Remember when the internet felt like a playground?
Not anymore. Now it’s an obstacle course of sludge-filled platforms, manipulative UX, and digital bait-and-switch tactics. You go in for connection, creativity, or convenience — and come out with data extraction, content farm fatigue, and a dozen dark patterns tattooed into your attention span.
This isn’t just a UI issue. It’s not even just capitalism. It’s communicative decay on a system-wide level.
From Utility to Extraction: A Pattern We Know Too Well
Cory Doctorow nailed it with a term that should be etched into every syllabus and strategy deck: enshittification. The process is simple:
- Phase 1: Platforms serve users. They’re useful, delightful even.
- Phase 2: Platforms monetize users — slowly replacing value with ads, friction, and upsells.
- Phase 3: Platforms squeeze both users and business clients. Everyone loses but the platform itself.
Think about your daily routines:
- Amazon: A thousand fake brands, SEO spam, and sponsored junk before you reach a real product.
- Reddit: The communities stayed; the interface got worse. Oh, and they killed third-party apps for IPO prep.
- LinkedIn: Once a professional space. Now a motivational poster generator. Unless you game the algorithm, you’re invisible.
The original promises — community, discovery, transparency — are replaced with artificial scarcity and gamified noise.
Habermas Saw It Coming (Before Web 1.0 Even Hit)
To understand how deep this goes, let’s dust off Jürgen Habermas. In The Theory of Communicative Action, he warned us about the colonization of the lifeworld — a moment where systemic logic (profit, power, efficiency) invades and overrides communicative logic (understanding, shared meaning, human interaction).
The early internet was an explosion of lifeworld potential. A digital public square. A decentralized bazaar of weird, wonderful, flawed communication.
Now? That same space is paved over by platforms optimized not for dialogue, but for data capture and user compliance. The lifeworld is gone. Welcome to the factory floor.
Why Everything Feels the Same — and Feels Worse
Platforms once differentiated by design and function have converged into the same grim logic:
- Hide the thing you want.
- Surface what pays.
- Make opting out harder than opting in.
- Use your data to nudge you into a funnel you never asked to enter.
It’s a communicative power grab — not through censorship, but through sludge. Sludge isn’t content. It’s friction: Confirmshaming, hidden options, default subscriptions, pre-checked boxes, and 12-button onboarding flows just to say “no.”
And the scariest part? We’re adapting. The noise is normalized. The sludge becomes standard.
Beyond the Factory: Is There a Way Back?
There are sparks of resistance. The Fediverse, indie blogs, and RSS readers are making slow comebacks. Digital minimalism isn’t just a wellness aesthetic — it’s a micro-revolution.
But we need more than nostalgia. We need communication design that protects agency. Platforms that embrace slow growth and shared meaning over scale and surveillance.
We’re not just losing time. We’re losing texture. Complexity. Nuance. Dialogue.
And it’s not inevitable — it’s designed. Which means it can be redesigned.
Want more?
→ Listen to the full podcast episode on FUNK !T
Curious about the media theory behind it?
→ Read our deep dives on RealityInBeta.com
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