mentality in what stories are “important” to the modern media, rather than any kind of relationship to the effects that these companies might have on actual consumers.
The mainstream media — especially when it comes to technology — doesn’t seem capable (or willing) to discuss the real, tangible, obvious problems with the modern tech ecosystem, instead choosing to attack things piecemeal or blandly report “news” with as little context as necessary.
Look, people are pissed off at the tech industry because the tech industry is actively pissing them off. They are getting less value from the products they pay for, and they’re aware that the free products they use are getting worse as a means of making them more profitable. Stories about “distrust in big tech” continually fail to talk about the simplest problems — Facebook sucks, Instagram sucks, our apps suck, everything feels like it’s built to subtly fuck with us, and this is a problem that affects billions of people discussed so rarely that I’m considered “creative” for writing 1000 words about the literal experience of using a shitty laptop.
Sidebar: Let me give you a live fucking example! I just typed “ltieral” instead of literal. Google Docs underlined it in red to suggest there’s a typo, only to say “this word is potentially misspelled. If not misspelled, you can turn off correcting this word using the menu.” When I clicked to see why it wouldn’t suggest a correction, I was sent to this page, which does not explain. However, I was able to click “spelling and grammar check,” which brought up another menu, which says “unknown word ltieral.” I also was not able to exit the spelling and grammar checker popup — the “X” button didn’t work — which meant I had to refresh my browser. It’s unclear why autocorrect no longer properly functions in Google Docs, but I’d measure this problem affects millions of people. COOL!
These problems are everywhere! They’re everywhere, and they are real, meaningful stories, ones that are more important than Anthropic’s Dario Amodei farting into a microphone about how AI will be smarter than humans at some point! Regular people are not pissed off at big tech for any complex multi-faceted series of events that made them furrow their brows with concern — the shit they pay for sucks, the shit they trade their data for sucks, the products are broken or in the process of actively breaking, and when consumers look to these companies they’re told “yeah well, what if we added some generative AI bullshit?”
I’ll give you ANOTHER example.
The App Store is a complete mess. On loading it up, the first ad I receive is for Truth Social, followed by “popular iPhone apps” including Bumble (microtransaction-heavy dating app), Paramount+, Zoom, Max, Amazon Prime Video, and Tinder (another microtransaction-heavy dating app), followed by a microtransaction-heavy mobile game (Madden NFL 25 Mobile Football), followed by another microtransaction-heavy mobile game (Clash of Clans), followed by yet another microtransaction-heavy mobile game (Archero), followed by “Helpful Apps for Every Day,” which included Strava (a fitness app), Letterboxd (a social network for people to review movies), StoryGraph (an app for tracking books you’ve read), Peanut (an app for mothers to connect to each other), some sort of app for "discovering IRL plans near you” (“Pie”) and Partiful, an app for planning parties, immediately followed by an ad for Apple’s own “Apple Invites” app that specifically competes with them.
The next carousel is for “10 Great Dating Apps,” the first of which is OkCupid, a dating app with a 1 out of 5 star rating on TrustPilot, with the first review saying that “everything is designed to force you into paying, but even when you do, you quickly realize it’s not worth it.” OkCupid is owned by the publicly-traded Match group, which also owns three of the other apps on the list (Hinge, Tinder and Plenty of Fish).
The reason I’m agonizingly breaking down these problems is because — much like I wrote about in Never Forgive Them — I believe that the problems of the modern tech industry are far simpler and more pervasive than the media will face. Apple’s App Store — a trillion-dollar marketplace where Apple takes a 30% cut of almost every buck a developer makes — actively promotes and profits off of exploitative free-to-play mobile games that academics believe rob consumers of their right to self-determination and an online dating industry that has adopted these very same ideas to turn romance into, well, its own kind of free-to-play game. The App Store largely promotes apps (and their associated features) from public companies with billions or trillions of dollars in market capitalization, and much like Google Search only functions to bring you results that are convenient for Google, Apple no longer highlights apps based on anything other than a thousand shadowy partnerships and profit incentives.
This is the way that tens if not hundreds of millions of people are introduced to software, and the software they’re introduced to is inherently exploitative. It’s like if every Kroger store sold bread that cost an extra $3 if you wanted to cut it into slices, or bacon that required a subscription to BaconPlus+ if you kept it in the fridge for longer than two days. I’m not even being facetious, this is the actual scale of the actual harms being done against actual consumers by a company with a market capitalization of $3.5 trillion dollars.
