The Sentinel Evening Post: Karl Marx and The Predictable Lifecycle of Enshittification

Karl Marx

Have you ever noticed how your favorite apps and websites seem to get worse over time? At first, they are great, but then they slowly become cluttered with ads, the search results become useless, and the best features are hidden behind a paywall.

This is an example of what the writer Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification." And while it might seem like a modern problem, it's what philosophers like to label "extractive logic." Doctorow argues that any platform has to go through a predictable three-stage life cycle of decay.

First, the platform is good to users. They offer everything for free to get you hooked, and they build a moat around your digital life.

Second, they abuse users to favor business customers. They prioritize advertisers and sponsors, and make the experience worse for you, but profitable for their partners.

Finally, they abuse even those business customers to claw back all of the value for themselves. They squeeze everyone until the platform is just a hollow shell of garbage and ads.

Karl Marx once argued that there is a certain type of toxic capitalism where the goal is not to create a good product, but to create a "monopoly rent." Because once a company owns the space where we all hang out, they no longer have to be good. They only have to keep that space.

We stay because our photos are here, our friends are here, or our business depends upon it. We all become sharecroppers (tilling the soil for a landlord who no longer cares if we are happy or not).

But the question then becomes: at what point does the convenience of staying outweigh the indignity of being harvested as the product?