Case Studies from the Enshitticene. Search or filter by tag:
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 […]
Read the case →The insurance company will knock a few dollars off your premium if you let it plug a device into your car or track you through your phone. It’s sold as a reward for good driving. The part they don’t lead with is that the same data becomes a permanent, shareable record of exactly how you […]
Read the case →Two people sitting in the same row paid two different prices for the same flight, and the airline didn’t pick those numbers by accident. It picked them by watching you, before you ever got on the plane. The fare that moves with your search Airline pricing has always been a maze of fare classes, buckets, […]
Read the case →There’s one button on every Amazon product page that matters more than all the others: the Buy Box, the yellow “Add to Cart” that decides where your money goes. Amazon controls who gets it, and it has decided, in its own words, that the price it wants beats the price you want. The box that […]
Read the case →Your PC is sitting right there, working fine. It runs the software you need. It’s got the RAM, the storage, the screen. But Windows 11 looks at it and declares it unfit to run, because of a hardware checkbox you can’t see, on a chip you didn’t choose, that Microsoft made mandatory for reasons that […]
Read the case →Microsoft Edge used to let you wipe all your saved passwords in one click. There was a checkbox in the “clear browsing data” panel, right next to cookies and cache, that swept every saved login away. That checkbox is gone now, and so is every other bulk-delete path. Step by step, Edge took away each […]
Read the case →You’re an administrator. You took full ownership of the registry key. You have every permission Windows can grant. And the write still fails with a silent “access denied,” with no explanation for why. Somewhere between you and the disk, an invisible force you never consented to is deciding what you’re allowed to change on the […]
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