[ed. Or more to the point, what we're fighting against - the Rot Economy, as the author terms it (also known as enshittification).]
The business of making our shit worse to increase revenue growth year-over-year is booming. The products you use every day are more confusing and frustrating to use because everything must grow, which means that product decisions are now driven, in many cases, by companies trying to make you do something rather than do something for you, which in turn means that basic product quality — things like "usability" or "functionality" — are secondary considerations.
We do not "use" the computer — we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do, because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user.
Too often when you open an app you start bargaining with the company behind it — like a popup from Dropbox saying you could save money switching to an annual plan, securing annual recurring revenue and locking you into something it hopes you'll forget. Tech companies have the perseverance and desperate hunger for your money of a timeshare salesman, and they’re not sorry.
And that’s assuming it even loads. We’re all familiar with the tense moment where you open Microsoft Teams and hope that it doesn't crash, or that your audio or video works. We live in a constant state of digital micro-aggressions, and as I wrote last year, it's everywhere — banking apps that now have "helpful assistants" that get in the way of, well, banking, pop-ups during online shopping that promise discounts in exchange for our emails and phone numbers so they can spam us, notifications from apps that are built to push us to interact further rather (like Instagram's "someone just posted a comment on someone else's post" notifications), or the emails we get from Amazon about an order shipping that don't include any of the actual information about the purchase — a product decision allegedly made to stop Google from scraping your emails and selling that info to other parties, which is Amazon's business, not Google's.
Yet my — and I'd imagine your — frustration isn't borne of a hatred of technology, or a dislike of the internet, or a lack of appreciation of what it can do, but the sense that all of this was once better, and that these companies have turned impeding our use of the computer into an incredibly profitable business.
So much of the pushback I get in my work — and the pushback I've seen toward others — is that I "hate" technology, when I'd like argue that my profound disgust is borne of a great love of technology, and a deep awareness of the positive effects it's had on my life. I do not turn on my computer every day wanting to be annoyed, and I don't imagine any of you do either. We're not logging onto whatever social networks we're on because we are ready to be pissed off. If anything, we'd love to be delighted by the people we chose to connect with and the content we consume, and want to simply go about our business without a litany of microaggressions created by growth-desperation and a lack of responsibility toward the user. (...)
The problem is that we, as a society, still act like technology is some distinct thing separate from our real lives, and that in turn “technology” is some sort of hobbyist pursuit. Mainstream media outlets have a technology section, with technology reporters that are hired to cover “the technology industry,” optimizing not for any understanding or experience in using technology, but 30,000 foot view of “what the computer people are doing.”
This may have made more sense 20 years ago — though I’d add that back in 2008 you had multiple national newspapers with technology columnists, and computers were already an integral part of our working and personal lives — but in the year 2025 is a fundamental failure of modern media. Every single person you meet in every single part of your life likely interfaces with technology as much as if not more than they do with other people in the real world, and the technology coverage they read in their newspaper or online doesn’t represent that. It’s why a relatively modest software update for Android or Windows earns vastly more column inches than the fact that Google, a product that we all use, doesn’t really work anymore.
As a result, it’s worth considering that billions of people actually really like what technology does for them, and in turn are extremely frustrated with what technology does to them.
The problem is that modern tech media has become oriented around companies and trends rather than the actual experience of a person living in reality. Generative AI would never have been any kind of “movement” or “industry” if the media had approached it from the perspective of a consumer and said “okay, sure, but what does this actually do?” and the same goes for both the metaverse and cryptocurrency. (...)
Worse still, regular people are also furious at the state of software, and are fully aware that they’re being conned. The tech media continually frames the “growing distrust” of the tech industry as some result of political or social change or a cumulation of scandals, rather than the big, unspoken scandal called “how the tech industry made things worse in the pursuit of growth,” and the greater scandal of exactly how much contempt tech regularly treats their customers with.
And more importantly, regular people feel like they’re being gaslit by the tech media. I am regularly told that people are glad to have *someone* say simple things like “hey the apps you use that feel like they’re fucking with you? They are actually doing that!” with regularity. The feedback I regularly receive is that there are too many articles about technology that seem fundamentally disconnected from reality, or at the very least disconnected from the people at the receiving end of the product.
by Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At | Read more:
Image: uncredited/via
[ed. Also known as enshittification. Unfortunately, it looks like there's no turning back, we're all junkies now, forced to accept whatever bad product is around because there's no alternative. See also: As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders (Ars Technica).]
