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November 1 - November 15, 2025
The platform has emerged as the endemic form of online enterprise, which is weird, because another word for platform is middleman.
Intermediaries are part of the solution to the age-old problem of connecting people with one another—but they become part of the problem when they grow so powerful that they can act as gatekeepers who can usurp the relationship between the two sides of their markets.1
Remember the early-2000s dream of disrupting the dozen major publishers? Today, there are five major publishers, four major studios, three major labels, two companies that dominate apps, and a single company that dominates ebooks and audiobooks. We’re a quarter century into the digital-forward, internet-fueled twenty-first century, and the power of intermediaries has never been greater.
Here’s the natural history of enshittification: First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.
Most online businesses enjoy high network effects. This is the economist’s term for a product or service that gets more valuable as it attracts more users.
Switching costs is another useful piece of economics jargon. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you switch from one product or service to another.
That’s our third and final piece of economics jargon: the collective action problem is the incredibly difficult business of getting other people to do what you want them to do, when you want them to do it.
When you search for a product on Amazon, the top results aren’t the best matches—they’re the matches that pay the highest bribes to Amazon to be at the top of the list. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you’ll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, that best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.
Scarcity gave tech workers enormous bargaining power, so tech bosses got creative. Rather than motivating their workers by threatening them with replacement by more desperate workers willing to accept worse pay and conditions, tech bosses discovered a different, winning strategy: inculcating a sense of mission into tech workers.
There’s a name for this strategy, coined by the librarian-theorist Fobazi Ettarh: vocational awe. Ettarh uses this term to describe the weaponization of workers’ sense of duty, especially to the public those workers serve. For Ettarh, vocational awe is why teachers, nurses, hospice care workers, and, of course, librarians accept poor pay and conditions without rebelling. They feel a sense of duty to their students, patients, and patrons, and their bosses don’t, and everyone knows it. So long as workers believe that their boss would rather harm the people they love and care for rather than
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It turned out that “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” was wishful thinking. It was truer to say, “Even if you pay for the product, you’re the product if the company can get away with treating you as the product.”
Gates and Allen didn’t write the OS, either—they tricked another company into selling them its OS cheap, incorporated a new company called Micro-Soft, slapped the Micro-Soft name on their sucker’s product, and made billions from IBM.
The ability of purveyors of cloud-based products to alter their terms, prices, and features at will enables one of the most beloved enshittification tactics of tech business leaders: bait and switch. If you operate a cloud-based app, you can monitor your customers’ every click and keystroke to discover which features are most valuable to your deepest-pocketed users, and then you can remove that feature from the product’s basic tier and reclassify it as an upcharged add-on.
As Goodhart’s law (named after the British economist Charles Goodhart) has it, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” If you tell employees that their workplace esteem is contingent on moving a mouse a certain way or typing at a certain rate (and that they will receive promotions and raises accordingly), the least motivated, least honorable employees on the shop floor will master the process of wiggling their mice or typing on their keyboards in ways that please the algorithm, irrespective of whether that translates into getting their job done.
“Regulatory capture”—when a company suborns its regulator and teams up with it to screw over customers, rivals, and suppliers—starts with a regulator that is weaker than the company it is supposed to be watchdogging. The pro-monopoly policies of the past forty years have produced gigantic companies that find it easy to unite against their regulators, even as the deregulatory policies over the same period have starved regulators of the resources they need to fight back. The inevitable result is regulatory capture.
Riley Quinn, showrunner for the excellent Trashfuture podcast, says that whenever you hear the word fintech (financial technology), you should mentally substitute unregulated bank.
In other words, tech companies don’t stop with “It’s not a crime if we do it with an app.” They also say, “It’s a crime if you fix our app to defend yourself from our crimes.”
The point is that while algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t an innovative new way of doing business—and like every other shell game is just a simple trick done quickly—the fact that it’s done with an app lets the modern blackhearted coal bosses claim that they’re not violating labor law.
A reverse-centaur is a machine that uses a human to accomplish more than the machine could manage on its own.
That’s chickenization: a system of total control over workers who have to borrow money to pay you for the privilege of working for you, and to whom you owe nothing. Those workers rely on you for everything, and they know that you can ruin their lives at the stroke of a pen and that, if you do, they have no recourse.
