You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? You try to scroll up on a gaming news article and the ads crowd out the text so thoroughly you have to reload. You want to find a short guide for collectibles in a new RPG, but beneath Google's flat-out wrong AI summary there's only a parade of videos well over the 10-minute mark. Pressures to survive in the attention economy have turned countless websites into labyrinths of engagement and monetization tactics. This spectre of quality decay—this "enshittification," as it was dubbed by journalist Cory Doctorow—goes beyond news outlets, social media sites, and blogs, extending to streaming TV, digital storefronts, and just about any service that exists in proximity to capital.
The world's going to enshittify around me, I'm not gonna stop it, but I can try and revel in something that used to be better.
Stephen "Blue" Heaslip
