Enshittification
The culture war nobody's talking about.
We usually talk about “enshittification” in terms of user experience. The slow death of platforms as they prioritize quarterly returns over anything resembling public service.
Instagram throttles organic reach. Amazon feels like walking through a strip mall designed by a casino. Google Search is so bloated with ads it barely functions as search anymore. Facebook is a rage machine. TikTok is a dopamine slot machine, curated by opaque algorithms.
It’s not a bug. It’s the business model.
Every platform eventually follows the same arc: nobility gives way to monetization, and monetization gives way to enshittification. But the true cost of enshittification isn’t just a worse internet experience.
It’s a worse society.
In 1994, just to choose a starting point, the internet was beginning to seep into daily life. I remember it clearly: crude HTML, black text on gray backgrounds, and the first blinking banners on the White House website. Al Gore was evangelizing the “Information Superhighway.” Netscape had just launched, its giant animated “N” promising a future of boundless knowledge at our fingertips. For a while, it felt like we were living through something revolutionary. Access to more information would empower us. The internet would be as transformative as Gutenberg’s printing press—or so we believed.
But what we failed to understand was this: More information didn’t just empower truth. It empowered noise. It empowered fraud. It empowered delusion.
The old gatekeepers—newspapers, broadcasters, publishers—were slow, biased, imperfect. But they maintained a basic filtering function. When they fell, what replaced them wasn’t a pure marketplace of ideas.
It was a marketplace of outrage.
And that’s where the real enshittification began.
Algorithmic Optimization as Civic Sabotage
The original promise of tech was liberation: information at your fingertips, communities without borders, power to the people.
But somewhere along the way, optimization swallowed aspiration. Every algorithm was tasked with a singular mission: maximize engagement. Keep people scrolling, buying, reacting.
And what drives engagement? Our most base instincts: outrage, fear, tribalism. The most limbic, least rational parts of ourselves.
Platforms didn’t invent division. They didn’t create our prejudices or anxieties.
But they industrialized them—at scale.
Social media created feedback loops where only extremity rose to the top, because extremity gets clicks—and clicks get dollars. Where tribal identity is constantly reaffirmed, because loyalty fuels revenue streams.
This isn’t something new. Media is entertainment, and entertainment is a business. You could already see the outlines of this dynamic before the internet fully took hold. Figures like Morton Downey Jr., Howard Stern, Don Imus, Jerry Springer, Rush Limbaugh, and Maury Povich built media empires on outrage, grievance, and humiliation. They were the real-life incarnations of Howard Beale, preaching fury to a national congregation tuned in night after night.
But they faced real limits: networks, advertisers, public standards. There was still friction. Still lines that, if crossed, could end a career. You could be “mad as hell,” but not everything automatically made it to broadcast.
But Alex Jones was all of them combined—on crack, at 10x speed, with no guardrails. Everything that guy did wound up on the internet and was broadcast to millions.
When the internet industrialized attention, it stripped away every external constraint.
Jones didn’t need a network to renew him. He didn’t need advertisers to tolerate him.
He needed only clicks.
Algorithms didn’t care if he was right. They didn’t care who he hurt, what truth he burned, or who got run over—only that audiences were watching.
In chasing profits, the platforms engineered a civic catastrophe. They broke the basic social contracts that liberal societies depend on: the belief that people can disagree, that truth is a shared project, that compromise is possible.
Instead, they rewired us to see every disagreement as an existential threat—and every opponent as a monster.
That crazy uncle who believed the Earth was flat? Once, the family would have tempered him.
Now he goes online, finds five million others just like him, and watches his fringe belief normalize overnight.
In a time when we have more information available than at any point in human history, we seem more disconnected from truth, epistemology, and basic empirical reasoning than ever before.
That didn’t happen accidentally.
It happened algorithmically.
The Bipartisan Drift Toward Authoritarianism
Most discussions about “threats to democracy” focus narrowly on elections, laws, or political leaders. Especially right now, with Donald Trump, who appears to be authoritarianism incarnate. I get it. The man is truly off the rails.
But far fewer are grappling with the deeper rot: the psychological demolition of trust that allows nearly 80 million Americans to say, Sure, let’s elect a convicted felon, who four years ago committed sedition against the United States, and has a lifetime’s history of lying over a sitting Vice President with a record of public service.
In a healthy democracy, institutions serve as the ligaments binding diverse societies together. Courts, legislatures, media, civic organizations—none perfect, but all essential for creating shared rules of engagement. They create predictability. Accountability.
When people lose faith in those ligaments, they don’t just give up on politicians. They give up on the very idea that persuasion or compromise is possible. And that isn’t just problematic. It’s how democracies fall apart.
