A journey into why your favorite apps, brands, and jobs are secretly getting worse.
Ever feel like your social media feed is a stranger? Or that your food delivery app is playing tricks on you? You're not imagining it.
It’s called 'enshittification'. It’s the cycle where platforms go from being useful and fun to a pile of digital garbage.
Step 1: The platform is amazing for users. Your feed has friends. Searches show you what you want. It's free, fast, and feels like magic.
Step 2: Once users are hooked, the platform lures in businesses, creators, and restaurants with promises of a huge audience and easy money.
Step 3: Everyone's locked in. The platform now squeezes both sides. Users get ads and irrelevant content. Businesses have to pay to reach the audience they helped build.
Remember seeing your friends' holiday pictures? Now, it's an endless scroll of ads, suggested Reels, and content from accounts you don't follow.
Try searching for a product on an e-commerce site. You'll wade through pages of sponsored, low-quality fakes before you find a genuine item.
Your food delivery seems cheap until you see it: inflated menu prices, mysterious 'platform fees', and 'restaurant charges' that erase any discount.
Your favourite show just left the platform you pay for. Now it's on another. And both have introduced ads. The digital library you paid for is an illusion.
This isn't just bad design. It's a key feature of a system obsessed with one thing: endless growth at any cost. Welcome to Late-Stage Capitalism.
It's the point where making a good product becomes less important than hitting quarterly profit targets for shareholders.
It's your shrinking chocolate bar and the bag of chips that's mostly air. It’s called 'shrinkflation' - paying the same or more for less.
It's the glamour of 'hustle culture' that makes burnout a status symbol. It's needing a side-gig just to keep up, not to get ahead.
You can choose between ten brands of shampoo, but they're all owned by two mega-corporations. Your choice is a carefully crafted marketing strategy.
Every service, from payments to groceries, wants to be a 'Super App'. The goal isn't convenience for you; it's to lock you into their ecosystem forever.
No. Recognizing the pattern is the first step to breaking it. You can't win a game if you don't know you're playing.
Choose the local store over the 10-minute delivery app. Pay a creator directly through their own site. Find communities on Discord or Telegram that aren't run by algorithms.
Instead of shouting into the void of a giant platform, people are creating smaller, curated spaces. Niche newsletters, blogs, forums. Places built for connection, not extraction.
Log off. Reclaim your attention. In a world fighting for every second of your focus, boredom can be a revolutionary act of self-care.
The world feels broken because parts of it are. Your anxiety is a rational response to a chaotic system. Your vibe isn't off. The game is rigged.