Amazon DSPs aren’t just reverse-centaurs; they’re chickenized reverse-centaurs.
Twiddling—the process of changing the costs, prices, recommendation weights, and search rankings through automated or semiautomated means—is a key driver of enshittification. A business with a digital back end can endlessly twiddle all of these virtual knobs.
1753 treatise Blackstone on Property, which defines property as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”
The digitization of textbooks—adding DRM to them and requiring a login and password to access course materials that come bundled with texts—destroyed that secondary market, but because textbook publishing is a cartel controlled by a tiny number of firms, those firms were able to use their market power to keep the prices high, even as they killed the secondary market.
Big Tech’s regulatory capture means that we have arrived at a juncture where copyright affords few rights to creators who make new works, and substantially more rights to a store whose sole contribution to those works is hosting a file server and payment processor that allows the public to buy the works, which gives Amazon not only a 30 percent cut of the purchase price but also the perpetual, legally enforceable right to veto the creators in their relations with the audience making those purchases.
When Boeing airplanes start falling out of the sky, this is the force at work: consolidation, regulatory capture, enshittification.
Even after acquisitions, predatory pricing, preferential discounting, exclusivity deals, and other antitrust violations allowed the tech sector to sew up the market and eliminate competition, tech workers held the line. Even after the newly consolidated industry captured its regulators and convinced them that violating our labor, consumer, and privacy rights was okay so long as it was done with an app, tech workers held the line. Even after those captured regulators were pressed into service to smash startups, tinkerers, hackers, and hobbyists whose plug-ins, mods, and aftermarket parts
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In “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” better known as the PageRank paper, two Stanford grad students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin set out a method for sorting good web pages from bad ones: citation analysis.
After all, the pandemic lockdowns that transformed “work from home” into “live at work” for hundreds of millions of white-collar workers around the world were a bonanza for Google, as demand for its services soared.
Varoufakis’s technofeudalism thesis holds that, in the years after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, tech was transformed from a primarily profit-seeking enterprise to a primarily rent-seeking enterprise. The thing that makes the tech giants powerful is that they control “factors of production” that they rent to actual, productive businesses.
Bezos ordered the editorial board at The Washington Post (which he owns) not to endorse Kamala Harris. Cook personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Both TikTok and Twitter changed their algorithms to favor Trump-oriented news in the run-up to the election.
The American business lobby has spent decades neutering the expert agencies that oversee industry, an effort that relies on Republican presidents making lifetime appointments of Federalist Society judges who believe that the agencies should do effectively nothing. This far-reaching takeover of the judiciary puts severe limits on the FCC’s ability to regulate ISPs. In 2024, a court struck down an order passed by Biden’s FCC. As I write this, Trump’s FCC is taking a wrecking ball to the few FCC policies that protect the public from predatory, monopolistic conduct.
Interoperability—the latent power of every digital system to run every valid program—is a powerful anti-enshittification force.
The Massachusetts Question 1 automotive repair initiative passed with a massive majority (74.97 percent!), but it still hasn’t taken effect, thanks to successful courtroom delaying efforts by Big Car. Even so, the idea of establishing right-to-repair laws spread to other states.
During Trump’s first term, his trade negotiators ripped up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which had been in place since 1994, and replaced it with the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). Under the USMCA, both Canada and Mexico are obliged to pass and enforce anti-circumvention laws, and in exchange, both countries get tariff-free access to US markets.
(Not for nothing is Harvard referred to as “a hedge fund with an inconvenient university attached to it.”)
A corrupt administration or a corrupt judge will always find a reason to attack workers. That’s why worker power always starts with workers, not with the law. Solidarity will get you through periods of legal attacks on unions more than the law will get you through periods of no solidarity.
But when administrations and the judiciary are on the side of labor, strong antitrust laws that attack corporate power at its root, that attack John Sherman’s “autocrats of trade,” are a powerful force to reduce the power of corporations, which makes it easier for labor to come out on top.
And it may be true that the law can’t force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation. But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn’t think you deserve it. And I think that’s pretty important.
