Enshittification Is a Market Inefficiency

Everybody feels it. You shop for a flight, check the price, come back the next day, and it’s gone up. You’re not imagining it. The site watched you hesitate and raised the price because the algorithm decided you’d pay more the second time around. They call it dynamic pricing. What it actually is: using an information advantage against the person you’re supposed to be serving.

And that’s just one tiny example of something that’s happening everywhere, all the time, in almost every consumer market. Your phone shows you ads for things you talked about at dinner. Subscriptions that used to be one-time purchases now cost you $15 a month forever. Platforms that started out useful are now so clogged with ads and engagement tricks that using them feels like wading through mud. A court recently found YouTube and Instagram guilty of intentionally designing their platforms to harm users. Not accidentally. Intentionally.

People feel this even when they can’t name it. They feel squeezed. They feel watched. They feel like every interaction with every company is just another opportunity to have something extracted from them. And they’re right.

What Enshittification Actually Is

Cory Doctorow’s term stuck because it named something everyone was already feeling. But I think most people use it to describe the symptom without really naming the cause.

The symptom is that products get worse over time. The cause is corruption.

Not corruption in the legal sense. Corruption as a process. A slow decay. A leaky moral bucket. Nobody starts a company thinking “I’m going to build something people love and then gradually make it worse to squeeze more money out of them.” But that’s what happens, over and over, because the pressures push that way.

Maybe it’s investors demanding growth. Maybe it’s competitors who seem to be pulling ahead. Maybe it’s the payroll that keeps getting bigger. Maybe it’s just the seductive math of “if we raise prices 5% most people won’t leave.” Every one of those decisions is small. Every one of them seems reasonable in the moment. And the cumulative effect is that you wake up one day running a company that treats its customers like a resource to be mined.

That’s corruption. Not a dramatic fall from grace. Just a slow slide into treating people as numbers on a spreadsheet instead of humans you’re supposed to be helping.

The Squeeze Is Everywhere

I don’t think most people sit around analyzing business models. But I think almost everyone walks around with a low-grade feeling that they’re being ripped off, constantly, by everyone.

Your printer won’t use third-party ink cartridges. Adobe turned Photoshop into a subscription you can never own. BMW tried to charge a monthly fee for heated seats that were already installed in your car. Every streaming service that was supposed to replace expensive cable now costs more than cable did, and there are six of them. Your bank charges you a fee for not having enough money.

And then there’s surveillance capitalism, which is its own special flavor. Everyone believes their phone is listening to them. Whether the microphones are literally recording your dinner conversations isn’t really the point. The point is that the behavior of these companies has made that theory completely plausible. People believe it because the world they live in makes it the most reasonable explanation. Companies have burned so much trust that “they’re spying on me” is just the default assumption now.

I wrote about this in Ethics Is a Feature. People aren’t just annoyed by this. They’re exhausted. They’re exhausted by the constant vigilance required to not get taken advantage of as a baseline consumer. Every transaction requires skepticism. Every “free” thing is harvesting something. Every “personalized experience” is a funnel. Living in a commercial ecosystem this predatory is tiring in a way that accumulates over years.

Why This Is a Business Opportunity

Here’s where I want to be really clear, because this isn’t a sermon. This is a business argument.

Every company that squeezes its users creates a market inefficiency. Every time a corporation uses its information advantage against its customers, every time a platform makes itself worse to extract more revenue, every time a subscription model traps people into paying for something they’d rather own, it creates an opening. A gap between what people are getting and what they actually want.

That gap is an opportunity. And the correction is absurdly simple: just don’t do that.

I know how that sounds. “Just be honest” isn’t exactly a groundbreaking business strategy. But look around at how rare it actually is. That’s the point. The bar is so low that basic decency is a differentiator.

Think about your auto mechanic. If you’ve ever found one you actually trust, one where you don’t walk in bracing yourself to be told you need $2,000 in repairs you suspect are fake, you know what I’m talking about. That person is gold. You would never leave them. You tell everyone you know about them. They don’t need to run ads or optimize their SEO or build a funnel. They just don’t lie to people, and in a market full of lying, that’s the most powerful competitive position you can have.

The same principle applies everywhere. In every market where the incumbents are squeezing, there is room for someone who isn’t.

I Built a Business on This Exact Idea

I run a vehicle inspection business. All we sell is information. That’s it. A person is thinking about buying a used car from a dealer, and we go inspect it and tell them what’s actually going on.

