In other words, once Google stopped growing, it started squeezing. Lacking competitors, having locked in its users and business customers, Google could make things worse for both groups in order to make things better for its shareholders and its executives.

These other fights are more important than the internet, but we can’t win them without a free, fair, and open internet.

Here’s the natural history of enshittification: First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.

The reason Biden’s Democratic administration backed a generationally significant antitrust agenda is that the people demanded it. You. Me. Us. We were pissed off enough, and loud enough, about corporate abuse that a party and a politician with a long history of doing nothing (or worse than nothing) on these issues finally did something. This is

The platform has emerged as the endemic form of online enterprise, which is weird, because another word for platform is middleman.

Like everyone who ever claimed to have developed a mind-control system, Google and Meta are lying (to us and possibly to themselves). From Mesmer to Rasputin, from the CIA’s MK-ULTRA to “neuro-linguistic programming” to the sad men who style themselves “pickup artists,” everyone who has claimed or still claims to be able to bypass our rational

“If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”

It’s as though we used to put down rat poison, and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then the millionaire economists convinced us to stop putting down the poison, and now the rats are gnawing our faces off and the economists are all saying, “Now, now, don’t get hysterical, dears. There’s no way to know if these rats have anything to do with our pro-rat

Recall that Congress hasn’t bestirred itself to update federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when it made it illegal to leak your VHS rental history. This inaction—expensively procured by the commercial surveillance industry—has hurt a lot of groups. Many of those groups are starting to recognize that while they are all concerned with very