Field notes on platform decay. A running collection of case studies documenting how services rot, what breaks along the way, and what actually pulls them back. Some recovered. Some still rotting. All real.
You had enough money in your account to cover everything you owed. But the bank processed your transactions in the exact order that drained your balance and bounced a check, then charged you $30 for the privilege of its own ordering. The money was there the whole time. The bank just decided to pretend it […]
Read the case →Apple’s phones are famously hard to repair, and the company’s answer to that criticism was to sell parts, official ones, that then refuse to work unless the phone verifies they came from Apple. It’s the repair business as an exercise in control: the right to fix your own device, doled out only through Apple’s approved […]
Read the case →You bought a printer, and you own it. But the firmware inside it decides what you’re allowed to put in it. Slip in a cheaper third-party cartridge, and the printer that worked perfectly yesterday refuses to print today – not because the ink is bad, but because the manufacturer’s firmware has been told to lock […]
Read the case →The company that runs the physical wires into your home also controls how fast the data can move through them, and it has every incentive to make the speed depend on which sites you visit and how much you pay. That’s not a technical accident. It’s a business model that was briefly illegal, and then […]
Read the case →The restaurant sets a price for its food. The delivery app takes roughly a third of it, in commission, fees, and charges. To survive, the restaurant raises its menu prices, and you end up paying more, while the driver gets paid less, and the app walks off with a cut of every side of the […]
Read the case →One company owns the ticketing platform, the venue contracts, the resale marketplace, and, according to a federal antitrust case, the whole rigged game in between. That’s why the same show can sell out in minutes and appear on a resale site for ten times face value, and why the person selling it to you at […]
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