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Enshittification is by design, not accident

Sunday, March 15, 2026 · from 2 podcasts
The Ezra Klein ShowThis Week in Startups
  • Platform degradation, or 'enshittification,' is the deliberate outcome of extractive monopoly economics, not user experience failure.
  • The broken internet feeling reflects platforms shifting value from users to business customers, then shareholders, as they capture markets.
  • Real alternatives require rejecting technological determinism and building decentralized infrastructure that restores competition.

Your feeling that the internet is broken is correct. It's not nostalgia.

On The Ezra Klein Show, Cory Doctorow diagnosed this as 'enshittification,' a systematic quality degradation. Platforms first deliver value to users, then to business customers, then extract everything for shareholders. Tim Wu calls this 'extraction.' Both argue it's the logical end of centralized platform economics where locked-in users become assets.

The fatalism is new. Doctorow noted that early internet problems felt like bugs the community could fix. Today's problems feel baked-in, designed violations you can't touch without breaking platform rules. This shift from empowerment to control is deliberate.

On This Week in Startups, a practical alternative emerged. Hippius co-founders built a decentralized cloud storage service on Bit Tensor's network, positioning it as a cheaper, resilient competitor to Amazon S3. Mog argued centralized services like S3, which powers roughly 60% of internet storage, create systemic fragility. When they fail, everything built on them fails.

The Hippius model distributes data across participant hard drives, not centralized data centers. Dubs explained they can modulate rewards in real-time to optimize network performance. It's a bet that for many applications, cheaper, resilient, decentralized storage beats reliability at a premium.

These perspectives connect. Doctorow and Wu explain why platforms degrade. Hippius shows how decentralized infrastructure can create the competitive pressure to stop it. The fight isn't about fixing existing platforms. It's about building alternatives that restore user agency.

Cory Doctorow, The Ezra Klein Show:

- I think when I was a lurker on the early internet and I saw things that sucked, I would think someone's going to fix this and maybe it could be me.

- And now when I see bad things on the internet, I'm like, this is by design and it cannot be fixed because you would be violating the rules if you even tried.

Big TechSocietyStartups

Source Intelligence

What each podcast actually said

The Ezra Klein Show
The Ezra Klein Show

What Trump Didn’t Know About Iran • Mar 14

  • The broken feeling of the internet stems from a deliberate structural shift from user empowerment to corporate control, not nostalgia for an earlier era.
  • Platforms now lock users in as assets, leading to a centralized economic model where they ultimately serve shareholders first and users last.
  • Cory Doctorow contrasts early internet optimism, where bad features felt like bugs to be fixed, with current fatalism, where poor quality is accepted as an unchangeable design choice.
  • Real change, as outlined by Wu and Doctorow, necessitates breaking platform monopolies to restore competitive pressure that forces companies to treat users well.

Also from this episode:

Business (2)
  • Tim Wu defines platform extraction as an economic process where monopolistic platforms capture wealth far beyond the value they provide to users.
  • Cory Doctorow labels the user-facing result of platform extraction 'enshittification', a systematic degradation of quality as value shifts from users to business customers and then to shareholders.
Regulation (1)
  • According to Doctorow, resisting platform decay requires rejecting technological determinism and the belief that abusive platform behavior is an inevitable stage of market capture.
SocietyMediaDigital SovereigntyBig Tech
This Week in Startups
This Week in Startups

One Genius Rule That Made This Coffee Brand Famous | EP 2262 • Mar 14

  • Hippius Subnet 75 uses the Bit Tensor decentralized compute network to operate a distributed cloud storage service, functioning as a direct competitor to Amazon S3.
  • Hippius cofounder Mog argues centralization creates systemic fragility, estimating Amazon S3 powers roughly 60% of internet storage and that its outages take down dependent services.
  • Mog positioned Hippius as a cheaper, more resilient drop-in replacement for S3, built on a custom protocol called Arion.
  • Hippius founders present the core tradeoff for users as cost versus guaranteed performance, betting that cheaper, resilient decentralized storage will win for many applications.
  • Dubs described their architecture as creating inherent fail-safes that monolithic centralized providers like Amazon cannot match.

Also from this episode:

Enterprise (1)
  • The service distributes user data across a global network of participant hard drives rather than centralized data centers.
Protocol (1)
  • Hippius cofounder Dubs explained the Bit Tensor subnet allows for real-time modulation of participant rewards, enabling them to dynamically prioritize miners with higher throughput to optimize network speed.
Big TechStartupsCoding

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