Enshittification Is Not an Accident
Most people sense that digital platforms have gotten worse. Search results are noisier, social media feels hostile, and basic features are locked behind paywalls or buried under ads. What often gets missed is why this happened. The decline of major platforms is not a natural market outcome or the fault of users choosing convenience. It is the result of policy decisions that removed meaningful discipline from powerful firms.
This process has a name: enshittification. It describes how platforms begin by serving users well, then pivot toward extracting maximum value once they are dominant and difficult to leave. I find this framework convincing because it explains patterns we see across nearly every major tech company.
How Platforms Decay
Enshittification is driven by policy failure, not just greed or bad leadership. Platforms like Facebook, X, Amazon, Apple, and Google followed a similar arc. Early on, they competed for users by offering useful, even delightful experiences. Once they reached scale and locked in communities, the incentives changed. Quality became optional. Extraction became the point.
Executives with reputations for reckless or antisocial behavior are not the cause of this system. They flourish because the system rewards them. When accountability disappears, the worst incentives rise to the top.
From User Control to Lock In
The early internet favored technical self determination. Users could modify tools, fix problems, or build alternatives. Communities were smaller, but they were resilient and portable.
Web 2.0 lowered the barrier to entry while quietly centralizing control. Platforms became easy to join and hard to leave. Data, audiences, and social ties were trapped inside closed systems. The result was a series of digital roach motels where users could check in but not easily escape without losing everything.
Once users were locked in, platforms could safely degrade the experience in pursuit of advertising revenue and growth metrics. The goal became keeping people just unhappy enough to complain, but not unhappy enough to leave.
The Disappearance of Discipline
Historically, firms were constrained by four forces: competition, regulation, labor power, and interoperability. Today, all four have weakened.
Competition has eroded under monopolization. Regulation exists, but companies routinely capture regulators or delay enforcement through legal maneuvering. Labor power has collapsed in tech as layoffs and consolidation undermine worker leverage. Interoperability, once a basic expectation, is now treated as a threat.
Interoperability is especially important. The ability to connect systems, run third party apps, block ads, or jailbreak devices gives users leverage. That is precisely why these tools are restricted, criminalized, or designed out of existence.
Why Individual Choices Are Not Enough
Personal consumption choices matter, but they cannot fix structural problems. Switching platforms or shopping ethically does little when monopolies control entire markets and lock in communities. Real change requires political and collective action.
Possible interventions already exist. Stronger antitrust enforcement, labor solidarity, and legally enforced interoperability would restore discipline. Large scale jailbreaking of platforms and devices could shift power back to users. Any country with technical capacity could lead such an effort and export the results globally.
Why This Matters
Enshittification is not inevitable. It is the predictable outcome of a permissive policy environment. That also means it can be reversed.
The decline of digital platforms is a political problem, not a technological one. Fixing it will require treating digital infrastructure as something that should serve the public rather than extract from it. On that point, the diagnosis is persuasive, and the conclusion unavoidable. If policy choices created this mess, different choices can undo it.
