Case Studies from the Enshitticene. Search or filter by tag:
You told Edge not to import anything. You turned off the setting. And the next time you open the browser, there are your Google Chrome tabs, your bookmarks, your passwords, sitting in Edge, and somewhere in the cloud, synced. It’s not a bug. It’s a browser that refuses to take no for an answer. The […]
Read the case →You clicked “no.” You clicked it again. And again. Then Windows restarted after an update, and your Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders are being backed up to OneDrive anyway, as if your choice never happened. This is the enshittification move that doesn’t trick you once. It wears you down until you stop saying no. The […]
Read the case →You set Chrome as your default. You set it again after the last update. And the next time Windows updates, Edge is back, asking you to make it the browser of the machine you already own. This is the quietest enshittification on the desktop, because it never looks like a decision. It looks like a […]
Read the case →In the summer of 2011, Coca-Cola quietly complained to the London Metal Exchange. Not about the price of aluminum futures – there was plenty of metal sitting around. The problem was getting any of it out. The queue to pull aluminum out of a Detroit warehouse had stretched to six months or more. “It takes […]
Read the case →A starter home used to be how a family got on the ladder. You bought a three-bedroom ranch with a yard, made payments, and built equity. Over the last fifteen years a large part of that first-rung stock was bought, not by families, but by institutions with a different goal: turning shelter into a rent-yielding […]
Read the case →In August 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice sued RealPage, a Texas software company, for operating what it described as an unlawful scheme that helped apartment landlords fix rental prices. The software in question is Revenue Management, the umbrella brand for YieldStar and AI Revenue Management (AIRM), and the core idea is simple and corrosive: […]
Read the case →Two drivers, same trip, same miles, same traffic. Different pay. And the difference has nothing to do with skill, seniority, or how well either of them drives. It has everything to do with how desperate the algorithm thinks each of them is. The same ride, priced twice Uber quietly offers a different rate to drivers […]
Read the case →Dek: AI’s most quietly devastating use case isn’t taking your job – it’s deciding what your job is worth, one stolen data point at a time. On the July 28 episode of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, Cory Doctorow – science-fiction novelist, EFF activist, and the man who gave us the word “enshittification” – […]
Read the case →You didn’t buy a smaller battery. You bought a full-size battery that Tesla decided to cripple in software, and then offered to unlock for cash. The trick Here’s the part that makes it enshittification instead of just a trim level: the battery cells are physically in your car. Tesla built the same pack, then wrote […]
Read the case →The camera that auto-dips your headlights is bolted into your BMW’s mirror, wired, and ready on the day you drive off the lot. Then BMW asks you to pay extra to switch it on. That’s not a feature. That’s a toll booth on hardware you own. The feature that’s already installed When you’re driving at […]
Read the case →Every “Best Of” list you click is a paid advertisement wearing a lab coat. The worse the review, the higher it ranks, and the more likely it is to be the thing you end up buying. The reviews are fake, and you’re the mark Rack up a product listing on Amazon and the pattern is […]
Read the case →The problem isn’t that you shopped wrong. It’s that Amazon made the cheapest price on the internet illegal for anyone but Amazon to offer. The clause you’ve never heard of Somewhere in the terms you clicked past, Amazon binds every seller on its marketplace to something it calls a most-favored-nation deal. In plain English it […]
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