Enshittification

How our digital world is becoming worse, and what I'm doing about it.

Tags: opinionPosted on: 2026-03-16

You've probably heard this quote before:

You'll own nothing and be happy.

This has become sort of a meme, but it would be a mistake to believe it's not actively being pursued behind the scenes. For over a decade now, it seems like everything related to technology is becoming worse. Companies want to provide worse services, at a higher cost, and keep us paying through monthly subscriptions so they can make as much profit as possible. The term enshittification, coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022, is quickly being recognized as a real issue that affects everybody.

The descent down the toilet

Remember when a Google search result page gave you a list of results? Maybe there would be a few options for images and videos, but that's it. Now, your search results have to contend with the AI-powered summary, ads, sponsorships, YouTube shorts, SEO click-bait results, and more. Many people have noticed how Google search has become unusable. And it's just the tip of the iceberg.

Software used to be thought as either free or paid software. Now? Everything is a subscription service. Adobe was one of the first large software vendors to switch to a subscription model back in 2011, eventually completely phasing out the ability to actually buy software from them. People used to buy Adobe Photoshop or Premiere Pro, then use it for several years. Unfortunately for the company, that wasn't profitable enough. So now if you want to use these products, you need to pay every single month, or lose access. And since then? Most other software vendors have followed suite. Sure, they'll add some basic online features like cloud storage to justify the subscription fee, but no one will convince me that you should be paying every month for the privilege to use a word processor or paint program.

Games have also become enshittified along the same lines. We used to buy a game once, and then play it forever. But now we have mandatory online activation, battle passes, loot boxes, and every game is trying to be a never-ending attention grabber. That is, until the company decides that the game isn't profitable enough anymore and shut the servers down. Then, you can't play that game you paid for anymore, because the service was terminated. Of course a massively online game has to rely on server hardware, but any company making a single player game that requires a constant Internet connection needs to reevaluate their priorities.

The same thing is happening with media, where we went from TV cable subscriptions, to buying our digital media, back to online subscriptions. The difference? I could record any show I wanted on my VCR, but now every digital streaming service makes it as hard as possible (and potentially illegal) to record your shows digitally. And it doesn't stop at the online world. HP wants you to pay a printer subscription, a computer subscription, Tesla charges a subscription for various car features, and it keeps going.

Before going on, let me say that I believe content creators should be paid for their work, and I understand companies exist to make money. But enshittification is more than just about money, it's a systematic dismantling of consumer rights that creates a cascading cycle of economic and environmental harm. We're forced into a treadmill of disposable software, hardware and gadgets, increasing the e-waste crisis. Companies go out of their way to make things harder to repair, removing basic rights from the users. For those relying on accessibility features, they face an even bigger battle. Ultimately, the process turns tools into services that you never truly own, leaving you to pay endlessly for a crappier product.

What I'm doing about it

To start with, I'm vehemently against subscriptions. I have a total of one subscription, and that's been the case for many years. Instead, what I do is rotate this subscription through various streaming services. Then, I use software like OBS Studio to record every show that I like. Yes, it's a lot more annoying than simply pirating them, but I'm basically replicating the VCR experience, which doesn't require breaking any copyright law or digital locks. I simply tape what appears on the screen, which has been legal since 1984 when movie studios attempted to make VCRs illegal.

For gaming, I only buy on GoG and other services that provide DRM-free games. This allows me to download the full games, and archive them forever. Most of the games I play are old classic anyways, which didn't suffer from enshittification, but I do like a few modern games like Cyberpunk 2077, and fortunately they've been available as DRM-free. For the rest, I take advantage of demos. Steam has a very large collection of demos that can keep you occupied for countless hours, and I find this satisfies me.

Analog books and music CDs have been going through a resurgence lately, and I've been taking advantage of it. I also use tools like yt-dlp to download videos and audio that I want to keep from various websites.

For privacy, I use a number of techniques like using the Quad9 DNS servers and a VPN service which bypasses potential censorship, using an ad blocker to block marketing ads, malware and more, and using throw away email addresses to keep myself more secure. I use privacy-respecting services like the Firefox browser and the DuckDuckGo search engine. I also don't use social media, so that's a whole class of problems I don't have to deal with.

I also make sure to buy software and hardware that don't require any subscription, and so far it's been possible to do so. Unfortunately, this is getting harder, and this is why I hope more and more people stop giving into the corporate demands. Projects like the Consumer Rights Wiki are great places to get involved, and hopefully will help push back against the tide.

At the end of the day I'm just one person, and I don't have any kind of pull to make corporations change their minds. But I do have the technical knowledge to fight against it for myself, and hopefully anyone else who's looking for a way out.