The Enshittification of Everything
The ad economy ate the internet. Then they came for work, culture, and your own sanity.
Grab your phone and try to reach anything that isn’t an ad.
You unlock the screen. What’s the first notification? Probably a promoted post? Go to a retailer’s website. Before you even get a chance to browse, you’re accosted by popups begging for your email address in exchange for a 10% coupon. Even this blog, sadly, engages in that same behavior.
Try to go read a news story. Maybe there’s an associated video with the article. It autoplays, but not because it’s useful. It plays because that’s the best way to guarantee you see yet another ad whether you were planning to actually watch the video or not.
Maybe you like to scroll TikTok; every third clip is either someone hocking goods on TikTok shop or a straight up ad. And even among videos that aren’t explicitly advertisements, you can rest assured that a significant number of those creators are pretending to “give advice” while they’re really just funneling you into their affiliate link tree.
Open any new AAA video game. Battlefield 6 comes to mind. You’ll probably find battle passes, loot boxes, skins sponsored by energy drink brands, or even actual in-game billboards.
Our world has been reformatted into ad inventory.
Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” has never been more apt. Enshittification is the process where platforms start out good, then gradually transform into useless piles of garbage in order to wring out more profit. And what started as a description for companies like Facebook, AirBnB, Uber, TikTok, and the tech space in general, is now a pretty solid description of America in the 2020s. The internet enshittified first; but work, politics, culture quickly followed. Now even friendship and “personality” run on ad logic.
It’s a theocracy of sorts; the culmination of an attention economy, where everything must serve the ad gods.
The Internet: Wild West to Commercial Break
We’ll start with the most obvious culprit here: the modern web.
Using search engines like Google used to feel like a public library with a fantastic catalog system. You could type a question and get back pages made by real people who actually cared about the topic. Now the first page is made up of sponsored junk, SEO sludge, and AI slop strategically manufactured to game the search ranking system. Anyone who grew up with or experienced the earlier internet can plainly confirm that search results in 2025 are worse than useless. Even the “site:reddit.com” trick is losing its usefulness given the rise of AI slop infecting everything we consume.
Social platforms followed the same arc. The old Facebook was posts from people you know. Generally useful content overall, and if you didn’t want to hear from the town crazies you could just unfriend them or block them. Facebook now? Agitprop, rage bait, and “suggested for you” content that paid to be there, juiced by an algorithm that literally decided that making you angry was five times more valuable than making you happy. TikTok, too, was pure dopamine at first; then the shop tab metastasized to the point where the app now feels like QVC but for shitty Temu items. Twitter turned into an influencer casino where paying for a blue check gets your replies shoved in everyone’s face.
Doctorow’s enshittification life cycle is pretty simply:
Be good to your users in order to grow.
Be good to your business customers to lock them in.
Once you’ve trapped them, squeeze them both so that you can deliver more and more value to the shareholders.
That’s enshittification in a nutshell: everything that made a product or service decent is later treated as a detriment to revenue.
Add the marketing obsession to the equation, too. Every pixel on a website now has to “perform.” When a user takes an action it’s simply a signal in a giant auction that determines how much a brand values a person’s next click, tap or lingering eyes. The internet used to be an information superhighway, but it’s devolved into a market that simply there to rent space in your head.
And because these strategies performed so well financially, that logic metastasized into the rest of daily life as well.
In Marketing We Trust!
This creep is literally everywhere once you start seeing it.
Video game developers used to sell you just that: video games. Now they sell you the game, a battle pass, catalogs of often branded skins, plus in-world billboards plus a branded crossover with a soda company. And don’t forget the pop-ups. You can’t open the game and just get into a match without the game throwing a pop-up ad in your face to beg you to buy new skins or that battle pass. Your $70 is the entrance fee to enter the digital mall, but the loading screen is an ad, the menu is an ad, and your character is walking ad real estate for whatever brands bought crossovers that season.
