Case Studies from the Enshitticene. Search or filter by tag:
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 […]
Read the case →Google and Meta signed a secret agreement to stop competing in online ads — giving one preferential auction access while the other shelved the tech that threatened them both.
Read the case →The train bricks itself if you take it to a rival garage Newag, the Polish train manufacturer, doesn’t just build locomotives. It sabotages them. Its locomotives are booby-trapped so that if they sense they’ve been taken to a rival service yard, the train bricks itself — locks its own software, refuses to run, and sits […]
Read the case →The ventilator won’t accept the part until it’s blessed Meet Medtronic, the company that pretends to be Irish. It’s the world’s largest medical-technology company, having bought up nearly all of its competitors and then pulled off the largest tax inversion in history — selling itself to an Irish firm so its profits could sit in […]
Read the case →The car is paid for. The pedal is a subscription. Mercedes spent the last decade pretending the emissions scandal was a one-time mistake. It wasn’t sorry – it was getting better at the same trick. The modern German luxury car no longer needs to cheat on a test to extract rent. It just sabotages its […]
Read the case →Article 6 killed them, and it was legal There’s a law that made Dieselgate possible, and it’s still on the books in Europe. It doesn’t have Volkswagen’s name on it. It’s Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive — the anti-circumvention rule that makes it a crime to reverse-engineer software that’s wrapped in digital […]
Read the case →When you buy a book from Amazon, read it in a weekend, and click “Return for Refund” on Monday, you probably feel like you pulled one over on the world’s biggest retailer. You didn’t. The money isn’t taken from Jeff Bezos’s swimming pool – it’s clawed straight out of the author’s earnings. This is the […]
Read the case →Dek: You already knew inflation was real. What you didn’t know is that the grocery store has decided – using AI and your purchase history – exactly how much you’re willing to pay. For each other person in the checkout line, the answer is different. We all know the excuses for the grocery bill. Inflation. […]
Read the case →You already paid for the delivery. Then you’re asked to pay for it again. The first fee goes to the company. The second one – the one you’re guilt-tripped into – is the only one that actually gets the pizza to your door. — Order a pizza from any national chain and you’ll see it: […]
Read the case →You don’t own anything. Sony just made that official. Sony made two announcements in the span of a month that, read together, tell you everything about where the whole industry is going. In July 2026 it said it would stop producing physical game discs in January 2028. Then it told customers it would permanently delete […]
Read the case →You bought the tractor. John Deere still owns the repair. Here’s the part of the enshittification thesis that has nothing to do with ads. A farmer buys a half-million-dollar tractor – pays cash, takes on the debt, keeps it in the family for decades, the way farm equipment has always worked. Then it throws a […]
Read the case →Google didn’t accidentally ruin search. It ran a code, got scared, and made a business decision to make search worse – because worse search prints money. There’s a moment in the surfaced Department of Justice documents where Ben Gomes – the man who actually ran Google Search – says the quiet part out loud. “I’m […]
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