When somebody buys a new phone, they are not thinking like me, or you, or someone else deeply aware of the incentives behind these companies. They blindly — because nobody really explains this shit or takes it seriously — download whatever apps they see promoted by Apple. Consumers trust Apple, and as a result trust the companies that Apple chooses to promote, at which point whatever malevolent mechanisms these companies use are more effective because consumers believe that Apple, a company with a multi-trillion dollar market cap, wouldn’t allow nakedly exploitative apps onto their phones. Apple could very easily use its unilateral control over the entire App Store to prevent these companies from existing, or at least choose not to promote them. Instead, it chooses to both ensure and profit from their success by putting them in front of millions of consumers a day.
While microtransactions aren’t inherently evil, when unrestrained they naturally lead to evil outcomes. Modern dating apps effectively require users to buy both a monthly subscription and piecemeal “items” that make your message or profile more prominent in the app. Mobile gaming — an industry that makes tens of billions of dollars of yearly revenue — has become dominated by “free-to-play” games that really require you to spend money to progress, using deceptive psychological techniques to push users into spending money in small amounts that naturally add up to much more than they’d spend on a regular game. I hammer on both of these so hard because they make up the majority of the promoted content on Apple’s App Store.
To be abundantly clear, Apple had (and has) the power to kill any of these industries, or at least vastly limit their harms. Apple controls every single thing that goes on the App Store, and could very easily make dark patterns that manipulate consumers (which are in the majority of subscription apps) against the rules, and penalize apps that predominantly monetize using microtransactions. It could take a stand against companies that combine microtransactions with lootboxes — essentially, in-game content where you don’t know what you’re buying ahead of time, with the content largely determined by chance — which is a way of introducing kids to the horrors of gambling addiction.
You are what you allow, and Apple allows companies to make money by actively abusing and manipulating their customers. It does so both by allowing these companies to make money in this way and actively promoting their apps to users, making tens of billions of dollars a year in the process.
One could argue that it’s the companies choosing to make these decisions, but the scale at which Apple operates means that it’s effectively a kind of government, and any government regulation controls the kinds of products and services that can be offered to a consumer. Apple’s App Store is a kleptocracy where sleazy companies like The Match Group (Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid) and SuperCell (Clash of Clans) provide billions of dollars in app store fees by tricking and hurting customers. Apple, through sheer scale, dictates how the economics of apps (and consumer purchasing at large to an extent) operate, and its decision has been to let a thousand poisonous flowers bloom.
This, I’d argue, is one of the largest-scale consumer harms in existence. Apple has perpetuated and profited off of economics that are harmful, manipulative and cruel, and will continue to do so unless meaningful regulation or media pressure makes them do otherwise.
The latter would require the media to actually discuss this problem. I can find no major media outlet that has run anything even close to an evaluation of the state of the modern app store, nor can I find any condemnation of the very obvious harms perpetuated by Apple or Google with their app stores outside of the lawsuit between Epic and Apple, which wasn’t so much about the harms themselves, but the extent to which Apple profited from them.
Similarly, there’s comparatively little coverage of the destruction of Google Search or the horrifying state of Facebook and Instagram. While outlets have had dalliances with the collapse of Search — Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic was earlier than most, myself included — these are usually one-and-done features, a momentary “hmm!” in the slop of breaking news and hot takes, if these stories even happen at all. You might argue that one cannot simply write these stories again and again, to which I say “skill issue.” The destruction of products core to the fabric of society is important and should be in the news constantly, in the same way that news outlets happily report on and discuss crime in modern metropolitan areas.
Companies like Google, Meta, and Apple have been allowed to expand their wealth and influence to the point that they’re effectively nation states, and should be reported on as such.
The manifold ways in which Mark Zuckerberg has manipulated Facebook’s users as a means to express growth to the public markets is a globally-perpetuated act of abuse, yet it remains relatively undiscussed because the media refuses to discuss technology in the way it actually affects people.
The same goes for Apple’s App Store, Google Search, and shit, I’d argue most of the modern internet. How is it not a bigger story that the mobile browsing experience on most websites ranges from “awful” to “impossible to use to the point your browser crashes”?
I think this is the thing that really confuses me — how the fuck is this not being written about? You see it any time you use your phone! It’s everywhere, always, all the time, there are so many examples, yet tech coverage is effectively always “news” or “how to do something on your computer or phone that isn’t obvious” without any acknowledgement that the reason you’re writing this piece is because user interface design is terrible, and you want your website to rank high on Google Search.
And I’d argue that regular people are experiencing the same pain, and they’re so frustrated because they know, beneath the layers of abstraction, of warring incentives and abusive user interface choices, there’s something they want or need.