TikTok is no longer “short video,” it’s just a home shopping channel. Every other clip is someone selling you something. Instagram feeds are half people and half “creators” pretending their life stories just naturally lead into discount codes for the newest protein powder.
Even the physical world has been strip-mined at this point. Go to a gas pump with a screen. Is it showing you anything useful? Nope. It’s just playing you ads. Uber inserts ads mid-ride. Your smart TV plays commercials inside the device you already paid for. Cars have even begun to ship with subscription features. If there’s a quiet surface anywhere in the world, it’s ripe for ruin as a “monetization opportunity.”
This is the beginning of technofeudalism. A small cartel controls chokepoints like app stores, search, payment processors (those Venmo transactions where you pay someone and add the pizza emoji? Don’t worry, the pizza ads will find you soon!); and then charges rent on every single human interaction that passes through. It’s been said for a long time, but you’re rarely the customer anymore. You’re just the product being sold to advertisers.
Work is Love, Work is Life
Our workplaces aren’t immune to the cancer of enshittification.
“Bossware” is installed on your machine to track your keystrokes, your webcam, and the human-ness of your mouse movements. It’s sold to companies with much the same pitch used for ad tech. There’s more data, more optimization, and more efficiency. Your tangible, unquantifiable performance comes second to the myriad of metrics that get reported to determine your “productivity.”
That’s just corporate work. But gig workers don’t even get the dignity of having a boss with a face. The platform is their boss. It decides rates, routes, deactivations, and “promotions.” Over time customers will pay more while the gig workers earn less. Drivers and couriers are treated as disposable in this revolving door; all in the pursuit of delivering value to the shareholder, of course.
And let us not forget the personal-branding sickness. LinkedIn’s transformation from useful networking platform to influencer-drive social media slop taught a generation to consider themselves corporate mascots for their own existence. You’re not just a designer; no, you’re a “thought leader” posting mini TED talks so that the algorithm will remember your face and so you appear professionally relevant when seeking employment. Every single bullet point on a resume becomes an ad for you, written in the most deranged buzzword dialect ever invented.
Life as a Subscription Bundle™
Housing is supposed to be shelter. But because our political systems, over decades, abandoned abundance in favor of managing scarcity, is now just an investment.
During the pandemic, institutional investors gobbled up single-family homes in bulk and turned them into rentals. If you’re trying to buy a starter home, you’re probably not bidding against a young couple who’s just trying to buy a place to live. You’re instead bidding against a faceless fund running simulations on revenue yield. If they win, the house turns into yet another subscription you pay for until you die.
Everything else got the same treatment. Airlines, hotels, ticketing sites are littered with junk fees and upsells. Shrinkflation quietly charges more for less. Streaming lured us all with their promises of saving money by cutting the cord; then they gradually raised prices, added ads, and split their catalogs to the point where you’re probably spending nearly the same amount on streaming services as you used to spend on cable. But don’t forget — if you want to watch live sports, you still more than likely have to pay for cable as well. They really figured out how to have their cake and eat it too.
Everyday life is beginning to look like a subscription bundle. You subscribe to housing, healthcare coverage, phone plans, “productivity” tools, streaming services, cloud storage, kids’ apps, and even your car’s heated seats. Miss a payment? Part of your world just switches off. Rather than just selling products, the enshittification game has optimized for “lock them in, then twist the price knob forever.”
Enshittification is monopoly power bundled with recurring billing.
Making America Polarized Again!
If you thought enshittification stopped at commerce, think again! It infected politics too.
Political campaigns just define you as demographic segments. They’ll throw A/B-tested slogans at your feed to make you fearful or angry. Rather than persuading you that a candidate has a plan for governance, the goal is really just to keep you in the outrage funnel (and, of course, buy the president’s cryptocurrency — which definitely isn’t a scam).
