You know that sinking feeling. The one you get when your favorite app updates and suddenly it’s full of ads, the feed is garbage, and it feels like the company hates you. You’re not wrong. They do. But the reason why isn’t greed — it’s math.
Let me show you the equation that’s quietly ruining everything you love.
Every platform starts as a miracle. Uber got you a ride in five minutes. Facebook connected you with old friends. Airbnb let you crash in someone’s cool apartment. Then, slowly, they all go to hell. The prices go up, the quality goes down, and the customer becomes the product. You’ve been told this is because of evil CEOs or short-term profit-chasing. That’s a comforting story — it lets you believe that if we just hire better people, everything will be fine.
But that story is wrong.
Enshittification isn’t a bug of modern capitalism. It’s the intended feature of an accounting system that rewards companies for privatizing gains while socializing the costs of their own decay.
Think about it. When Uber underfunds driver benefits, the cost doesn’t show up on their balance sheet — it shows up in the form of exhausted drivers, community resentment, and taxpayer-funded healthcare. When Facebook lets misinformation run rampant, the cost isn’t deducted from their ad revenue — it’s paid by democracies, public health, and your sanity. The quarterly earnings report only sees the revenue. The destruction is invisible to the spreadsheet.
I watched a friend who works at a major tech company explain their bonus structure. ‘We know it’s making the product worse,’ she said. ‘But the metrics say we’re winning.’ She was promoted six months later.
This is the broken math at the heart of enshittification. The system structurally rewards you for degrading the long-term value of the platform, because the costs of that degradation are offloaded onto society. It’s not a bug — it’s a feature of the economic model we’ve built.
We’ve been told that the solution is better CEOs, more competition, or maybe a new regulation or two. But that’s like treating a fever by changing the patient’s hat. The entire economic system’s math is flawed. You can’t fix a broken equation by swapping out the numbers.
As long as the profit spreadsheet never includes the cost of destruction, destruction will always be the most profitable strategy.
Look at every major platform today. Google Search is now a billboard farm. Amazon is a counterfeit flea market. Twitter is a digital dumpster fire. Each one is following the same mathematical inevitability: first, build a valuable service by burning venture capital; second, squeeze every user and partner for revenue; third, externalize the costs of that squeeze onto the public. The result? The platform decays, but the quarterly report looks great. The CEO gets a bonus. The shareholders are happy. And you, the user, are left wondering why everything is getting worse.
This isn’t just about tech. It’s about schools, media, healthcare — every institution that has been forced to optimize for a set of metrics that ignore the real costs of doing business. The US school system, for example, is often criticized for poor outcomes despite high spending. But the spending numbers don’t include the cost of poverty, inequality, and systemic neglect that the schools are forced to absorb. The math is broken there too.
So what’s the answer? Not a new CEO. Not a better mission statement. The only way to stop enshittification is to change the math itself. That means forcing companies to pay for the damage they cause. It means accounting for externalities — the pollution, the societal harm, the degraded lives — and making them a line item on the balance sheet. It means building an economy where destroying value costs more than creating it.
Until then, every platform you love will eventually die — not because of incompetence, but because the spreadsheet demands it.
FAQ
Q: Doesn't competition solve this? If a platform gets bad, won't users just switch to a better alternative?
A: In theory, yes. But in practice, the same math applies to every competitor. They all face the same incentive to externalize costs. Switching costs and network effects also lock users in. Plus, the new competitor will eventually follow the same trajectory — unless the underlying economic rules change.
Q: Okay, so what's the practical thing I can do as a user?
A: Stop using platforms that degrade your experience? That's like telling someone to stop breathing polluted air. The real leverage is political: demand regulation that forces companies to internalize their externalities. Support policies that tax pollution, penalize misinformation, and require transparency in algorithmic decision-making. The math has to change at the system level, not the individual level.
Q: Isn't this just a fancy way of saying 'greed is bad'? What's new here?
A: No, because 'greed' is a moral judgment about people. The broken math argument is a structural analysis about incentives. A greedy CEO might still run a great platform if the accounting system penalized degradation. The problem isn't human nature — it's the spreadsheet that tells you destroying the future is profitable. That's a much harder problem to fix, but also a more honest one.