Shit, I think we all are. The nakedly awful state of modern technology — software in particular — is something that unites us all, and I think a lot of us get a lot more out of the computer than we really want to admit. I’m not just angry at Mark Zuckerberg for turning Facebook into an actively harmful product. I’m angry that he’s done so in a way that took away something that made the internet magical, in the same way I despise Prabhakar Raghavan and Sundar Pichai for doing the same with Google Search. I’m not just angry at one of the many different quarter-page-sized ads that block an article I want to read. I’m angry that one of the coolest things on the internet (access to varied media while sitting on the toilet) is literally obfuscated by the demands of growth.
The internet allows us to do so many things, and what we see today is both a technological marvel and a disgrace to humanity. We, right now, have the ability to talk to somebody thousands of miles away, to send them a photo or video of what we’re doing, to meet people we’d never meet in real life and build meaningful relationships with them.
As a writer, I am able to shoot the shit with my buddy Kasey in Southern California and my editor Matt in Liverpool, England with about the same speed, and as a result write thousands of words of ideas that Matt then edits, all with a few clicks, and then distribute it to 55,000 people with a few more. I can go on Bluesky and shoot the shit with people I know well or who I’ve never met in my life, and have a blast doing so. I can sit in my living room and play a videogame while I stream music to my phone to a big speaker in a few taps, and this technology has become more and more accessible as the years have gone on. We live in a time where technology does really, really cool things that help billions of people. These companies can innovate and they can make our lives better.
The problem is that software may have eaten the world, but growth holds software’s leash. The Rot Economy sits above all things. It is not enough for Apple to make iterations of the iPhone that are better and faster — it must sell more every quarter, and the software sitting on each iPhone must continue to generate more money in perpetuity. The websites you read that have page-wide ads are all run by people that don’t read anything and must see revenue numbers increase, in the same way that The Match Group must find new ways to increase quarterly revenues for their dating apps, even if the way they choose that is “to make using the apps cost more money.” Each of these ideas — a miniature computer that sits in our pocket and gives us access to the world’s information, or an app for falling love — are extremely cool, yet the reckless incentives of growth have poisoned them.
I am, as I have said, a brokenhearted romantic. The internet made me who I am, allowed me to thrive both as a person and a professional, and continues to do so every day, except now I have to fight seemingly every app and service to get them to do what I want. As I’ve said before, I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer, as I love what the computer has done for me, and hate what the computer now does to other people so that Apple, Google and Meta can increase quarterly revenues.
It’s easy to give into pessimism here, and I’d argue that the better alternative is to be loud and annoying and extremely verbal about the problems you see. Every single website you use has a feedback form, and I encourage you to use it, as I encourage you to complain about these problems on social media, and to regularly say the names of the people who caused these problems to everybody you know. If you’re feeling spicy, perhaps write to your elected officials that you believe the quality of digital products you’re using is getting worse as a means of increasing stock prices, and add that doing so is anti-democratic and anti-competitive, while also actively harmful.
Hell, a lot of these executives have email accounts. Why not let them know how you feel? I’m not saying to be horrible or rude, but you should absolutely look them up and let them know how bad things have become.
Another thing you can do is be less useful. If you use Instagram, use it in a way that generates less engagement. Click through a few stories then drop off the app, don’t use the feed, avoid clicking or staying on any ads, and (as Geoffrey Fowler of the Washington Post recommends) reset your feed regularly. Delete the data that these companies have on you regularly, and any time a company asks you for feedback that isn’t about a customer service rep, skip it or close your browser, as that data is only useful to them. In general, engage with apps less — both in the amount of time you spend on them and the amount you interact with their features — and obsessively read every privacy policy.
These companies make billions off of idle, muscle-memory-based use of their software, so get used to their tricks, and work against them. And if you really don’t use a service, stop using it. I will not, however, judge you for staying. I’m still on Instagram because it’s where a lot of my friends are and I like seeing what they’re up to. Again, I’m not against these products in principle. I just hate what they’ve become.
More importantly, I want you to find solidarity with others against the Rot Economy. Every single person you meet is a victim, every single person you meet faces similar problems to you, and every single person you know is likely angry at email spam, the collapse of social networks and Google, or the abominable state of modern business software.
The reason that these companies have been able to penetrate and poison so many things using software is a combination of lax regulation and a docile societal approach to technology. They want — no, they need — you to feel hopeless, that they are too big, that they can grow forever by doing whatever they want to you, and that there will never be enough negative sentiment to change their ways.
The reality is that these people are extremely vulnerable, and extremely unprepared for any real pushback. Tech executives are poorly-trained, thin-skinned, and have never faced any meaningful negative consumer sentiment, largely because they’ve never faced any real competition. They simply do not believe you will act in a way that doesn’t benefit them, because they’ve done literally everything they can to make it difficult to avoid or leave their systems.
