Why Big Tech Loves Enshittification (And How We Got Here)

Meet the Enshittificator. He wears a bright yellow hazmat suit, sports a magnificent beard, and exists solely to systematically ruin every piece of hardware or software you touch – a delightful monster paired with a scythe-wielding Grim Reaper in a brilliant campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council that perfectly captures how modern platforms start great, trap you inside, and slowly rot until you pay triple for a fraction of the utility.

Trapped. You get lured in by a remarkably slick tool that genuinely solves a real human problem, only to find the rug violently yanked away once switching costs make leaving a logistical nightmare. Leaving basic utility locked behind arbitrary monthly subscriptions while ads infiltrate your dashboard because infinite growth requires perpetual extraction until a man crashes his car because he forgot to pay the monthly software fee for his brakes.

We treat this slow degradation as an inevitable law of nature. Why? Durable goods ruin future quarterly projections.

Planned obsolescence reigns supreme. Companies pivot rapidly toward glued-shut chassis, hostile APIs, and endless recurring fees that treat customers not as partners in craft, but as static targets to be aggressively monetized until churn hits equilibrium.

Real builders know an alternative exists. Craft matters. Small teams shipping honest tools without venture capital breathing down their necks can opt out of this race to the bottom, proving that software should respect the user rather than treat them as an adversary.