The entire business exists because car dealerships are, as an industry, corrupt. Not every individual dealership. But the system is set up so that the buyer has almost no information and the seller has almost all of it. Every incentive is aligned against the customer. The salesperson’s commission, the finance office upsells, the “as-is” language buried in the paperwork, the cosmetic fixes that hide mechanical problems. It’s a market where the squeeze is the whole business model.

So we just… tell the truth. We inspect the car, write up what we find, and give that information to the buyer. That’s the whole value proposition. Honest information in a market where honest information is scarce.

That’s a market correction. We didn’t invent a new technology. We didn’t disrupt anything with AI. We just stepped into a gap that corruption created and filled it with something people were desperate for: someone who isn’t trying to take advantage of them.

The David and Goliath Trap

Here’s the hard part, and I don’t want to skip over it.

The companies doing the squeezing right now? A lot of them started out as the good guys. Google’s original motto was “don’t be evil.” Amazon built its reputation on customer obsession. Facebook was going to connect the world. They were all Davids once.

What happened is the same corruption process I described earlier. They got big. The pressures mounted. The incentives shifted. The small compromises piled up. And eventually they became the Goliaths they originally set out to displace.

This is the real challenge. Not beating the corrupt incumbents. That part, honestly, isn’t that hard if you’re willing to just be decent in a market full of indecency. The hard part is not becoming them. Not letting success corrupt you the same way it corrupted them. Not letting the leaky moral bucket drain everything that made you different in the first place.

Why I Think the Tide Is Turning

I might be wrong about this. It might be wishful thinking. But I don’t think so.

Something feels different right now. The backlash against big tech feels less like complaining and more like action. Courts are finding platforms guilty of deliberately harming users. People are actively seeking alternatives to subscription-everything. The word “enshittification” went from a blog post to common vocabulary in about eighteen months because it named something that millions of people were ready to name.

I think we’re at a tipping point. Not because people have suddenly developed higher standards, but because the squeezing has gotten so aggressive and so universal that tolerance is running out. When every company in every market is trying to extract maximum value from you, the person who shows up and just… doesn’t… stands out like a bonfire in the dark.

I keep coming back to the question of why you are the person to build whatever you’re building. And I think for a lot of people reading this, the answer might be simpler than they think. Maybe your advantage isn’t a technology or a patent or a network effect. Maybe your advantage is that you actually give a damn about the people you’re serving, and you’re willing to do the work to prove it.

This Is Not a Playbook for Better Manipulation

I want to be very direct about who I’m talking to here, because I know how this can get twisted.

I am not saying “pretend to care because users are onto your game.” That’s just a more sophisticated version of the same corruption. If your fundamental orientation is “how do I get people to give me money,” no amount of ethical branding will save you. People can tell. Maybe not immediately. But eventually your product tells on you. Your customer service tells on you. Your pricing tells on you. You can’t fake caring at scale. The cracks always show.

This is for people who already think this way and are wondering if it’s naive. If it’s a competitive disadvantage. If the world is just too cynical for decency to work as a strategy.

It’s not. The cynicism is the opportunity. The more corrupt a market gets, the more valuable integrity becomes. That’s not idealism. That’s supply and demand.

Stand Your Ground

I talk to founders and potential business partners all the time, and honestly, a lot of those conversations leave me feeling gross. Because for too many people, the conversation begins and ends with money. How much can we charge. How fast can we grow. How do we maximize extraction. It’s just dickheads all the way down sometimes.

And I get that money matters. Everyone needs to make a living. But when making money is the only thing driving you, when you have no interest in the problem you’re solving or the people you’re serving, it shows. It shows in the product. It shows in how you treat people. And eventually it shows in your results, because building something without understanding the problem is how you end up with a product nobody uses.

The people I want to reach are the ones who feel the pull in both directions. Who care about doing the right thing but also feel the market pressure to cut corners, to squeeze a little harder, to let the bucket leak. I’m telling you: don’t. Hold on to it. Because once you trade it away, you can’t buy it back. No amount of money replaces the knowledge that you built something good for someone else. And no amount of money fills the hole left by knowing you didn’t.

The corruption that’s hollowed out so many markets, so many industries, so many companies? It happened because people let go of the rope. One small compromise at a time, until the compromises became the culture and the culture became the product and the product became the thing everyone hates but feels stuck with.

Don’t let go of the rope.

Walk through it.