Cable news and partisan creators discovered that measured, objective, and boring governance doesn’t move numbers, doesn’t sell super chats, and doesn’t drive Patreon subscriptions. But telling people that some “enemy” wants to erase them? That’ll make you rich. So that’s what we get. Every televised congressional hearing becomes content and every tragedy becomes copy for a fundraising campaign before the bodies are cold.
Legislation is almost secondary. Why bother doing the hard work involved with fixing healthcare when last quarter’s metrics went through the roof by simply screaming about “illegals?” The incentives favor viral cruelty over boring competence, so virtue signaling about the latest culture war takes precedence over crafting serious AI policy at a time where it actually may pose an existential threat to modern society.
Politics have become just another branch in the sprawling ad industry, and from that lens, the collective nihilism of the younger generations makes a lot of sense.
Culture, Friendship, and Influencer Brain Rot
Culture had no chance of escaping this fate either.
Consider Hollywood. Every other movie is a remake. Is that because the remakes are better than original content? Nope. Hollywood went all-in on franchises, reboots, and remakes because they’re easier to market globally than original stories. Streaming platforms buy and sell rights to popular shows, and if Netflix has a rough quarter? It’s okay, they can just cancel Santa Clarita Diet even though it was great, but not as popular as Stranger Things. No more paying Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant if we’re not looking at infinite growth.
Whether it’s music, books, or games, recommendation engines decide what’s “hot,” and they are incredibly opinionated. Ever notice how songs used to be at least 3-4 minutes long, but now they’re barely breaking the 2 minute mark? Yeah, that’s enshittification at work there too. Creative processes like making music are tuned to the almighty algorithm. Catchy hook that can be a viral sound on TikTok; verses and depth be damned.
Your social life, too, gets sucked into this same filter. Friendships turn into engagement metrics. Who liked your posts? Who shared your clips? Who engages with you? People start treating their face and personality as “their brand.” Rather than hanging out, you collaborate. Rooftop drinks are photo shoots and hobbies are potential content.
Meanwhile, we’re lonelier than we’ve ever been. The Surgeon General had to literally issue a warning that half the country is experiencing serious loneliness, with physical health effects on par with smoking. And what was the solution? It certainly wasn’t investment into public spaces and mental health. Instead we got AI companion apps marketed as “connection.”
Is This Inevitable?
None of this is necessarily some natural evolution of technology; rather it’s a very specific set of decisions about how power and money are allowed to work.
We could have built an internet funded like a utility, but we chose surveillance ads instead. Instead of cutting drudge work and shortening workweeks, we’re using AI to fire people and crank out endless slop to glue your eyes to more ads. We could govern like adults and invest in housing, transit, healthcare, and the climate. Instead, we’ve collectively decided to let oligarchs and theocrats squabble over whose brand of control gets to dictate our lives.
And this is the real obscenity about all of this. Not that everything has become an ad. It’s the fact that “ad logic” has replaced any serious sense of what a decent society should actually work to deliver. If it can’t be auctioned it’s treated as fluff. You can’t have a park without a sponsor’s logo, a public train that isn’t plastered in brand wraps, or news outlets that don’t farm rage for revenue because the march toward infinite growth demands these things.
The answer can’t just be “digital detoxing” on an individual level or being angry at people for liking — and working for — nice things. The answer is simply power. Laws that work for the people by breaking up monopolies (and modernizing laws to actually redefine what monopolies look like in our era), block harmful data harvesting, and make some spaces legally off-limits to the ad machine.
If we keep letting everything be consumed by enshittification — our social media feeds, our jobs, our friendships, and our elections — we shouldn’t pretend to be surprised when the country feels hollowed out, like a private equity firm buying a company and stripping it for parts and profit.
Electoral power in the hands of ordinary people like you and me is the only thing that can stop the cancer of enshittification. We need to build abundance; to replace a gerontocratic government; and to elect Americans who care about Americans to rebalance the scales of our society.
As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat. You can find me on the following platforms:
Twitter: https://x.com/just_becs
Email: rebecca@unaligned.sh