They need you to think that things will always be this bad (or worse), and for you to just sit there and take it rather than screaming in their fucking face that what they’re doing is unacceptable. They want you to give up.
Don't let them destabilise you. Don't let them pump you full of cynicism, of pessimism, of the belief that there is NOTHING good, and thus there can never be anything to aspire to.
Going forward, one of my missions in this newsletter and on my podcast is to give you the language to describe what is being done to you, and the names of those responsible for doing it. I fundamentally believe that anyone can understand the stuff I'm talking about, that the tech behind it is not magic, and that the things being done to you in the name of the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy and its demands for perpetual growth in engagement metrics and revenue. I want you to understand this stuff so you can make better decisions, but also understand you are the victim of a con where you've been convinced you were “behind the times” when the tech industry just gave up on serving you.
Our economy and the majority of public companies are run by people who don't face any real problems or do any real work, and the tech industry — run by the same people — has oriented itself around building products and services to sell to them. These people do not use their own products, or if they do, they do so in such a distant way that it doesn't really matter if they suck.
It is time to speak about them in plain terms: we are in an era of rot, our markets dominated by a growth-obsessed death cult so powerful that it's just accepted that the only good stocks are those that grow every single quarter. A “good company” isn't one that provides a good service — it's one that provides that service in such a way that they can jack up the prices or upsell customers while also somehow getting more.
If anything the Rot Economy is a global Ponzi scheme where the only companies that succeed are the ones that can continually get more customers or come up with new ones, even if the service or goods provided are bad. It doesn't matter to them that the only thing that grows forever is cancer, and that perpetual growth could very well falter and then crash everything. It's all short-term thinking, all the time.
I want you to start seeing everything through the lens of growth, and I believe everything will make a lot more sense.
And they don't HAVE to do it this way. Success and being a decent — in the moral sense of the word — company are not mutually exclusive.They could have modest 2-5% growth each quarter, they could make good software that people like, they could do all of these things, but they choose not to. They'd rather hurt us, because growth is more important to them than whether our lives fucking suck. They'd rather refuse to maintain or rigorously test their products — especially their software — because investing in customers doesn't grow your customer base as fast as focusing on finding new ones.
These things have been happening for over a decade, and being able to explain it in plain English is important. Having these conversations is important. Talk to your friends and families and coworkers about this stuff, they're all dealing with it too. I don't care if you show them my work — just tell them what's fucking happening.
You cannot change the world on your own, and you may very well go through the world without changing much at all. But in your small way you can, at the very least, contribute to a greater hope and positivity in the bubble around you. The ideas you have — of a fairer, better world, one where people are not vilified for being who they are — are shared by most people. We outnumber them, and by an overwhelming margin.
The demands you make of the world do not have to necessarily seem realistic, but they can be fair. It is not unfair to demand a tech industry exists that is merely worth a few hundred billion dollars while providing a service that largely benefits the world around us. At the very least we can ask for shit that works
Discussing ideas for what a better world might look like is eternal. It is the root of humanity. It is what gives us light in the darkest times and what the darkest people in the world wish to rob us of — not simply hope, but the ingredients of hope, the stuff that builds the foundation that allows us to truly believe.
This isn't to say this is an easy process, nor one without deep, dark moments. But at the very least we can have standards and beliefs in ourselves of what better looks like.
It feels silly to hold up "better software and technology" as such a serious concept, but I think the world as it stands is suffering due to the tolerance we've had for the horrifying condition of modern software, which has now deeply penetrated every part of our lives, in some cases leaving trash lying around that we find ourselves tripping over all the time. Software has, to some extent, truly improved humanity, allowing levels of connection that are truly special, both with those we know and those we barely know.
It has, however, grown without restraint, without true accountability for those who write it and deploy it and (barely) maintain it, or actively and consciously strive to undermine it.
I cannot promise you that I will ever have the solutions to any of these problems, but I can — as you can — say what a better world looks like, and a better world is one where software works for, not against, the people that use it.
There is no harm in liking — or even loving — technology, as liking it allows you to more articulately explain why you fucking hate what they've made of it. Expressing what good looks like — what you love — allows you to cut deeper with your hatred for those who have caused so much harm.
That starts by naming those responsible for poisoning the world with software — Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Tim Cook (and Phil Schiller, who runs the App Store) of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and the other invisible war criminals responsible for the destruction of our digital lives.
They have nothing but their names. The tech industry is woefully unprepared to deal with regular people having the language and understanding of their acts. Crisis PR for tech doesn't know how to deal with real people saying “why did you fuck up your website so badly?” in the thousands or millions.
These people have never, ever dealt with real accountability, or even a real conversation about what they're doing and why they're doing it.
We deserve better, so we should fucking ask for it.