Political scientist Barbara F. Walter has written extensively about this phenomenon. In How Civil Wars Start, she argues that democracies collapse not when people disagree, but when their loyalty to identity groups overwhelms their loyalty to the broader civic project. When political competition becomes a zero-sum contest for survival, strongmen don’t have to seize power by force—people hand it to them willingly, out of fear and despair.
Because when identity hardens, authoritarianism stops looking evil. It starts looking efficient. The question shifts from “Who best protects liberal democracy?” to “Who will fight for my side by any means necessary?” Strongmen rise not just because they deceive the masses, but because the social ground has been softened by years of erosion—algorithmic and otherwise.
And let’s be clear: this drift is bipartisan.
It’s tempting to think the “other” side is uniquely vulnerable to authoritarian temptation. But enshittification is nonpartisan. If the left increasingly flirts with illiberalism in the name of social justice, and the right embraces it in the name of tradition or security, it’s because both sides are swimming in the same poisoned waters.
When every institution feels captured, broken, or fake, the hunger for a “clean sweep” grows. When platforms reward conspiracy over reason, loyalty over integrity, performance over substance, democracy itself becomes a casualty.
Enshittification as the New Culture War
The real culture war isn’t between right and left. The real culture war is between those trying to preserve any form of ordered liberty and those, knowingly or not, pushing toward collapse.
And make no mistake: collapse has an aesthetic appeal. Rage is energizing. Cynicism feels smarter than hope. Watching the system burn feels cathartic. But collapse doesn’t end with a cleansing fire. It ends with ashes—and the people best prepared to rule the ashes are not the ones most loudly calling for justice.
What too few acknowledge is that collapse isn’t purely organic. It is being curated. Incentivized. Profited from.
The “tech bros”—the venture capitalists, the platform founders, the so-called free speech absolutists—are not neutral actors. They made choices. They built systems that reward outrage over thoughtfulness, tribalism over tolerance, provocation over persuasion.
Fixing this isn’t about nostalgia for the “good internet” or LARPing as defenders of “the real America.” It’s about recognizing that enshittification isn’t just happening to us; it’s happening through us—and often for someone else’s profit.
Every time we reward the sensational over the substantive, the inflammatory over the informative, we are voting—with our attention and our wallets—for a darker future.
Reclaiming the Public Square
If we want to fight back, the first step is recognizing the stakes.
Bad UX is annoying, but broken trust is existential.
Resisting enshittification isn’t just about unplugging or scrolling less. It’s about actively reclaiming the civic commons—using the very platforms hijacked for rage and profit to rebuild movements of trust, resilience, and pluralism.
Writers, thinkers, creators: we are not neutral participants.
If the tech elites refuse to steward the platforms responsibly, then we must. We must build spaces where ideas are tested against reality, where disagreement is not treated as heresy, where reason is more valuable than virality.
This will not be easy. It will require slower reading. Less reactive sharing. More curiosity about opposing views. It will mean building new networks of face-to-face civic life that algorithms can’t easily corrupt—and being intentional about how we use digital spaces, refusing to let ourselves be weaponized by them.
Substack, BlueSky, Medium, YouTube—these are just tools.
They can be used for corrosion or for construction. The difference is not in the platform. It’s in the people who choose how to use it.
The public square will not reclaim itself. It will be rebuilt—piece by piece—by those willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of restoring trust, resilience, and civic imagination.
Some are already starting: creating independent networks for trustworthy analysis, practical resilience, and shared inquiry.
Some of the best new thinking is happening outside traditional institutions—on platforms like Substack—where writers are rebuilding trust, restoring civic norms, and anchoring a shared understanding of truth.
These new communities are not rooted in performative outrage, but in stubborn hope that shared reality still matters. Movements that don’t seek to burn the house down, but to build better ones—brick by brick, outside the poisoned walls.
It won’t be easy. It won’t be quick.
But if liberal democracy has a future, it will be because free citizens—not billionaires, not algorithms—chose to remember what freedom requires.
And if that wager fails, it won’t be because “the other side” was too evil.
It will be because all of us—left and right—scrolled, shared, monetized, and doomposted ourselves into a future we were too distracted or too cynical to rebuild.
William A. Finnegan is a pseudonym used by a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration. He is the author of two Substack publications: The Long Memo, on U.S. and global politics; and Borderless Living, a practical guide to building a life beyond borders.
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Enthralling and depressing piece. I found this point particularly pithy: “Every time we reward the sensational over the substantive, the inflammatory over the informative, we are voting—with our attention and our wallets—for a darker future.”
This was visible in pop culture even before the internet, as everything has become infotainment. MTV, which used to unironically stand for “music television,” slowly evolved from a music video channel into a reality TV channel. CNN lost its gravitas. The History Channel and Learning Channel became nothing of either sort. Entertainment capitalism simply leads to brain rot.